The Foundry faces the lake like a reformed factory, brick scrubbed and skylights grafted on top. The water sits a notch low today; the dam schedule dragged it back at dawn, leaving the pilings at the pier banded with pale scum like growth rings. Donation plaques catch the morning sun and throw little blades of light across the sidewalk. I tuck my tote higher and rehearse my cover: whiteboard hour, heuristic review, goodwill between spouses. I am a consultant today, not a wife with a key in her shoe and a clause in her throat.
Inside, the lobby smells like espresso and moss. A living wall climbs behind the reception desk, plants posable as donors. The receptionist wears a hoodie with the rook logo tone-on-tone at the chest. Even the bell on the counter is shaped like a rook—chess made into feng shui. I give my name, and the printer chirps. A badge slides out warm, the lamination sucking air.
Guest—No Access.
The words sit under my headshot like a diagnosis. The receptionist smiles brightly enough to be a floodlight. “Clip this anywhere,” she says. “You’re meeting comms?”
“UX sync,” I say. “Lens on onboarding.”
She gestures toward the turnstiles. The reader blinks blue, then red when I offer my new badge. A security guard taps a tablet. “I’ll walk you,” he says cheerfully, which means I will not walk myself.
We pass the donor wall where photos rotate on a silent screen. Captions crawl beneath them in live-style font even though nothing is live: Thank you to residents who choose less. I resist the urge to correct the kerning with my thumbnail.
The guard peels off at the elevator. The doors swish open, and my badge refuses the car controls too. “I’ll ride with,” he says, thumbprint unlocking floor two. I watch the interface register Administrator—J.R. in the corner of the screen, a ghost that haunts every building he curates.
Comms lives in a sunlit bullpen with plants in minimalist pots and a ring-light glow at three desks. A poster reads OPTICS ≠ ETHICS in a font so austere it becomes moral by osmosis, and yet it hangs there like an apology someone meant to deliver and forgot. The junior officer I’m scheduled to meet—Rae, dotted i turned into a heart in her email signature, earnest ponytail—pops up from behind a laptop.
“You’re Lena!” she says, hand warm, eyes wide like she’s not sure whether to treat me as a source or a statue. “Thank you for coming. We’re huge fans of your Medium post from, like, two years ago. The consent flow teardown? Chef’s kiss.”
“I’m glad it was useful,” I say. I rest my tote on the visitor chair. The cushion sighs like it knows it’s for temporary bodies.
“We’re refreshing our pledge hub,” Rae says, half-leading, half-bouncing. “Julian wants it cleaner. Fewer words. More… conviction.”
Conviction always reads better when sworn by someone else’s body. I follow her to a small glass room. The door recognizes no one, not even her; she badges, it blinks red, she badges again, it surrenders. On the table, a deck waits in presenter view—title slide in pale gray, rook watermark ghosting the background.
“Before we start,” I say, “bathroom?”
She points down the hall. “Left at the podcast studio, right at the wellness room. You can’t miss it.”
I walk the corridor, feigning a search I’ve already mapped. The podcast studio glows like a ring box, microphones sleeping under knitted socks. The wellness room door wears a soft green sign with a leaf icon. WELLNESS—NURTURE SPACE. I press the handle. My badge pings. Red light.
A woman in ops appears with a key, jangly on a carabiner. “Sorry,” she says, unlocking with a quick twist. “We keep this locked to prevent… misuse.”
“Of wellness?” I say, smiling.
“Of props,” she says, smiling back like we’re conspirators. “Have a good session.”
The air inside is lemon-clean. A fiddle-leaf fig preens in a white pot under a skylight. A ring light stands assembled in the corner, head tilted. On the far wall sits a miniature white crib, mattress still in its plastic wrap, a single mint blanket folded like a catalog image. The crib wears a small silver padlock through the slats. A tiny tag dangles from the lock: Property of Facilities—Do Not Move Without Approval.
I run my finger over the blanket’s binding. The fabric is new, stiff at the edges where thread still remembers the machine. The room smells like wipes and fresh paint, not humans. No diaper pail. No bottle warmer. No outlet covers. A picture-perfect pause button.
I flick the ring light on with a fingertip. It blooms cold aurora around my reflection. I turn it off. My chest tightens in that slow way, not panic, more a body deciding which parts of itself are not welcome here. Before I leave, I crouch and check the crib wheels—unused, dustless—then stand and trace the yellow striping on the plant’s leaves with my eyes. Everything in this room is slightly too healthy to ever be used.
Micro-hook #1 knots: If care is display here, where do they store the mess?
Back in comms, Rae has the deck up and the ring light at her desk set to “flattering.” Two colleagues hover—one with a nose ring, one in a hoodie that says LESS IS MORE in small type across the ribs. Someone has set out lemon sparkling water and a bowl of almonds like we’re about to make principled choices.
“We’re trying to fix the friction,” Rae says, clicking. Slide one: cheerful couples without kids, pets in sunbeams, tiny homes that look engineered to refuse a mess. Slide two: the pledge badges for cities; the lake appears in one photo, low in frame, ladder rungs on the pier exposed like ribs. Slide three: a chart titled BENEFIT CLARITY—tax harmonization, housing rebates, wellness credits.
“Define wellness,” I say.
“It’s flexible,” Rae says. “We reimburse choices that support mission alignment.”
“Which is?” I ask, friendly enough to pass for curious instead of cross.
“Lower load,” she says, quick. “Less consumption. Fewer… variables.”
The words dial my jaw tight. “A variable is a person until your model edits them out,” I say, still friendly. I’m better at this tone than I want to be.
She nods, uncertain whether I’m praising or cutting. “We’re testing language: ‘child-neutral amenities,’ ‘household autonomy,’ ‘legacy without heirs.’ Julian wants us to emphasize freedom without sounding like we’re policing.” She clicks to a slide of the wellness room, but in the photo the crib sits unlocked, mint blanket draped just so, ring light softened by a diffuser to mimic dawn. “We don’t plan to use this,” she says quickly, noticing my eyes. “It’s just… B-roll.”
“For who?” I ask.
“Press,” she says. “Donors love a wellness angle.”
She advances to a section labelled RISK / OPTICS, and I watch the cursor hover over an icon of a gavel. “This isn’t final,” she says, color rising in her cheeks. “But we have to anticipate… misreads.”
“Show me the alt-text,” I say.
“The what?”
“The descriptions for accessibility,” I say. “If you’re designing for everyone, you describe the picture under the picture. That’s where truth leaks when the veneer forgets to watch its mouth.”
She clicks into the slide’s alt-text. The box opens with gray letters: ‘Wellness room—symbolic crib; no infants present; aligns with inheritance optics post.’
“Inheritance optics?” I say, gentle and dead center.
“It’s placeholder copy,” she rushes. “We brainstorm in shorthand.”
“Whose inheritance?” I ask.
She glances toward the hall like the word has an assigned exit. “Families,” she says. “Legacies. Donors react to certain frames. We’re trying to avoid blowback when people assume—”
“Assume what?” I prod, still soft. “That you’re replacing families with tax credits?”
The colleague with the nose ring snorts and then coughs to cover it. “We say ‘brand-safe families,’” she says, can’t help herself. “Households that play well on the pledge page. Dogs are great.”
“Brand-safe,” I repeat, as if tasting a new citrus that surprises with bitterness. “And children are…”
“Complicated,” she says. “We never say that on record. Julian says ‘choice.’ We echo.”
Echoing explains everything and nothing. I go back to the alt-text box and point. “Change this today. Accessibility is discovery in court. You’re writing a deposition in your captions.”
Rae swallows and types, fingers correcting toward technically honest. ‘Wellness room used for media shoots; no childcare services provided.’ She looks up at me like a student checking a teacher’s face for mercy.
“Better,” I say. I sip the lemon water. It tastes like HVAC and public relations. I glance at the glass wall; the hallway reflects back my posture, polite and erect, the kind of body people let into rooms when they don’t plan to tell it anything that matters.
Micro-hook #2 tugs: If their captions confess for them, what does my house whisper when I’m not in the room?
Julian’s voice bursts from a nearby office speaker—a recording of his talk about Planetary Stewardship looped low for ambiance. “We respect freedom,” he says, the syllables engineered to calm. Staff smile involuntarily at the air, a Pavlovian exhale.
“Can we talk account permissions?” I ask, closing the deck with a gesture I make look casual. “Handoffs. Admin rights. Who can change copy in an emergency?”
Rae relaxes. She loves process. “We have tiers,” she says. “Admin, Editor, Viewer. I’m Editor. Julian’s Admin.”
“Anyone else?” I ask.
“Trustee Hale,” she says. “And legal. Two-factor on everything.”
“Two-factor is secure until the Administrator defines the factors,” I say. I keep my smile. It keeps me alive. “Do you ever mirror home scenes here? Demo rooms?” I make it sound nerd-adorable, like I’m excited to test features, not to accuse an entire building of behaving like my kitchen.
“We test scenes for shoots,” she says. “We rehearse door-openings to match product. It’s easier to sell transparency when you know what the glass will do.”
The nose ring colleague opens her mouth, closes it. She has the face of a person whose ethics itch under corporate cotton. “Sometimes we test surveillance templates for ‘safety messaging,’” she offers. “People like numbers. Time saved, resources conserved. They don’t like to think about what is being counted.”
“What is being counted?” I ask.
“Load,” Rae says brightly. “We measure load reductions. You know all this; you wrote the consent flow piece.” She beams at me like I belong here, like I am a framed article they posted in the kitchen between a comic and a bake sale flyer.
“I wrote about consent,” I say. “Not conversion.”
She flinches, then hurries to sweeten. “We’re aligned,” she says. “Julian says families are welcome; we just don’t build policy around them. It’s about choice.”
Choice sitting padlocked inside a crib.
The door to the corridor opens, and Julian appears in a navy sweater with the sleeves pushed to his forearms like he wants to look approachable. He radiates the exact warmth calibrated for staff morale. He sees me and slots surprise into delight so fast it feels like choreography.
“My favorite human interface,” he says, stepping in to kiss my cheek in a way that reads as domestic to anyone watching and managerial to anyone counting. His cologne brings cedar and white pepper into the lemon air. “You two breaking the funnel?”
“Just smoothing splinters,” I say. I angle my face so the kiss lands on hair, not skin. He looks at the monitor.
“Alt-text,” Rae blurts, nervous. “We’re updating.”
“Excellent,” he says. “Accessibility is freedom.” He turns the phrase like a coin—shiny, self-pleasing. He taps the table. “Lena has the best instincts for clarity. Use her.”
Use her.
He leaves as quickly as he arrived, already texting, already Administrator to a dozen rooms. The rook on his cufflink flashes once at the door like a lighthouse warning ships that the rocks are friendly until they aren’t.
“He’s so good,” Rae breathes.
“He’s very… polished,” I say.
We wrap the deck with notes about focus states and error messages. I mark friction points on a whiteboard: buttons with saintly labels, modals too eager to harvest email. I talk like a consultant and think like a witness. I take no photos because the cameras are theirs. I take mental screenshots instead: badge red light, padlocked crib, alt-text confession, brand-safe families.
As I stand to leave, the nose ring colleague lowers her voice. Her eyes flick to the glass wall and back. “I get why you’re here,” she whispers. “Just—be careful. Policy looks cleaner than people.”
“I prefer people,” I say.
“Then you may not like our approval chain,” she says, half-smiling so it passes as a joke.
I walk back past the wellness room. The door stands open now for a tour of interns, their lanyards bright like field trip ropes. The ops woman reappears, relocks the crib, flips the ring light to a gentler setting like a sunset no one can misuse, and closes the door with a soft hush. The padlock glints, small and ridiculous.
In the lobby, the receptionist takes my badge and drops it in a clear bin labeled GUEST—NO ACCESS. The rook bell on the counter looks heavy enough to knock. I do not touch it. Outside, the lake air tastes like ozone again, storm threat building beyond the city. The flags on the plaza crack smartly, eager for wind.
Micro-hook #3 sinks its teeth: If their brand edits families into props, what will their committee edit me into when the receipts arrive?
I text Tamsin from the sidewalk: Found a crib on a leash. Alt-text said ‘inheritance optics.’ Call you in ten.
I look back at the brick, at the glass, at the living wall that drinks a measured sip every hour on the hour. Inside, people I might have liked are writing captions for a world where I am a variable to be tuned. I square my shoulders to the water and walk toward the car, my shoes counting off the distance between polite and resolute, each step loud against the cleaned concrete that wants everyone to forget who built the original floor with their hands.