1500 hours

"Zone: L-B-3-W. Pax: 1-4-B-8-K-4-4-Ayeeeight." I yawned on the last letter and waited for Supervisor's reply. The seconds passed, and I tried not to focus on the buzz of the other auditors locked in their workboxes all around me, but it was hard not to be distracted by the din that was a conglomerate of human voices catalysed into the mesmerising whisper of a malevolent spirit luring me into the endless lull of perpetual sleep—my actual thought construct at the time, and not a romanticised recollection of the moment. Dozing off at work could lead to termination, so developing the language of poetic imagery was an exercise I'd started experimenting with and just about the only thing that was, at the time, keeping me awake.

It took wilful force to remain alert while waiting for Supervisor's reply, and I could feel my annoyance at their tardiness build like the pressure of a terrific tempest trapped inside a platonic solid—okay, I have to work on that—it was because of them that I was way behind in my work.

"Confirmed."

Finally! I wasted no time moving to the next pax. It was "Zone: L-B-3-W. Pax: 8-2-N-7-H-6-8-0."

"Confirmed." This reply was timely. As a pax auditor, my job is to ensure, code by code, that the chain of my assigned pax exactly matches Supervisor's chain. A task that could be easily done automatically by routine, but the Law of Pax states that "chain verification must be implemented manually by human audit"—don't ask me why or what's inside a pax, because I don't know (I wonder if anyone knows).

"Zone: L-B-4-0." I noticed a new zone, the first increment in weeks. "Pax: 6-Q-4-4-N-8-2-4." I stretched my arms and back to relieve stiff muscles but there was little to be had; my discomfort was enhanced by the glare off the white walls of my brightly lit duty box, the glare that had started to burn my eyes. I would have given anything at that moment just to click my fingers to bring on night hours. In an attempt to put discomfort aside, I let my eyelids drop gently and focused on the stream of pax floating across my overlay. I yawned again. Poetry or none, the risk of surrendering to sleep, now, was a present danger and, I think, the only thing keeping me awake was the biting discomfort of the harness City provides us to strap down our sexual characteristics, helping to protect gender neutrality and facilitate the enby protocol—designed for an optimal body fat rating of five percent, if you let that slip even by a couple of points, the sides of the harness would cut uncomfortably into the skin. I'd let myself go to an unhealthy eleven percent.

"Confirmed." About time. I growled inside and swore that one of these days I was going to vocalise my discontent. That would be funny, but not today. "Zone: L-B-4-0. Pax: 8-8-8-G-G-8-8-8."

"Rejected." Supervisor's reply was instant.

The word 'rejected' didn't register at first. Eight years in the job and my pax were always confirmed. For a pax auditor, the word 'rejected' was like every fear you ever had packed inside a single sound. Rejection was career ending and psycho making and, the worst part of it, the rejection must have been my fault; given the Laws of Pax, the only circumstance that should give rise to a rejection was auditor error.

Even in the face of rejection, to my credit, I was holding it together. I knew my job and now was my chance to show Supervisor that I was made of tougher stuff. My response was textbook: measured and delivered with purpose.

The first thing to do was to double-check that the pax name I'd provided was correct; it was. The next step required a response to Supervisor: "Acknowledged. Proceeding to enact rejection protocol G-A-2-3. Stand by." I spoke as would be expected of an articulate professional, but inside I was a blubbering mess and had to force myself to breathe to maintain the facade of confidence. Next, I would be required to recall the protocol's requirements verbatim and no one was more surprised than me when the correct words left my lips; an array of administrative details and resolution objectives finishing with "Enacting Protocol: G-A-2-3, Exception for Zone: L-B-4-0: Pax: 8-8-8-G-G-8-8-8. Request authorisation for pax dequeue enacted. Awaiting Supervisor's Statement of Problem." I held my breath and prayed to Director that my initialisation of the protocol would be validated.

The illusion of hold-it-togetherness dissolved in an instant as I let out a gasp at Supervisor's reply: "Pax rejection validation successful. You are hereby assigned the following Statement of Problem: Too many eights."

It was the first time I'd ever thrown a blue-level administrative opcode into the system. I selected PAX_EXCEPTION and packaged it with the protocol ID and the title: 'Too many eights', I threw the code and was presented with options, 'close' or 'investigate'. Time stopped. I selected 'investigate'.

Supervisor's response was immediate. "Investigate? This is highly irregular, wait."

I thought that I could detect annoyance in their reply, and wondered at the nature of my impending punishment. Perhaps they would override my choice to investigate. If only they could understand my desire to please. On the verge of panic, I wished I'd just chosen the option to 'close'.

The wait bordered on intolerable. All I could do was imagine the scope of the myriad complex tasks Supervisor was performing to decide upon the fate of my request to investigate the mysterious pax anomaly.

After what seemed the longest time, Supervisor replied. "Investigation Approved. We've raised the code for Problem: J-3-0-T and assigned it to you."

A new task appeared on my board. Having a specialised unit of work made me feel important, and when I opened the package, my heart exploded with pride. The title read:

Too many eights.

"Remember, regardless of the outcome of your investigation, your assigned audit is behind schedule." Supervisor brought me back to the ground. "You must close the task at the resumption of duty at zero-six-hundred hours with a full outline of your methodology for review. No extension will be granted. To facilitate your duties I've extended access to your workbox for two hours. You had better get busy."

"I understand. Thank you, Supervisor." Two hours, plus I had three hours remaining on my shift, so, five hours total.

It was going to be tight, but there was no time to dwell on difficult timeframes. Luckily, because it was a number problem, I had a safe place to start as I was the star of my after-hours classical mathematics group. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

A quick review of the last several numbers showed that the number eight featured in the previous eight pax codes. Interesting. I really needed to see a preview of the next pax numbers in the queue, but that was impossible, so I had to work with the pax that had already dropped. The last pax name was palindromic, reading the same in reverse, and the middle letters 'G' in the code's thirty-three base was a multiple of eight; and, of course, the pax name was eight characters in length.

It didn't take me long to discover that the digits equal to or less than eight at the end of the preceding eight pax names contained eight and were also divisible by eight; in fact, they represented a subset of the decimal sequence of multiples of eight that contained eight, appearing in order of that set of numbers, although, of course, not consecutive. What was more, the decimal representation of 8-8-8-G also featured a number from that same sequence of multiples of eight. With such a beautiful cascade of numerical relations, I must have been drawing close to something special. I was confident that I'd be able to crack the problem soon.

Then, after almost two hours of intense inspection, I found myself treading water.

I rubbed my face and slapped my cheeks, partly in frustration and partly so that I could remain alert.

Hope burst upwards when I discovered that the interval between the integers as they appeared in the sequence of multiples of eight that contained eight was eight. But the same hope wilted when I couldn't build further on that revelation. Reluctantly, I resigned myself to the fact that I'd have to turn to evaluating probability, an exercise that consumed my remaining hours only to arrive at a percentage chance so scientifically minuscule that it made the promise of coincidence seem large, or, to put it another way, you would be almost guaranteed to be struck by lighting before you found my numbers appear again in your audit chain—I remember imagining what it would have been like to be fried by a bolt of pure energy, a fate preferable to reporting failure to Supervisor—actually, I was failing and had never been so close in my life to cursing out loud.

"Shit", I whispered quietly in a challenge for the monitors that were always listening for such incursions. Inside my head I was like, shit-shit-shit-shit-shit! I was sweating and, I feared, on the verge of going psycho. In one last push, I worked out that the decimal representation of the final pax number was perfectly divisible by eight, and that was the best that I could do. Bloody-shit!

There were only fifteen minutes of my time extension remaining. The five hours had passed so quickly that it had just seemed like five minutes since starting the investigation. I was out of ideas and spent the remaining time ruminating with my insides wrapping in on themselves. I dug my fingernails into my forearms in the hope that the pain would release the tightness in my throat; I ground my teeth so the sound would drown out the pounding of my heart as it sought escape from my chest. Then, the anxiety transformed to anger: anger because I was too much of a coward to go psycho.