Three Minutes

I was walking backward down the corridor when Oren Dask said, “Your room number’s upside down.”

I turned my timetable around. The print settled into something legible, including the room I had already passed.

“Thank you,” I said. “I was beginning to think the school had put chemistry in the basement as a character test.”

“It’s on the second floor.” He nodded toward the stairwell behind me. “You’re close.”

The ceiling camera above his shoulder followed the small turn of my head. A black sensor sat in the wall beside it, smooth as a smoke alarm. The school counted conversations, contact, and how long we looked at each other. Even a simple direction came with a record.

Oren stood on the opposite side of the corridor, leaving more than a metre between us. He had a neat, unhurried way of waiting, as if he could spare the time and didn't want me to feel I owed him for it.

“You’re new,” he said.

“Is it the timetable?”

“That, and I’ve seen everyone else get lost already.”

The dry answer surprised a laugh out of me. I saw the small light above the sensor switch from green to amber. Our conversation had begun its count.

I could have thanked him again and gone. We were allowed five conversations a day, and each one could last three minutes. That was enough for directions, a request for a pencil, or a brief exchange about the weather. It was less generous when I wanted to know whether someone was kind or merely efficient.

“Does the school ever get less confusing?” I asked.

Oren took a moment before he answered. “The buildings do. The rest takes longer.”

He glanced at the sensor, then back at me. His attention didn’t linger long enough to make me wonder whether he was trying to test the system. I liked that he’d noticed it. I liked less that I’d noticed him noticing.

“Orientation made the rules sound manageable,” I said. “A weekly emotional quota. Five conversations a day. Three minutes each. It’s a very tidy way to tell people to be normal.”

“They want people focused.”

“That’s what they said.”

The exchange had the shape of something rehearsed. He didn’t defend the school, though. He looked at the timetable in my hand, turned his own wrist so the screen was visible, and checked the time.

“You have a minute and a half before the warning bell,” he said. “If you use the north stairs, you’ll make it.”

“Have you memorized the routes for everyone?”