The first one came back on the twelfth day after compression began.
There was no announcement. No roster change. Just a new presence on the floor where one hadn't existed the session before.
He stood near the entrance, waiting.
Not uncertain.
Paused.
That distinction mattered.
The instructor acknowledged him with a nod and nothing else.
"Reintegrated," he said to no one in particular.
The word carried no weight.
It was procedural.
The returned candidate—Joren, according to the faded tag on his interface—moved differently than before.
Not slower.
Less precise.
His posture compensated constantly, as if the floor were unstable even when it wasn't. Reaction delays stretched beyond optimal windows, but the system tolerated them.
That was new.
Greyline had tightened margins for everyone else.
But not for him.
I watched his first drill.
The platform shifted.
He corrected late.
The system adjusted for him.
Once.
Then again.
No verification.
No narrowing.
The system was absorbing his inefficiency instead of rejecting it.
That told me where he'd been.
During break, Joren sat alone.
No one approached him.
Not out of fear.
Out of recalibration.
People didn't know which rules applied to him anymore.
I took the station beside him.
He didn't look at me immediately.
"They don't let you think there," he said finally.
"Where?" I asked.
He swallowed.
"Outside."
That was enough.
He didn't elaborate, and I didn't ask.
Information volunteered was safer than information extracted.
But he kept talking anyway.
"They assign you tasks that never finish," he said. "Cleanup. Stabilization. Reset loops."
His hands flexed once, unconsciously.
"If something breaks, it's your fault. If it holds, no one notices."
"Did you fail?" I asked.
"No," he said quickly. Then slower, "I stopped mattering."
That matched the logs.
External allocation wasn't punishment.
It was exhaustion.
The next session confirmed it.
Joren was exempt from compression rules.
His tolerance windows were wide. His errors absorbed silently.
Greyline wasn't testing him.
It was phasing him out.
Reintegration wasn't a return.
It was a delay before disappearance.
That afternoon, a directive came through the public channel.
Short. Clean.
—Efficiency alignment requested—
No source listed.
But the implications were obvious.
Greyline was being evaluated.
Not for effectiveness.
For cost.
The system wasn't just deciding who to keep.
It was deciding whether Greyline itself justified its footprint.
Support Operations expanded again.
More routing.
More overlap.
Dependency clusters thickened.
Mine included five processes now.
I could see the shape of it forming.
Not a role.
A bottleneck.
If Greyline failed its efficiency check, clusters would be dismantled first.
Resolved outward.
The system always removed complexity from the edges inward.
I adjusted my behavior again.
Not to stand out.
To bind.
I delayed corrections in ways that forced handoffs. Created dependencies that spanned tasks instead of resolving locally.
Messy.
But survivable.
The system rerouted around me instead of through me.
That increased load elsewhere.
Which meant removing me would increase inefficiency.
That was the line.
I stayed just inside it.
Joren didn't last long.
Three days after his return, his name vanished again.
No reintegration notice this time.
His station powered down.
Clean.
Final.
Greyline absorbed the space without comment.
I logged the timing.
Return-to-removal window: forty-six hours.
Reintegration was not mercy.
It was closure.
That night, my interface surfaced something new.
Not a tag.
A projection.
[RETENTION COST — ELEVATED]
No recommendation attached.
Just data.
The system wasn't asking what to do with me.
It was calculating whether it could afford not to.
That was different.
I thought about Mira.
About Joren.
About the difference.
She had asked a question.
He had been used until he wore out.
Neither had done anything wrong.
The system had simply reached a point where clarity and inefficiency were both unacceptable.
Only inconvenience remained viable.
That was what I'd become.
Not valuable.
Not powerful.
Inconvenient.
The efficiency alignment review concluded the next day.
No announcement.
But compression stabilized.
Fewer removals.
Fewer exports.
Greyline had justified itself—for now.
And so had I.
But watching Joren disappear a second time taught me something I hadn't accounted for.
Survival inside the system did not accumulate.
It expired.
Every delay only narrowed the future that remained.
Stability bought time.
Utility bought relevance.
But neither bought continuity.
Only leverage did.
And leverage, once applied, changed the system permanently.
I wasn't there yet.
But I was closer than I'd been yesterday.
And the system knew it.
That was the most dangerous part.