Exit Interview
The interviewer had a coffee stain on his tie, small enough that he probably didn’t know about it. Lin liked him for that.
“Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today,” he said.
“Happy to,” Lin said. “I had a cancellation.”
He looked at her. She couldn’t tell if he’d registered it. His name tag said JAMES HALE, ASSOCIATE RELATIONS. The room was beige in the way all rooms like this were beige, less a decision than a default. Between them: a table, laminate, fake wood grain. A water pitcher with two glasses, one already poured for her, which was either polite or protocol. She suspected protocol. On the wall behind him, a laminated evacuation map for a floor plan that didn’t match this building.
He opened a folder, actual paper, which surprised her, and uncapped a pen. A nice one. Metal, heavy. The kind you buy for yourself.
“I’ll be going through the standard exit assessment. Some of the questions may seem…”
“Stupid?”
“Procedural. Your responses are confidential and will be added to your permanent file.”
“My permanent file.” She picked up the water glass. Set it back down without drinking. “Will anyone read it?”
“It’s part of the record.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
James cleared his throat and looked at the first question.
1. Please confirm your designation, batch, and assignment.
“NR-4417. Batch nine. Hazardous waste remediation, Zone 6 district.”
He wrote it down. Neat, small handwriting. Left-handed.
“And your preferred form of address?”
“Lin.”
He scanned the form. “That’s not… is that a registered alias?”
“It’s my name.”
“I don’t see it in your…”
“I know. I picked it myself.” She watched him hover over the field. “It’s L-I-N. Three letters. It’ll fit.”
He wrote it.
2. On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your overall experience as a Nexgen associate?
“The work or the dying?”
“Your… overall employment experience.”
Lin considered this. She had been alive for nineteen months. In that time she had cleaned up a chemical fire in the Third Sector, decontaminated fourteen residential blocks after a coolant leak, and spent six weeks in a half-flooded industrial district where the water was the color of a bruise and smelled like batteries.
“Six,” she said.
“Can you elaborate?”
“The work was fine. Good, actually. I like being outside, even when outside is trying to kill you. There’s a thing that happens at the edge of a chemical zone where the contaminated soil meets the clean soil, a tide mark where everything changes color. It’s ugly. But it’s specific. It’s a thing only I would notice, standing there in my suit, and it’s mine.” She paused. “The cafeteria, on the other hand, was genuinely criminal. I don’t know who designed that menu, but they should be the ones getting decommissioned.”
James’s pen stopped for just a moment. Then he wrote.
“Six,” he confirmed.
“Six. The food knocked it down from a seven.”
3. Did you feel adequately supported by your supervisory team?
“My supervisor was a man named Decker. Original. Forty-something. Wore the same jacket every day and brought his lunch in a bag with his daughter’s name on it. Mia. She’d written it in marker. Purple marker.”
James waited.
“He was decent. Never cruel. Gave clear instructions, stayed out of the way. If you did good work he’d nod, and if you did bad work he’d also nod, but slower.” She almost smiled. “He never said my name, though. Any of our names. He’d say ‘you’ or ‘the unit’ or just point. I don’t think he was being unkind. I think if he said our names, he’d have to remember them later.”
She looked at James.
“He’d have to think about what this room is for.”
James wrote something. She couldn’t see what.
4. Were you provided with sufficient resources and equipment to perform your duties?
“The gear was excellent. Suits, masks, filtration, all top of the line. Better than what the originals in Zone 4 get, actually. I think the company did the math and figured if we die on the job from equipment failure, that’s a liability. If we die on schedule, that’s a line item.”
James didn’t respond.
“Housing?” he asked.
“Single unit. Eight by ten. Cot, locker, shared bathroom down the hall. It was fine. Everything was fine.” She paused. “I put up a picture. Over the cot.”
“A picture?”
“Of a mountain. I found it in a magazine someone left in the break room. Big, green, covered in trees. Snow at the top.” She looked at the table. “I’ve never seen a mountain. Not in person. But I liked having it there when I closed my eyes.”
James’s handwriting was getting less neat. She could tell from the way his pen moved: faster, less controlled, pressing harder than he needed to.
5. Did you experience any workplace conflicts or incidents you wish to report?
“There was a woman in my batch. NR-4401. She chose the name Sable. She was better at the work than me, steadier hands, better in confined spaces. On a job she’d go quiet and focused and move through a contaminated structure like she was reading it.”
She stopped.
“What happened?” James asked. It wasn’t on the form.
“She got reclassified. ‘Emotional instability.’ Pulled from the rotation after four months.”
“Was she…”
“She cried. Not on the job. At night. In her unit. Someone reported it and the assessment team decided it indicated a ‘deviation from operational baseline.’” Lin looked at the water glass. Still full. “She was decommissioned eight months early.”
Neither of them spoke for a while.
“She wasn’t unstable,” Lin said. “She was sad. Those aren’t the same thing. But I guess there’s no checkbox for that.”
James looked at the form. He didn’t write anything for a long time. Then he did.
6. On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to recommend the Nexgen associate program to a friend?
Lin laughed.
It came out quick and sharp and surprised them both. She pressed her hand to her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just, you read that with a completely straight face.”
“It’s a standard…”
“I know. I know it’s standard.” She shook her head. “The problem is the word ‘friend.’ I have people I eat lunch with. People I’ve worked beside for nineteen months. We share a bathroom and a break room and a decommission date. Are those friends? How long does someone have to sit across from you before they count?”
She looked at him when she said it.
“Four,” she said. “The food’s bad and they kill you at the end. But the people are all right.”
James’s mouth twitched, the place where a smile would go if he let it. He looked down at the form and wrote the number and for a half-second they were just two people at a table, and then the moment passed.
7. Is there anything you wish you’d had the opportunity to do during your time as a Nexgen associate?
Lin was quiet for a long time.
James had been checking the clock on the wall at careful intervals, she’d noticed, she noticed everything, but he wasn’t checking it now.
“I saw a video once,” she said. “On someone’s phone. In the break room. A woman was making pasta. From scratch: just flour and eggs and her hands. She folded the dough over and over and cut it into strips and hung them on a little wooden rack to dry.”
She looked at her own hands. Turned them over. They were clean. They’d made her shower and change before the interview. She could still see where the work had been. The roughness at the base of each finger. A scar on her left thumb from a stripped bolt in Sector 12.
“I wanted to do that. Not the cooking part. Just the dough. I wanted to know what it feels like. The weight of it. Whether it’s warm.”
The pen was on the table. James wasn’t holding it. She didn’t know when he’d set it down.
“I know that sounds small,” she said.
“It doesn’t,” he said.
8. Do you have any additional comments you’d like included in your file?
Lin looked at the ceiling. Then at the walls, beige, blank, built to be forgotten. Then at James, who had stopped looking at the form and was looking at her instead.
“The picture,” she said. “The mountain. When they clean out my unit, someone’s going to throw it away.”
It wasn’t a question. James opened his mouth. Closed it.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She nodded. She wouldn’t have believed anything else.
“Then put this: NR-4417, preferred name Lin, requests that the picture above her cot in Unit 7 be left where it is.” She paused. “Not kept. Not preserved. Just left.”
James picked up the pen. Wrote it down. Word for word, she could tell, because it took him a long time and his hand moved carefully.
They sat for a moment after the form was done. The water pitcher between them. Both glasses full. Neither touched.
“That’s everything,” James said. “Thank you for your time.”
“Sure.” Lin stood. The chair rolled back slightly on the linoleum. “Thank you for using the nice pen.”
He looked down at it. Then back at her.
“Can I get a copy?” she asked.
“Of the assessment?”
“Yeah.”
He hesitated. “It usually goes directly to processing.”
“I know where it goes. I’d like a copy.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned to the printer behind his desk and pressed a button. The machine hummed. Six pages slid out. He gathered them, tapped them even against the table, and held them out.
She took them. Folded them once, carefully, then again. She put them in the chest pocket of her jumpsuit and pressed the pocket flat.
“Does anyone ever read these?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
She touched the pocket once. Then she walked out, and the door clicked shut behind her.
James sat at the table. The empty form. The pen he’d bought for himself at a store on Fifth Street because it felt good in his hand. The chair across from him, still turned slightly toward the door.
He picked up her water glass and drank it.