Chapter 15: Perfect Control

Sarah Chen’s calculator gave her 847.32 the first time. The second time, 847.29. The third time, 847.35.

She stared at the display, her chest tightening. Same numbers, same operation, same machine she’d used for three years without a single error. She cleared it and tried again.

847.31.

“What the hell?” she whispered, then immediately felt guilty for the profanity. Her apartment was silent except for the hum of the refrigerator—a sound that had become constant background noise over the past week, though she was sure it had never been that loud before.

She picked up her backup calculator. A different answer: 847.28.

Sarah’s hands started shaking. She was preparing tax returns for Morrison & Associates’ biggest client, and if the numbers didn’t balance, if her calculations were wrong, if she’d somehow made an error in her methodology…

Her phone buzzed. 8:47 PM. Time for her evening routine: shower, skincare, layout tomorrow’s clothes, prepare breakfast ingredients, review tomorrow’s schedule, lights out by 9:30.

But she couldn’t stop calculating.

The numbers kept shifting like they were alive, like mathematics itself had become unreliable. Her perfectly organized spreadsheets showed results that changed when she wasn’t looking. Cells that had contained solid data for weeks now displayed values that made no logical sense.

She grabbed her laptop and opened the Morrison account. Every formula she’d built over months of meticulous work showed different outputs. The tax liability jumped between $847,000 and $852,000 depending on when she refreshed the screen.

The humming from her refrigerator grew louder.

Sarah stood up abruptly, knocking over her coffee mug. Brown liquid spread across her desk, soaking into client files and sticky notes. She watched the coffee flow around her carefully arranged pens, disrupting the perfect order she maintained.

For some reason, she didn’t clean it up.

She walked to her refrigerator and opened it. The humming stopped. Inside, her meal prep containers sat in perfect rows—Sunday through Thursday, each containing identical portions of grilled chicken, steamed broccoli, and brown rice. She’d made them three days ago, like she did every week.

The food looked wrong. Not spoiled, just… meaningless. Like someone had arranged plastic replicas of nutrition.

She closed the fridge and the humming resumed, but now she could tell it wasn’t coming from the appliance. It was coming from below, through the floor, like someone in the apartment underneath was playing a bass note that never ended.

Her phone buzzed again. 8:52 PM. Five minutes behind schedule.

The panic started in her stomach—a familiar flutter that happened whenever her routine got disrupted. But instead of the usual adrenaline that drove her to get back on track, she felt something else. A deep exhaustion that seemed to rise from her bones.

When was the last time she’d made a decision that wasn’t scheduled?

The thought came from nowhere and hit her like a physical blow. She grabbed the edge of her counter, suddenly dizzy. Her perfectly color-coded calendar hung on the wall—blue for work, green for personal maintenance, red for health appointments. Every hour accounted for, every day optimized.

When had she last felt surprised by anything?

Sarah stumbled to her desk chair and stared at the coffee spreading across her papers. The liquid had reached her tax code reference book, staining pages she’d marked with precise highlighter strokes. She should clean it immediately, save what she could, reorganize.

Instead, she watched it spread.

The client file for Morrison’s biggest account lay soaked and ruined. Six months of work, destroyed by her clumsiness. She should panic, should call her supervisor, should stay up all night reconstructing the data.

Instead, she felt relief.

Her laptop screen flickered, and when it stabilized, every number in her spreadsheet had changed again. But this time, they’d arranged themselves into a pattern she’d never seen before—not random, but following some logic her conscious mind couldn’t grasp. The tax liability now showed $847,847.47.

The repetition should have bothered her. Instead, it felt like the numbers were trying to tell her something.

The humming grew stronger, and Sarah realized she’d been holding her breath for the past minute. She exhaled slowly and, without deciding to, began humming along.

The sound that came from her throat was nothing like the methodical hum of her refrigerator. It was wild, wordless, and seemed to harmonize with voices she couldn’t hear but somehow knew were there.

Her phone buzzed. 9:15 PM. Way behind schedule now.

She turned off the phone.

For the first time in eight years, Sarah Chen went to bed without setting out tomorrow’s clothes, without preparing breakfast ingredients, without reviewing her calendar. She lay in the dark listening to the humming that seemed to rise from the earth itself, and for reasons she couldn’t calculate, she felt more at peace than she had since she was a child.

The numbers could figure themselves out tomorrow.

Or not.

Either way, she was done pretending she could control them.