A second later, the third buzzer went off, shattering the silence. He had never thought he would be relieved to hear it. Opening his eyes, he turned away from the belt, in time to watch his door slide up smoothly. He turned around, looking for Sorrow, but she was gone, disappeared into the colourless depths of her cubicle.

Albert sighed and, slowly, in a manner befitting a person much older, he shuffled into his workspace. There he stood, just inside the threshold, listening to the electronic chiming of the door as it whizzed shut, the huge digital display counting down the time left before it would open again. He scowled, screwing up his face, biting his lip, finally recognizing the waves of emotion that had been washing over him for the last few minutes. Feeling the weight in his chest, he shook his head. He knew how impotent sadness was.

Shaking his head again, Albert opened his eyes and looked around. There wasn’t much to see—the inside of the workspace was as sterile as the outside. There was a chair, his water and rations for the day, a screen and a toilet section in the corner. A whiff of the air freshener of the day glazed the air. That was it. Nothing to tell a visitor to the cubicle anything about its owner or, indeed, to tell it apart from any other cubicle.

As he eased himself into the chair, he thought about how, if somebody ever went to the wrong workspace, he or she might never know the difference until the rightful occupant arrived to set them straight. Unless, of course, the rightful occupant was also in the wrong workspace. This gave way to an almost infinite loop of possibilities, which he was more than happy to explore. Anything to prevent returning to what he had just witnessed.

So he sat there and tried to occupy his mind by pondering the question of how many times he might have sat all day in the wrong place, or if he was truly in the right spot today. There was no way to tell, really, without actually checking the coordinates on his communicator. People sometimes did make marks on the walls, but every night the sanitation bots went around and restored each cubbyhole to its earlier pristine condition. Not that that deterred the scribblers, though. For instance, Luke, who had been with him at the Academy, spent his days merrily creating one panoramic masterpiece after another, all the while knowing full well that he would begin all over again on a fresh background the next morning. No doubt there were plenty more like him.

Albert now began to wonder why they bothered at all. Perhaps they wanted to feel a sense of belonging, or maybe they just wanted to know where they were. It could be anything. At the end of the day it didn’t matter—it was surprising how often that sentence crossed his mind these days.