The third column was called what they notice about me.
Gyeol-ri had not planned it. She had been adding columns to the calibration journal for two months — what the tier looked like from inside each system, what residents asked when they noticed something was off, what her NDA technically covered and what it did not. She had not thought to record what residents noticed about her until Mrs. Ji said it.
She had been calibrating a Premium-tier apartment in Gangnam, working on the thermal overlap in sector 7, when Mrs. Ji appeared in the kitchen doorway. She had the look of someone who had been watching for a while before speaking.
— Does it feel different to you than your own apartment?
Gyeol-ri stopped. Technical questions she had an answer for. She had been asked about the equipment, the calibration intervals, the difference between tiers as written in the documentation. She had not been asked this.
— Yes, she said.
Mrs. Ji nodded, as if this confirmed something. — I thought so. You have a different look when you come in here. Like someone who's been in the cold coming inside.
She went back to the kitchen. The sentence was not addressed to anyone in particular. It was the kind of thing you say when you've been right about something for a while.
Gyeol-ri stood in the living space for a moment. The apartment was 1.4 million polygons per second. Haptic at 22kHz. Rain through the window had grain. People's faces had subsurface scattering — the bounce of light beneath skin that signals aliveness. She lived at 380k polygons, 8kHz, rain as pressure, faces slightly flattened in a way no one named but some people felt.
Her calibration journal had been documenting what she noticed. She had not thought to document what she looked like to the people whose systems she maintained.
She added the third column when she got home. First entry: Mrs. Ji. Premium. Gangnam. You have a different look when you come in here. Like someone who's been in the cold coming inside.
She thought about the column for a long time before she added the fourth one.
The fourth column was called who noticed without being asked. Not clients who complained. Not clients who praised. The ones who looked at her — at the way she moved through a Premium space, at the quality of her attention, at something she hadn't known she was showing — and understood something about the relationship between where she lived and where she worked.
She did not know what to do with these columns. They were not evidence of anything she could report. They were evidence of something she already knew and had not been writing down: that she was legible to people who paid attention, that her body moved differently in spaces it did not belong to, and that some residents had the vocabulary to name it even without knowing the technical fact behind it.
They had been watching her the way she had learned to watch the fidelity gap. From outside it. Professionally. Noting the delta without naming the cause. Knowing something was off without requiring a document that said so.
Mrs. Ji had not known about polygon counts. She had known about cold and warmth.
She had been right.