Compliance

Compliance

The envelope was matte grey with a textured surface that felt almost like fine sandpaper. There was nothing to indicate a sender. His name and address looked embossed rather than printed, in a square blocky font. No stamp, just a speckled sigil in the upper right corner, which he assumed to be a custom q-code.

He held it between his fingers for a moment before attempting to open it, as if the unusual weight and dimensions of the paper might reveal something. The adhesive strip holding it closed was ridiculously strong. He had to find a pair of kitchen scissors to half chew, half saw it apart.

Inside: a single laminated sheet, white text on grey card, the opposite of glossy. Its surface absorbed light rather than reflected it.

You have been selected for a routine compliance review.
Attendance is mandatory.
Location: Unit 7, Southbank Processing Annex
Time: 14:00, Thursday 26^th February
Duration: 45 minutes
Bring identification.
Do not bring personal electronics.

He read it twice. The language was neutral, with an almost soothing tone of authority. There was no other information. No department name. No contact number or website. No explanation. Just the instructions.

He placed the letter on the kitchen counter beside the unopened electricity bill and the mug he’d used three days in a row without rinsing. The flat was quiet. Outside, the city exhibited its usual arrhythmia: the electro beat of buses, jazz tap of footsteps on wet pavement, distant drum solo from a building site. He stood by the window and watched the clouds failing to form faces.

⸬

On Thursday, he walked to the address. The route took him past shuttered cafés and a row of new-build flats with balconies that looked too small to stand on. The air smelled of concrete dust and river water.

The Annex was a squat and featureless slab of concrete, like a postmodern reconstruction of a post war prefab. Its door had been painted a shade of brown as ugly as a scab of dried blood. A sensor light on the keypad beside the door blinked once when he approached.

“Name?” said the speaker grille.

He leaned close and identified himself.

The door hissed open as if hermetically sealed.

Inside: long tubes of fluorescent lighting, a scuffed linoleum floor that pretended to be Victorian mosaic tiles, framing a corridor that stretched longer than it should. The air was dry, tinged with a hint of disinfectant that made his sinuses tingle.

A woman sat behind a curved art deco desk, her uniform the same shade of beige as the walls. She didn’t look up. The flicker of reflected movement in her glasses suggested there was a row of monitors beneath the desk top.

“Room four,” she said.

He walked past three closed doors, each stencilled with black numbering. No sounds. No movement.

Room four was open to the corridor; a bare, functional space, drained of personality. A single metal chair bolted to the floor. A camera in the corner, its lens dark but somehow alive.

He sat down. The chair creaked. The door sighed shut and sealed him in with a silence that seemed to grow thicker.

Ten minutes passed. Or twenty. There was no clock in the room. The face of his smart watch was blank. Perhaps it counted as ‘personal electronics’ he should have left at home.

Eventually, the door opened. The man who entered wore no badge or lanyard. His uniform was the same nondescript beige as the receptionist’s. He carried what looked like a clipboard, but which actually turned out to be an ultra thin tablet.

“Thank you for attending,” the man said in a neutral expression, without introducing himself. “This is a routine review.”

He asked for ID. Scanned it with his handheld device. The screen glowed briefly, displayed a swift succession of glyphs, then resumed the appearance of blank paper.

“Have you ever failed to comply with a directive?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

The man made a mark in an invisible check box.

“Have you ever withheld information from a registered authority?”

“No.”

Another mark.

“Have you ever questioned the legitimacy of a compliance request?”

He hesitated. “I wasn’t sure what this was.”

“But you came.”

“Yes.”

Another mark.

The questions continued. They were abstract and oddly phrased, like riddles designed to test something other than knowledge.

“Have you ever experienced a discrepancy in your perception of sanctioned reality?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

The man wrote something down with a squiggle of his index finger on the touch screen.

“Have you ever felt watched?”

He paused. “Yes.”

Another mark.

At the end, the man tapped the screen once, emphatically.

“You’ll receive a follow-up,” he said and left without ceremony.

The door closed behind him and remained locked for several more minutes. The camera blinked once, then set him free.

⸬

Back home, the flat felt unfamiliar. The light was wrong. The kettle took longer to boil.

Rather belatedly, he decided to check online He could find no mention of the Southbank Processing Annex. No listings. No government pages. His antivirus checker warned him about attempting to access non compliant websites.

He phoned a friend who worked in Intervention Services.

“Have you ever heard of a compliance review?”

His friend paused. “Not officially.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean… I’ve heard things. People getting letters. But it’s not in the system.”

“Is it legal?”

“I don’t know.”

His mobile made a funny noise when he ended the call, a warning beep as if the signal were being interrupted.

⸬

The next morning, a man stood across the street from his flat. Long beige overcoat, military posture, hour after hour. Never moving. Never looking directly up at his window.

He tried to take a photo, but the image wouldn’t focus. The facial recognition couldn’t find any features. Its frame just kept searching and failed to settle.

He asked a neighbour. “Do you see that man?”

“What man?”

He pointed. Of course, the man was gone.

⸬

The following day, another stiff grey envelope arrived. There was something disturbing about the sigil in its top right corner. Its q-code dots were like an old magic eye puzzle that wanted to break into the 3^rd dimension.

Your review has been escalated.
Attendance required.
Location: Unit 7, Southbank Processing Annex
Time: 14:00, Monday 2^nd March
Duration: Indeterminate
Bring identification.
Do not bring personal electronics.
Do not inform others.

Although it made his stomach feel uneasy, he didn’t go.

⸬

On Tuesday, his phone stopped working. No signal. No Wi-Fi. No error message, just a blank screen. It even refused to switch off and on.

He received an email alert that the direct debit to pay his rent had failed, so tried to log into his banking application. His account was locked.

He spent a fruitless couple of hours going round in circles with the bank’s online help facility. The chatbot kept telling him, “Your identity is under review” and ignored requests to transfer him to a human agent.

He was eventually forced to give up when his laptop couldn’t locate his broadband provider.

⸬

He attempted to return to the Annex. He found the road with the boarded up cafés. Followed it to the new-build flats. But he seemed to be on the wrong side of the estate as there were no balconies. Further down, there was a gap in the temporary fencing, through which he tried to locate the concrete block.

There was only the bedlam and cacophony of a building site.

Try as he might, he couldn’t find his way to the other side. The streets kept twisting and turning in directions that made no sense, until he eventually arrived back at his own home.

⸬

That night, he heard footsteps outside his flat. Slow and deliberate.

He looked through the peephole. No one there.

He opened the door. The corridor was empty. But the air smelled of disinfectant.

He stopped sleeping. The lights in his flat flickered, then went out and could not be switched back on. His personally addressed mail stopped arriving. A letter came from electoral registration, from which his name had been removed.

He went to the council offices.

“I live at 42A.”

The clerk checked the system.

“There’s no 42A.”

“There is. I live there.”

She looked at him. “Are you sure?”

He returned home. The door wouldn’t open. His Yale key didn’t fit the Chubb lock.

He knocked. No answer.

He sat on the steps outside the building. The man in the beige overcoat stood across the street, studiously not looking at him.

⸬

He walked to the river and strolled along the embankment. The city felt thinner, more exposed, as if its outer layer had been peeled away. People passed him without looking.

He waited for his friend outside the Department of Intervention Services. He tried to speak to him, but he did not respond. It was as if he could neither see nor hear him.

He continued walking aimlessly until he saw a sign pointing to the Southbank Processing Annex. There was the building, even though it was on the wrong road.

The door was already open, waiting for him. He could smell the disinfectant.

The corridor was somehow even quieter than before. He could hear the buzz of the fluorescent lighting.

The woman at the desk didn’t look up.

“Room four,” she said.

He hesitated. “I didn’t make an appointment.”

“You’re here now,” she replied diffidently, as if that settled it.

He walked down the corridor. The floor felt slightly inclined; the building shifted out of true. The doors looked the same —though were the numbers printed in a different font?— but the spacing felt wrong. Too close together. Or too far apart. He couldn’t tell.

Room four stood open. The chair waited for him. The camera in the corner stared with its opaque lens.

He stepped inside and sat down. The door closed behind him with a slight hydraulic grind.

A moment later, the overhead light brightened: not flickering or buzzing, just rising to a level that made the room feel smaller, exposing the shabbiness of its decor.

He waited. The silence remained absolute for an indeterminate time.

Then a voice crackled through a speaker he hadn’t noticed before. Calm. Administrative. Familiar.

“Thank you for returning.”

He swallowed. “I didn’t...”

“This will be brief,” the voice continued. “We’re finalising your status.”

“My status?”

There was a pause. Paper shuffled. A pen tapped on a desk top.

“You’ve been very cooperative,” the voice said. “That’s noted.”

He felt something tighten in his chest. “I want to leave.”

“You are in the correct room,” the voice replied.

“I didn’t agree to this.”

“You attended your review,” the voice said. “You returned for escalation. You’re here now. That indicates consent.”

“I never...”

“Please remain seated,” the voice chided gently. “Movement complicates the process.”

He stood anyway. His legs felt ponderous, as though the air had thickened around them. The door didn’t have a handle on the inside. He hadn’t noticed that before.

“Your compliance is appreciated,” the voice said, still calm, still polite,

He turned toward the camera.

“Please,” he said. “I just want to go home.”

There was a soft click from somewhere above him.

“Your home has been archived,” the voice said.

He froze in place. “What does that mean?”

A long, drawn out pause as the speaker considered his next words.

“It means,” the voice stated, “you won’t need it anymore.”

The light brightened further, bleaching the room into a flat, colourless glare. The smell of disinfectant grew overpowering. The camera lens opened. The door remained closed.