The Quality Circle (Part 1)

The rating terminals glowed in the break room like confession booths, blue-white screens waiting for judgment. Marlene Vickers had passed them a hundred times without thinking, same as she passed the vending machines and the safety posters warning about chemical burns. Now she stood before Terminal Three with her badge in her hand, the plastic warm from her pocket, watching the cursor blink.

PEER EXCELLENCE PROGRAM, the screen read. YOUR ANONYMOUS FEEDBACK SHAPES OUR FUTURE.

She swiped her badge. The system loaded her assigned evaluations: twelve names, twelve contribution assessments, a ten-point scale for each. Marlene had spent eleven years in quality control learning to quantify the unquantifiable. Viscosity. Purity. Acceptable deviation. This was just another metric.

Marcus Chen appeared first. She'd worked beside him for six years, watched him raise twin daughters on a forklift operator's wages, seen him bring his wife's tamales to the holiday potluck before the divorce took that from him too. He showed up early, left late, never complained about overtime. But he was slow—methodical where the production targets demanded speed. She rated him a seven. Competent. Steady. Room for improvement.

Wade Putnam came next. Third-generation Piedmont Chemical, grandson of a man who'd mixed formulas when the plant still made fertilizer. Wade had a way of appearing at your elbow when you needed help, always ready with a solution, always smiling like he knew something you didn't. Last month he'd caught a labeling error that would have cost the company six figures. She gave him an eight.

She worked through the list with the methodical precision that had made her supervisor. Patty Odom got a nine—twenty-eight years on the floor, reliable as the sunrise, sang hymns under her breath while she worked the filling line. Derek Stahl, the new Marine from shipping, got a six—not because he was bad, but because he was green. The system demanded differentiation. Everyone couldn't be excellent. That's what made excellence mean something.

Marlene submitted her evaluations at 6:47 AM, thirteen minutes before her shift started. The terminal thanked her for her contribution.

#

Marcus Chen didn't come to work on Monday.

Marlene noticed his empty station at the mixing tanks, the hard hat hanging on its hook where he always left it. The chemical smell was stronger than usual—someone had overpoured the surfactant blend, an amateur mistake Marcus would never have made. She checked the schedule posted outside the supervisor's office: his name wasn't on it. Not called out, not on vacation. Simply absent from the roster.

"Wade." She caught him near the loading dock, clipboard in hand. "You seen Marcus?"

Wade tilted his head. The morning light caught the gray at his temples, made him look older than thirty-four. "Marcus who?"

"Chen. Works the mixing tanks. Six years."

Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone. "Don't think I know him. You sure you're not thinking of the old plant? Before the merger?"

"There wasn't a merger."

"Right." Wade's smile didn't waver. "Right, of course. Must be thinking of someone else." He touched her shoulder, and his hand was warm through her coveralls. "You've been pulling doubles, Marlene. Taking on extra shifts since the Brennan order came in. Might be time to ease up."

He walked away before she could answer. Marlene stood in the chemical-sweet air watching him go, her skin still holding the phantom pressure of his palm.

#

The HR office occupied a converted storage closet on the administrative floor. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, slightly out of sync with each other, the kind of ambient noise that burrowed behind your eyes if you let it. Linda Oates sat behind a desk crowded with manila folders and a plastic fern that had never seen sun.

"I'm looking for Marcus Chen's records," Marlene said. "He's not on the schedule and I need to reach him about a quality issue from last week."

Linda's fingers moved across her keyboard. Her nails were coral pink, incongruously cheerful against the gray-beige room. "I don't have anyone by that name in the system."

"He's been here six years."

"Ma'am, I've been in HR for twelve years. I know every W-4 that's ever been signed in this building." Linda turned her monitor. The employee database showed names in alphabetical order. CHAVEZ, MARIA. COLEMAN, DEREK. CRAWFORD, JAMES. The space where CHEN should have been held nothing but the next name down.

Marlene pulled out her phone, scrolled to the photos from last year's safety awards. Marcus stood in the back row, half-hidden behind Wade's shoulder, face grainy but there. Undeniably there. She turned the screen toward Linda.

Linda looked at the photo for a long time. Her fingers stopped moving on the keyboard. Something flickered in her expression—recognition, maybe, or the ghost of it. Then she blinked, and whatever had surfaced smoothed back under.

"I don't recognize that person," she said. "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

#

Marlene found Marcus Chen's locker on her lunch break. Number 247, bottom row near the showers. She knew it was his because she'd seen him there a thousand times, toweling off after the decontamination rinses, complaining about the water pressure.

The locker was empty. Not cleared out—empty in a way that suggested it had never held anything at all. No rust marks where his padlock had hung. No scuff marks on the interior walls. The metal gleamed factory-new.

But his hard hat still hung at the mixing station. His coffee mug—World's Okayest Dad in faded letters—still sat in the break room cabinet, shoved behind the communal sugar container where he always left it.

Marlene took the mug. She didn't know why. Proof, maybe. Evidence that she wasn't losing her mind.

That evening, she called the home number she'd photographed from the employee directory three months ago. Disconnected. She tried his ex-wife: not in service. She drove to his apartment complex off Highway 62, the one-bedroom he'd moved into after the divorce, unit 4B next to the dumpsters. A FOR RENT sign hung in the window. Through the gap in the blinds she could see bare walls, empty rooms, the kind of vacancy that suggested no one had lived there in years.

She sat in her Corolla with the engine running and the heat on, Marcus Chen's coffee mug in her lap. The streetlight above the parking lot buzzed and flickered, casting orange shadows across the dashboard.

She tried to picture his face and found she couldn't quite hold it. The shape was there—broad forehead, kind eyes, the scar on his chin from a childhood bicycle accident he'd told her about once—but the specifics kept sliding away, like trying to remember a dream three days after waking.

#

Two weeks later, Janet Flores from packaging stopped coming to work. Her locker gleamed. Her name disappeared from the schedule. When Marlene asked about her at the morning shift meeting, the supervisor looked at her with polite confusion and moved on to production quotas.

A week after that: Roy Whitmore from shipping. Then a maintenance tech whose name Marlene couldn't remember, which frightened her more than anything else. She was forgetting them now. Forgetting that she'd forgotten.

She started keeping a list. Names and dates in a pocket notebook she carried everywhere, updating it each morning before she could lose the thread. The ink felt like the only solid thing left.

Her own score appeared on her evaluation dashboard: 6.4, trending downward. She'd never paid attention to the number before—had assumed it was just another corporate metric, meaningless as the posters about synergy and excellence that papered the break room walls. Now she watched it like a patient watching a heart monitor.

The pattern emerged slowly. The ones who disappeared were always the lowest-rated in their department. The system aggregated anonymous feedback, identified the bottom performers, and then—

She didn't know the then. She didn't want to know.

What she knew was that her 6.4 put her closer to the bottom than the top.

#