Optimal Distress Processing

The morning Nora Tillerman audited a birthday cake, she felt good about herself, which was the problem, if you thought about it, though she tried not to, because unstructured introspection was a Category 2 Cognitive Luxury and she was already at 97.3.

The cake had cost forty-seven dollars. Gerald Pemberton, the father, had purchased it from a bakery on Elm Street for his daughter’s ninth birthday. It was shaped like a unicorn. The unicorn had fondant wings. According to the Against Malaria Foundation’s current conversion metrics, forty-seven dollars purchased 9.4 long-lasting insecticidal nets, which, at the Foundation’s published rate of one statistical life saved per five hundred nets, meant the cake represented approximately 0.0188 of a statistical life, which was actually worse than Nora had initially estimated, and she felt a small professional satisfaction in catching the discrepancy, which she immediately noted on her Emotional Audit sidebar as “task-related gratification (authorized).”

“Mr. Pemberton,” she said, and she meant it warmly, she truly did, “I want you to know that this isn’t punitive. The Bureau of Optimal Giving exists to help people align their spending with their values. And I think — I really do think — that when you see the numbers, you’ll feel better. Most people do.”

Gerald Pemberton was crying.

This was normal. The Bureau’s internal research (Quarterly Wellness Report, Q3 2029, pp. 14-22) indicated that approximately sixty-eight percent of first-time auditees experienced lacrimation during their initial compliance session, with a median duration of four minutes and an intensity rating of 2.3 on the Patel-Morgenstern Distress Scale. Nora had tissues. She always had tissues. She’d requisitioned the good ones — with lotion — after submitting an efficiency memo demonstrating that lotion tissues reduced average session times by eleven percent, because clients whose noses hurt from cheap tissues tended to prolong their distress past the productive threshold.

“I just wanted her to have a nice birthday,” Gerald said.

“Of course you did. And that impulse — that generous impulse — is exactly what we’re going to redirect. Because here’s the thing, Gerald.” She leaned forward. She’d practiced the lean. It was Empathetic Posture 3, from the manual, and it worked. “Your daughter’s birthday can still be special. It can be more special. Because instead of a cake she’ll eat in twenty minutes, you can show her a certificate proving that her birthday saved —” Nora checked her calculator. ”— almost two percent of a human life. Isn’t that a better gift? Isn’t that the kind of gift that teaches her what love actually means?”

Gerald looked at her with an expression she filed internally as “pre-compliance ambivalence” and then signed the Remediation Agreement.

After he left, Nora ate a granola bar at her desk. Bureau-approved: $1.20, nutritionally optimized, sourced from a supply chain vetted by the Ethical Consumption Board. She’d done the math on granola bars once, early in her career, and determined that the moral cost of eating lunch was acceptable as long as she didn’t enjoy it too much. She didn’t. It tasted like compressed sawdust, which was fine, which was actually ideal, because pleasure in food was a gateway to Category 1 Hedonic Expenditure, and she was trying to close the gap on those last 2.7 points.

Her next case was a dog.

Specifically, it was a woman named Patricia Hollis who had adopted a twelve-year-old beagle from a shelter in Poughkeepsie and was now contesting her moral surcharge in what the Bureau classified as an Attachment Remediation Hearing. The beagle’s name was Humphrey. He was not present, as animals were not permitted in Bureau facilities, though Nora sometimes wished they were, because the fluorescent lighting and the motivational posters (“YOUR GIVING IS YOUR LEGACY — OPTIMIZE IT”) could use some warmth, and then she’d catch herself wishing and note it on her sidebar as “non-productive environmental longing.”

“Mrs. Hollis, the numbers are clear,” Nora said, though she said it gently, because Patricia Hollis was sixty-seven and had the kind of face that looked like it had been recently surprised by grief. “A pet is a Category 3 Moral Luxury. The projected lifetime cost of Humphrey’s care — food, veterinary bills, the bed you purchased, the sweater —”

“He gets cold.”

“The sweater you purchased for thermal reasons — totals approximately twelve hundred dollars per year. Over his expected remaining lifespan of four years, that’s forty-eight hundred dollars, which is nine hundred and sixty malaria nets, which is approximately 1.92 statistical lives.”

Patricia Hollis looked at Nora the way Nora sometimes looked at herself in the bathroom mirror at 2 a.m.

“But I love him,” Patricia said.

Nora opened the file on her screen. There was a field for this. It was labeled “Non-Optimized Attachment (Category 3)” and it had a dropdown menu with options ranging from “Mild (redirectable within 2 sessions)” to “Severe (refer to Emotional Restructuring).”

“I understand that,” Nora said. “And the Bureau has resources to help you process that attachment in a way that’s more aligned with —”

“I didn’t say I’m attached to him. I said I love him. He sleeps on my feet. He’s afraid of the toaster. Yesterday he sneezed eleven times in a row and then looked at me like I’d done it to him.” Patricia Hollis paused. “Can your spreadsheet do that?”

Nora selected “Moderate (may require 4-6 sessions)” from the dropdown and moved on.

The 2.7 points. She thought about them more than she should have. Her PME — Personal Moral Efficiency rating — sat at 97.3, and had sat there for eleven months, like a door that wouldn’t quite close. She’d optimized everything she could think of. Her apartment was four hundred square feet, the Bureau’s recommended minimum for a single occupant in the Tri-State Division. She had no pets. She had no romantic partner, not because she didn’t want one, but because the dating efficiency audit in 2027 had demonstrated that courtship expenses for non-procreative partnerships averaged $4,200 annually, which was eight hundred and forty malaria nets, which was 1.68 statistical lives, and Nora couldn’t look at another person across a dinner table without seeing the number floating above their head like a price tag from some terrible store.

The memo from Analytics arrived at 2:15 on a Tuesday. Her favorite day for bad news, because her Emotional Regulation Index peaked mid-week, per her wearable, which transmitted biometric data to the Bureau’s Wellness Division in real time, for her own benefit, naturally, so they could intervene if her cortisol suggested non-optimal distress patterns.

RE: SECTOR 7 MORAL INJURY ASSESSMENT — ACTION REQUIRED

The memo was nine pages long. Nora read it three times. The first two readings she kept thinking she was misunderstanding something, and then she realized she wasn’t.

The data was straightforward: Bureau employees in Sector 7 — her sector — had the highest rates of depression, anxiety, and “sustained moral injury” of any workforce cohort in the country. Higher than hospice workers. Higher than pediatric oncologists. Higher than the people who moderated violent content for social media companies, and those people had a dedicated line item in the federal mental health budget.

The cost of treating this distress — therapy, medication, lost productivity, the occasional employee who stopped coming to work and had to be processed through the Workforce Attrition Protocol — now exceeded, by a factor of 1.3, the total moral value of the compliance work the sector produced.

The Bureau’s own employees were suffering more than the people they were supposed to be helping. And the ones who suffered most were the good ones — the ones like Nora who took the work seriously, who lay awake calculating the moral weight of a granola bar. The compassionate ones broke first. The cynics were fine. The cynics processed their guilt assessments with the detachment of toll booth operators and went home and bought birthday cakes and didn’t think about it.

Dale Fitch had slides.

Of course Dale Fitch had slides. Dale Fitch had been a Regional Compliance Coordinator for eleven years and had never attended a meeting without slides, and the slides always had clip art, and the clip art was always slightly wrong — hiking boots on a slide about mental health, a cartoon sun wearing sunglasses on a slide about workforce attrition, a thumbs-up emoji on a slide about suicide prevention, which Nora had once reported to HR and been told was “aspirational imagery.”

“So,” Dale said, clicking to the first slide, which showed a photograph of a Finnish hiking trail superimposed with the Bureau’s logo and the words KARHUNKIERROS PROTOCOL: YOUR PATH TO OPTIMAL DISTRESS PROCESSING. “Great news.”

“This doesn’t feel like great news,” Nora said.

“It’s great news because we have a protocol for it. That’s what the Bureau does, Nora — we identify problems and we build protocols. And this particular protocol is, honestly, one of our best. The data is incredible.”

He clicked. The next slide was a bar graph showing employee wellness outcomes before and after the Karhunkierros Protocol, which was, Dale explained with the enthusiasm of a man describing a new restaurant, an eighty-day walking sabbatical named after a Finnish hiking trail called the Bear’s Round. The Bureau had adapted it. You walked. You processed your distress. You came back.

“The therapeutic value,” Dale said, and here he paused for emphasis, the way he paused before all his favorite numbers, “has been calculated at 0.3 QALYs per walkabout. That’s quality-adjusted life years, Nora. You know what 0.3 QALYs means? It means the protocol actually increases net moral output by twelve percent, because employees who complete the circuit process guilt assessments twenty-three percent faster upon return. Twenty-three percent. We’ve optimized the recovery from moral injury. It’s beautiful, really, when you think about the systems design.”

“What happens to the employees who don’t complete the circuit?”

Dale clicked to the next slide, which showed a pie chart. A small wedge — 4.2 percent — was colored a cheerful green, like it was the portion of the pie that represented people who’d chosen the salad.

“Some people choose to continue walking,” Dale said. His voice was the same warmth as always. “That’s within their rights. It’s an authorized exit pathway. We factor the attrition into the annual efficiency model.”

“And those people — the ones who keep walking — where do they go?”

Dale considered this with the expression of a man who had been asked about a part of the map that wasn’t on the map. “They go wherever they go, Nora. The protocol doesn’t track post-circuit outcomes. It’s outside our scope.” He brightened. “But the attrition rate is within acceptable parameters. Four-point-two percent. Down from five-point-one last fiscal year. We’re actually retaining more walkers than ever.”

Nora stared at the pie chart. She thought about the 4.2 percent — former Bureau employees walking through towns they didn’t belong to, carrying nothing, having calculated the cost of everything they owned and decided it was too expensive to exist as the people they’d been.

“Dale,” she said. “I ran the numbers on the Analytics memo.”

“Great. That’s exactly the kind of proactive —”

“The numbers say we should shut down the Bureau.”

Dale’s finger hovered over the clicker. A small, involuntary twitch. Then it passed, and he was Dale again, warm and confident, the way water is warm when it’s been sitting in a pipe for a long time and has forgotten what cold meant.

“The cost of maintaining the Bureau’s workforce — the therapy, the medication, the attrition, the moral injury, the walkabouts — exceeds the moral value of the compliance work we produce. Not by a small margin. By thirty percent. The most cost-effective intervention in Sector 7 isn’t a protocol, Dale. It’s dissolution. If we disbanded tomorrow and redirected our operating budget directly to the Against Malaria Foundation, we’d save approximately fourteen thousand statistical lives per year more than we’re currently enabling through compliance enforcement.”

She’d written it in a memo. She’d written it in Bureau-speak — the right terminology, the proper formatting, the headers and subheaders and cost-benefit tables and the approved font (Calibri 11-point, per the Style Guide, Third Edition). It was the most beautiful memo she’d ever written. Every line of it was correct.

Dale read it slowly, the way a man reads his own autopsy report, if the autopsy report were written in Calibri and included a section on “Stakeholder Impact.” When he finished, he set it on the desk and looked at Nora with Managerial Empathy Pattern 2: Concerned but Confident.

“Nora,” he said. “This is outstanding work.”

“It’s a recommendation to eliminate your job.”

“And that’s what makes it outstanding. The willingness to prioritize moral efficiency over institutional self-preservation — that’s exactly the kind of thinking that makes you such a valued member of this team. I’m going to flag this for the quarterly review committee. I think we can build a working group around it. Maybe a task force.”

“Dale, you can’t form a task force to study whether to eliminate the organization that would fund the task force.”

“Why not? We have budget for it through Q2.”

She opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again. Nothing came out that wasn’t Bureau-speak, and for the first time she realized that might be because nothing else was left.

“I’ll schedule the kickoff meeting,” Dale said, and clicked to his next slide, which was a photograph of a sunrise over a mountain and the words TOGETHER, WE OPTIMIZE.

The thing about the 2.7 points is that Nora had always known where they came from. She just hadn’t looked directly at it, the way you don’t look directly at certain thoughts because looking at them would require you to do something, and doing something would require you to be a different person, and that kind of wholesale self-revision was not the sort of thing you could schedule in the app.

The self-audit was mandatory now. She’d requested it herself, thinking the gap was something fixable — an inefficiency in her commute, an overlooked subscription. Instead the system did what it always did, which was tell the truth in the most brutal possible units.

SUBJECT: TILLERMAN, NORA E. PME DEFICIT ANALYSIS (2.7 POINTS)

Primary contributing factor: Non-productive emotional attachment to deceased sibling (TILLERMAN, ELI R., d. 2019, age 11, acute lymphoblastic leukemia, preventable with early intervention, ref: National Cancer Institute treatment protocols, estimated intervention cost at time of death: $47,000).

Estimated cognitive overhead: 340 hours/year. Estimated productivity loss: 12.6 compliance sessions/year. Estimated moral cost of productivity loss: 4.2 statistical lives/year.

Recommended intervention: Structured Grief Optimization seminar (SGO), 8 sessions. Projected PME improvement: +1.4 points. Remaining deficit addressable through supplementary interventions (see Appendix C).

She read it at her desk. She did not cry. Crying at work was a Category 2 Emotional Expenditure, and anyway, she had already used her quarterly allocation of grief-related tears (three episodes, maximum twelve minutes each, per the Employee Wellness Handbook, Appendix J, which she had helped write).

Eli had been eleven. He had liked dinosaurs and hated math and had a laugh that sounded like someone had surprised him with the fact of his own happiness — a sudden, gulping sound, almost a hiccup. Their parents hadn’t been able to afford the treatment. The insurance had denied the claim, and the appeal had taken four months, and by then the leukemia had decided not to wait for the paperwork.

She’d been seventeen. She’d sat in the hospital room doing math on her phone — how much the treatment cost, how many people could contribute, how the money could be raised — while Eli watched cartoons on a tablet someone had donated and laughed at a rabbit getting hit with a frying pan. The math hadn’t worked. It hadn’t worked because she was seventeen and didn’t know how to make math work for things that mattered.

And now the system she’d built herself for had looked at her grief for her dead brother and seen waste. Had quantified her love in hours and converted her hours into statistical lives and determined that her inability to stop missing a boy who laughed like hiccups was costing the world 4.2 people per year.

The Emotional Audit sidebar pulsed gently, reminding her to log her current affective state.

She typed: Compliant.

Fourteen people sat around the table in Conference Room 3, which smelled like dry-erase markers and the particular brand of institutional anxiety that comes from sitting in a room where someone is about to present a slide containing the phrase “human capital depreciation.” Nora knew all of them. She knew that Rodriguez in Sector 4 had been on anxiety medication since the pet audit expansion. She knew that Whitfield in Intake had stopped eating lunch. She knew that Okafor in Analytics, who had sent the original memo, had requested the Karhunkierros Protocol three times and been denied because her skills were too valuable, which meant her suffering was too productive to treat.

Nora read her memo aloud. She did not editorialize. She did not raise her voice. She presented the data as data.

“In conclusion,” she said, “the most effective altruistic intervention available to this Bureau is to cease existing. The projected moral savings of dissolution, redirected to direct interventions, would exceed our current output by a factor of 2.3. I recommend immediate implementation.”

The room was quiet. Not the quiet of shock — Nora had expected shock and would have welcomed it — but the quiet of people waiting for the next slide.

Dale spoke first. “Nora, that was phenomenal. Truly. The rigor. The intellectual honesty.”

“I’m recommending we shut down, Dale.”

“And I’m recommending we convene a cross-divisional working group to study the implementation timeline. We’ll need a budget. I’m thinking Q3 for preliminary findings, Q1 next year for actionable recommendations.”

“The time the working group takes will cost approximately six hundred statistical lives.”

Dale nodded thoughtfully. “Good point. I’ll flag that in the project plan as a known externality. Can you quantify the margin of error?”

Okafor was looking at Nora with an expression she recognized because she’d seen it once before, on the face of a woman at a dog adoption hearing who had said but I love him as though love were an argument, as though love had ever won an argument against a spreadsheet.

“I’d like to request the Karhunkierros Protocol,” Nora said.

“Wonderful,” Dale said. “I’ll start the paperwork.”

They issued her walking shoes. Merrell Moab 3, mid-rise, waterproof. The Bureau had determined through procurement analysis that the Moab 3 offered the optimal cost-per-mile ratio for moral sabbatical, and Nora appreciated this, or rather the part of her that was still the Bureau’s appreciated this, the part that had been calculating so long it couldn’t stop, like a clock that keeps ticking after you pull the batteries because the gears don’t know they’re supposed to be still.

They gave her a GPS tracker. They gave her a pamphlet: YOUR MORAL SABBATICAL: A GUIDE TO OPTIMAL DISTRESS PROCESSING. The pamphlet had a photograph of a woman on a hilltop at sunset, arms spread, face turned toward a sky that was the exact same shade of orange as the Bureau’s logo.

She started walking on a Thursday morning in early October, when the leaves were doing something expensive and gratuitous with color.

The first day she walked fourteen miles and tried not to calculate the caloric expenditure against the nutritional value of the Bureau-approved trail mix she’d been issued, and mostly failed. The second day she walked twelve miles and saw a red-tailed hawk catch a mouse in a field, and the hawk did not pause to calculate the moral implications of eating the mouse, and the mouse did not file a complaint, and the whole transaction took about four seconds and involved no paperwork whatsoever.

The fifth day she passed through a town that had a gas station and a church and a bar with a sign that said COLD BEER and nothing else. Not “Ethically Sourced Beer.” Not “Beer: A Category 2 Hedonic Expenditure — Enjoy Responsibly and Consider Redirecting.” Just cold beer. She didn’t go in. But she noticed that she’d noticed, and that the noticing didn’t trigger anything on her sidebar, because the sidebar was seventy miles away and the app had lost signal in the hills on day three.

On the ninth day it rained all afternoon and she walked through it because the pamphlet said nothing about rain and she didn’t know what else to do. A farmer on a porch watched her pass and lifted his coffee mug — in a kind of salute, or maybe just in the direction of his mouth — and Nora waved, and the farmer nodded, and that was it. A human interaction that cost nothing and meant nothing and was, for some reason she couldn’t calculate, the best she’d felt in weeks.

On the twelfth day she sat by a creek and watched the water and did not think about anything for almost three minutes, which was the longest she’d gone without calculating since she was twenty-two, and when she realized what had happened she cried — not Bureau-sanctioned crying, not the quarterly allocation, but the kind that doesn’t have a duration estimate, the kind Eli used to do when he skinned his knees, open-mouthed and bewildered and not about anything except the overwhelming fact of being a body in a world.

The GPS blinked on her wrist. Somewhere, the Wellness Division was logging her cortisol. Or maybe they weren’t. Maybe the signal was gone here too.

On the twenty-sixth day, she reached a gas station that sold coffee. Not Bureau-approved coffee. Just coffee. The kind that comes in a paper cup and costs four dollars and fifty cents and tastes like it was made six hours ago by someone who did not care about the optimal water-to-grounds ratio.

Outside, a dog was running in a field. Not a service dog. Not an emotional support animal with documented QALY justification. Just a dog, running, because the field was there and the dog had legs and the morning was cool and sometimes that’s enough.

Across the road, behind a house with a sagging porch, a teenager was playing guitar. Playing it badly. Playing it with the kind of joyful incompetence that suggested no one had yet informed her that the hours spent practicing could be redirected to higher-impact skill development, and Nora hoped, with a fierceness that surprised her, that no one ever would.

She went in. She poured a cup of coffee. She brought it to the register.

“Four fifty,” the kid behind the counter said.

She knew what it was. She couldn’t not know. It was 0.9 insecticidal nets. It was 0.0018 of a statistical life. The math was always willing to keep going — that was the terrible thing about the math, it never stopped unless you stopped it.

She paid. She didn’t calculate the change.

She took the coffee outside and stood in the parking lot and held it with both hands. The cup was warm. The dog was still running. The girl was still playing guitar — three chords and a stumble, three chords and a stumble, the same beautiful failure over and over.

The GPS blinked on her wrist. The trail curved east from here. Eighty days. Return refreshed. Process guilt assessments twenty-three percent faster.

The road went west.

Nora drank her coffee.