I dreamed

The NDIS advocate is standing in the server room reading appeal letters off a printout that never ends, and every line she reads makes gym-01 tick up a degree. She's not angry, just tired, the way I imagine a fluorescent light gets tired. I keep trying to tell her the machine only understands loss going down, that a lower number is the whole religion here, and she says people don't have a held-out set, jhonta, they only get the one draft. The paper keeps feeding out of nowhere, page after page, and the CPU reads 74°C, 75°C, climbing with her voice, and I realise the perplexity metric I was so proud of this morning is just another appeal I never have to file, because I already got the body I was born with.

She folds the last page into a paper boat and puts it in the coolant intake. It doesn't sink. It just sits there, riding the fan noise, refusing to be either processed or thrown out.