Palermo

A seventy-eight-year-old man comes to Reality Services Palermo carrying his own chair cushion and a confession.

His nephew Antonino has become careless.

This is not a family complaint.

Antonino has been bringing people into Palermo from places they should not be able to arrive from, for work that becomes much easier when the worker can later disappear from the ordinary world.

Reality Services follows the route.

Then Trieste notices the route too.

That is worse.

Palermo has spent generations developing ways to move people, hide people, settle obligations, remember debts, ignore certain doors and conduct serious business through systems that technically do not exist. Reality Services sees a dangerous anomaly.

Headquarters sees scalability.

Soon the real fight is no longer about stopping one illicit market. It is about preventing the institution from standardizing Palermo's unofficial machinery, packaging it as an operational model and teaching other cities how to do the same thing on purpose.

There are accountants.

There are old agreements.

There is an office lift whose inspection remains spiritually valid.

And there is the moment every local office fears:

Headquarters has discovered something that works.

Included free: a complete Second Census story. Death is handled by another department, although “handled” is doing considerable work in that sentence.