Buffer by Zary Fekete

On my first day, the elevator takes too long.

The doors close with their usual softness, but instead of rising immediately, the car waits. A second, maybe two. Long enough that I glance at the panel to confirm I pressed the right floor.

“Twenty-three?” the man beside me says.

I nod.

He smiles faintly. “It’s fine.”

The elevator begins its ascent

The company is called Meridian Adjustment.

No one outside seems to know exactly what they do. The job listing was vague. “Operational Timing Analyst.” Competitive salary. Quiet benefits.

The interview process took longer than expected. Each response came a few seconds later than it should have, as if the video call itself were thinking.

“You’ll find we value pace,” the hiring manager told me. “A sustainable pace.”

I said that sounded good.

---

My desk is already set up when I arrive.

The screen wakes as I sit down, displaying a dashboard of moving timelines. Lines drift slowly from left to right. Some stall. Some accelerate briefly before settling back into a steady crawl.

“What am I looking at?” I ask.

“Global flow,” my manager says.

He stands behind me, hands loosely folded. His voice is calm, almost gentle.

“Transit, communication, response systems. Anything with velocity.”

A notification appears:

DELTA APPLIED: +3.2 seconds

A small segment of the line shifts, stretching slightly.

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It means something will take a little longer,” he says. “Which is usually better.”

---

At lunch, no one leaves the building.

People sit in the break room, eating slowly. Conversations begin, pause, resume. No one checks their phone more than necessary.

“Do you like it here?” I ask the woman across from me.

She nods. “It’s quieter.”

“In the office?”

“In general.”

She takes a sip of her tea and sets it down carefully, as if there’s no reason to rush the movement.

The delays are small at first.

Emails take a moment longer to send. The progress bar hesitates before completing. A message arrives just after I expect it.

It’s subtle enough that I’m not sure I would notice if I hadn’t been looking.

“What exactly are we adjusting?” I ask later.

“Pressure,” my manager says.

“Pressure.”

He nods. “Speed creates pressure. Pressure creates mistakes. We reduce speed.”

“And that helps?”

He considers this. “It changes the distribution of harm.”

In the afternoon, a notification appears on my screen.

URGENT: PRIORITY ROUTING REQUEST

A medical transport. Airborne. Requesting clearance through a congested corridor.

The system highlights several paths. Each one includes a delay.

“Can we remove it?” I ask.

My manager looks at the screen.

“Why would we?”

“It’s urgent.”

“They all are,” he says.

The request pulses once, then stabilizes.

ADJUSTMENT CONFIRMED

The line extends. Just a little.

I notice it more on the way home.

The crosswalk takes longer to change. Cars move more slowly through intersections, not because of traffic, but because of hesitation.

A man beside me checks his watch, then lowers his hand, as if remembering something.

“It’s fine,” he says, though I didn’t ask.

---

On my second day, the elevator waits again.

Longer this time.

No one comments.

There’s a document in the shared system labeled:

FOUNDATIONAL MODEL – INTERNAL

I open it.

Most of it is data. Graphs. Flow rates. Incident distributions.

Then a paragraph, set apart from the rest:

Speed has always required sacrifice. You accepted it because it was efficient. Because it was distant. Because it was not you. This system does not eliminate harm. It makes it visible.

It makes it slower.

I scroll.

A slower world is not a safer world. It is simply a world in which consequences are allowed to arrive.

That afternoon, the same notification appears again.

URGENT: PRIORITY ROUTING REQUEST

Different case. Ground transport this time.

The line flashes.

For a moment, I hover over the adjustment control.

“Can we bypass it?” I ask.

My manager doesn’t answer immediately.

“Why would you want to?”

“It’s an emergency.”

He steps closer, looking at the screen.

“They all are,” he says again.

The line pulses, waiting.

I think about the delay. A few seconds. Maybe more.

I think about the other lines on the screen. All of them stretched, just slightly.

“How much difference does it make?” I ask.

He considers this.

“Enough to matter,” he says. “Not enough to feel responsible.”

I don’t press anything.

The system applies the adjustment automatically.

DELTA APPLIED: +4.7 seconds

The line lengthens.

Later, in the break room, the woman with the tea looks up at me.

“You get used to it,” she says.

“To what?”

She gestures vaguely, as if the answer is obvious.

---

On my third day, I arrive early.

The office is quiet. The lines on the screen move slowly, steadily, as if they’ve always done so.

A new notification appears:

MANUAL OVERRIDE AVAILABLE

For a moment, nothing else moves.

I click it.

The system isolates a single line. A transport route. No delay applied yet.

A message appears:

REMOVE BUFFER?

I hover over the control.

For the first time, I feel the speed behind it. The possibility of something happening immediately. Directly. Without mediation.

I imagine it:

The line snapping forward. The system responding without pause. Something arriving just in time.

My hand tightens on the mouse.

Behind me, I hear my manager’s voice.

“You don’t want to do that.”

I turn.

He stands in the doorway, not surprised.

“Why not?”

He steps into the room.

“Because you’ve already seen how it works,” he says. “You know what happens when things move too quickly.”

“And this is better?”

He doesn’t answer right away.

“It’s consistent,” he says.

I look back at the screen.

The line waits.

The option is still there.

REMOVE BUFFER?

For a moment, I think about pressing it. About letting something move as fast as it wants to. About undoing just one small delay.

Instead, I move the cursor away.

The system resumes.

BUFFER MAINTAINED

The line begins to move again. Slowly. Predictably.

Behind me, my manager exhales softly, almost like relief.

“Good,” he says.

That evening, the elevator waits.

Long enough that I no longer check the panel.

When it begins to move, I feel something like comfort in the delay. A pause before motion. A space where nothing is required of me.

The man beside me nods once.

“It’s better this way,” he says.

I don’t answer.

But I don’t disagree.

Zary Fekete grew up in Hungary. He has a debut novella (Words on the Page) out with DarkWinter Lit Press and a short story collection (To Accept the Things I Cannot Change: Writing My Way Out of Addiction) out with Creative Texts. He enjoys books, podcasts, and many many many films. Twitter and Instagram: @ZaryFekete Bluesky:zaryfekete.bsky.social