Collections Agent Vera Lin
Senior Collections Specialist, Good Fortune Cognitive Asset Recovery Division
Vera Lin dims people for a living and sleeps eight hours every night.
She is a Senior Collections Specialist at Good Fortune Corporation's Cognitive Asset Recovery Division — the person who, three to five times per week, initiates the sequence that reduces a human being's cognitive capacity until the numbers balance. She was hired after seven years in customer relations, where her empathy scores ranked in the 92nd percentile. The hiring logic was precise: collections work requires interpersonal calibration. Debtors who contest their dimming need to be managed by someone who can hear distress without being destabilized by it.
The procedure takes four minutes per initiation. Review the case file. Verify the default. Confirm the Grace Period has expired. Check for last-minute payment (there is never a last-minute payment). Authorize the Dimming sequence. Log the authorization. File compliance documentation. Move to the next case. A person's mind begins to shrink. Vera opens the next file.
Field Observations
Vera speaks with the measured precision of someone who has perfected professional distance without losing professional warmth. She cares about the people she dims — genuinely, measurably. She dims them anyway.
The Four Minutes
Review. Verify. Confirm. Check. Authorize. Log. File. Next. The procedure is a liturgy. Each step prevents the one thing the system cannot afford: a collections agent who stops to think about what she is doing.
Hired for Empathy
Ninety-second percentile. Good Fortune screens for it the way Ironclad screens for stress tolerance. A debtor contesting cognitive diminishment needs to be heard by someone who genuinely understands their terror — and proceeds regardless.
Basic Wakefulness
She does not dream. Basic Wakefulness eliminates the REM processing that might convert daytime experience into nighttime disturbance. The subscription costs less than a Memory Therapist. Good Fortune recommends it in the onboarding packet.
The Mug
"World's Okayest Economist." A gift from a former colleague who doesn't know what Vera does now. The ceramic holds warmth longer than disposable cups. She noticed this. She considers it important.
Recorded during her third and final session with a Memory Therapist:
"If I don't do it, someone else will, and they might not be as careful. I check the files. I verify the math. I confirm the Grace Period. Some of my colleagues skip steps. I don't skip steps. That's what I can offer."
On why she chose Basic Wakefulness:
"I sleep eight hours. I wake up rested. The subscription is affordable. I don't see why that's anyone's concern."
Sensory Profile
Her terminal's display shows aggregate portfolio metrics in Good Fortune red-and-gold — the numbers are people but they don't look like people. Twelve terminals on the Collection Floor, identical workstations in neutral gray, evenly lit with nothing to cast a shadow and nothing to distract from the task. The lighting was designed for focus. It achieves focus.
The 72-bpm hum from Server Farm 14 below, felt through her shoes, creating a meditative rhythm that makes repetitive cognitive diminishment feel procedural. Her ceramic mug sits beside the keyboard — the one human object in an institutional space, the gold lettering slightly faded from years of washing. She wraps both hands around it between initiations. Four minutes per case. Enough time for two sips.
Known Associates
Lin's position within the Cognitive Asset Recovery Division places her at the operational end of Good Fortune's debt architecture. These are the systems and people her daily work intersects.
Good Fortune Corporation
Employer. The corporate gold, the empathy screening, the onboarding packet that recommends Basic Wakefulness. Good Fortune hired Vera's compassion because compassion makes the process smoother for the debtor, and smoother processes generate fewer compliance incidents.
The Collection Floor
Fourteenth floor, Sector 4D tower. Twelve terminals in neutral gray. Even lighting. No windows. The hum from Server Farm 14 felt through the floor. This is where people's minds are diminished by people who check the files first.
Lena Marchetti
Both bear institutional witness. Marchetti reads transcripts of the dead and conducts exit interviews with the living. Lin authorizes the dimming of the living. Neither has found a reason sufficient to leave. Both have looked.
Lena Marchetti
Both administer institutional reduction with professional warmth. Lena conducts exit interviews; Vera authorizes dimmings. Twin expressions of managed diminishment — one removes you from a company, the other removes you from yourself.
The Complicity Gradient
Level 3: fully aware of what she does, continuing to participate, justifying continuation through the quality of her care. The Gradient doesn't measure guilt. It measures the distance between knowledge and action. Vera's distance is zero.
Open Questions
What Happens When Care Improves the Machine?
Vera does not skip steps. She verifies the math. She confirms the Grace Period. Individual debtors receive slightly better treatment because she is careful. The system processes more dimmings because careful agents generate fewer compliance incidents, fewer appeals, fewer delays.
Her care makes the system more efficient. Her efficiency makes the system process more cases. More cases means more people dimmed. The question the Collection Floor cannot answer: does a careful executioner reduce suffering, or increase it?
The Empathy Hiring Criterion
Good Fortune screens collections candidates for empathy the way other corporations screen for stress tolerance or technical aptitude. Ninety-second percentile isn't a bonus — it's a job requirement.
What kind of system needs its operators to genuinely feel what the subject feels, and then proceed? What does it mean that the cruelest work is done most smoothly by the kindest hands?
The Dreamless Subscription
Basic Wakefulness eliminates REM sleep. Good Fortune recommends it in the onboarding packet. Vera took the recommendation. She sleeps eight hours. She wakes rested. She has not dreamed since her first week on the Collection Floor.
Dreams are where the mind processes what it cannot process during the day. What accumulates in a person who does this work for years without the machinery that would force them to feel it?
▲ Unverified Intelligence
Sprawl Analytical Bureau — Confidence: Low to Moderate
- Lin visited a Memory Therapist for exactly three sessions. She articulated her justification during the third, then discontinued treatment. The therapist's notes — obtained through channels the Sprawl declines to specify — contain a single annotation in the margin of the third session: "Patient is not in denial. Patient is performing a cost-benefit analysis in real time and arriving at the same answer every session."
- Her loyalty coefficient of 76 is above the division average but below the corporate norm. Internal Good Fortune metrics flag any coefficient below 80 for quarterly review. Lin has been flagged four times. Each review concluded that her work quality exceeds departmental standards. The coefficient measures something the reviews do not.
- The mug — "World's Okayest Economist" — was a gift from a colleague named Dara, who left customer relations two years before Vera transferred to collections. Dara has sent three messages in the past year. Vera has read all three. She has replied to none. The mug remains on the desk.