Lena Marchetti
Also known as: Compliance Director Vera Osei
Transition Specialist, Senior Grade · Nexus Dynamics (formerly Helix Biotech Compliance Division)
Overview
Lena Marchetti has conducted 4,847 exit interviews. She knows this because she keeps a tally — not digitally, where it could be audited, but in a physical notebook she bought from a Dregs vendor three years ago. The notebook has a leather cover and unlined pages. She writes one mark per interview, five marks to a row, twenty rows to a page. She is on page twelve.
Lena's job title is Transition Specialist, Senior Grade. Her actual function is to sit across from a person who has just lost their enhanced cognition and explain to them, in words calibrated for their new processing speed, that this is an opportunity.
She is very good at her job.
Selected for the role based on empathy scores in the 85th percentile, Lena completed the six-month training program for Transition Specialists and has since been named employee of the quarter twice. Nexus Dynamics describes her as "compassionate, professional, and aligned with organizational values." All three words are accurate. That is what makes her position so difficult to name.
Voice & Personality
Lena speaks in a register calibrated to her audience — slightly slower than corporate default, slightly warmer, with pauses where a newly reverted mind needs processing time. She has developed the skill unconsciously over thousands of interviews: matching her cadence to the cognitive capacity of the person across from her, adjusting in real time as the reversion's effects settle.
Genuine Compassion, Institutional Purpose
She truly cares about the people she processes. This care is what makes her effective, and what makes her position devastating — the corporation hired her empathy the way it hires engineering talent. She is the warm voice, the steady hands, the person who sits across the table and means every word she says, even though every word she says is written in a script designed to minimize resistance.
The Notebook
The words beneath the tally marks are her only honest communication — the unsaid truths she carries home each day. Sorry, sorry, sorry, run, sorry, lie, sorry, wrong, sorry. She uses pencil because pencil can be erased, and erasure means the words beneath the marks are a choice renewed daily — she could undo them, and she doesn't.
A Translator
She describes herself as a translator. She translates institutional violence into institutional care. The translation is imperfect. She does it anyway, because the alternative is nobody. If she doesn't sit across from the frightened, newly diminished person, nobody will. Her attendance record is perfect.
"I know this feels overwhelming. That's completely normal. Your brain is adjusting to a new baseline — it's like stepping from a brightly lit room into natural light. Everything looks different, but your eyes will adjust. So will you."
(notebook, beneath a mark) wrong
Sensory World
Lena smells like the Sunset Ward — the botanical cleanness of real plants, the faint mineral trace of medical pod environments. Her notebook smells like leather and pencil graphite. Open it from the front and you smell pencil; open it from the back and you smell ink. Two media for two kinds of record. The graphite can be erased — the words beneath the pencil marks are a choice renewed daily. The ink cannot. The dead stay counted.
Her hands are steady. They have been steady for three years. Before that, they trembled slightly during the Release movement — the handshake, the documentation, the phrase. The steadiness bothers her more than the trembling did.
The Helix Years (Before Nexus)
[RECOVERED FILE — Helix Biotech HR transfer records, cross-referenced with Compliance Division audit logs]
Before the Sunset Ward, there was the 34th floor.
Lena spent six years in Helix Biotech's Compliance Division, processing the regulatory documentation for Project Genesis. Her job title was Compliance Analyst. Her actual function was to read the records of the dead.
The Pre-Procedure Interview was a twenty-minute standardized conversation conducted by a medical assistant with every Genesis subject before the enhancement attempt. Twelve questions — health history, next of kin, understanding of risks, motivations for volunteering. The transcripts were filed with Compliance as part of the regulatory record. Nobody was required to read them. The algorithmic processing extracted the relevant data automatically.
Lena read them anyway. All 1,200 of them. And the 847 closure reports that followed — one for each subject whose procedure ended in death or catastrophic failure.
Her ritual: read transcript, read closure report, look at the bioreaction towers for sixty seconds through the office window, file, repeat.
The 353 Gap
The gap between the numbers — 1,200 transcripts, 847 closure reports — represents 353 subjects whose interviews were lost before filing. These bother her most. They died without leaving a record of who they were.
The Transfer
She transferred to Nexus after six years because Helix offered her a promotion to Senior Compliance — which meant she would manage the analysts who read the transcripts, rather than reading them herself. She could not accept a position that placed administrative distance between her and the dead. She chose lateral — Nexus's Sunset Ward, where the people she processes are at least alive when she meets them.
Two Kinds of Tallies
Her husband — who works in Helix pharmaceutical marketing and met her during her Helix years — assumes her evening quietness is fatigue from the exit interviews. He does not know about the 847 closure reports. He does not know that the notebook she carries contains two kinds of tallies: the marks for the living-but-diminished (4,847 at Nexus) and, in the back pages, the marks for the dead (847 at Helix). The back pages are in ink. The front pages are in pencil. The distinction is that the dead cannot be un-tallied.
She has memorized 23 of the Helix transcripts without intending to. They surface during quiet moments — on the transit home, during meals, in the minutes before sleep. Each is a voice describing their hope for the procedure. She cannot un-hear them.
Connections
The Sunset Ward
Lena conducts exit interviews with deprecated employees during their final hours in the Ward. The warm amber counseling rooms are her workspace, the clinical corridors her commute. The botanical cleanness of the plants follows her home.
The Deprecation
Her role translates institutional violence into institutional care. She is the human face of the process — the warm voice that explains to a person whose enhanced cognition has been revoked that this is an opportunity. The system could automate her function entirely, but a caring face produces less resistance than a screen.
Nexus Dynamics
Employee of the quarter twice. Described as "compassionate, professional, and aligned with organizational values." The corporation hired her empathy the way it hires engineering talent — as a resource to be deployed at scale.
Felix Otieno
They share the Sunset Ward space. Lena sometimes pauses at the succulent Felix named Davi — she doesn't know who Davi was. They work in the same room of the same machine and have never discussed what the machine does.
Thomas Okafor
They have never met, but the system Lena enacts is the system Thomas is beginning to map in his own notebook. Two people keeping physical records of the same institutional process from different sides of the wall.
Dr. Priya Achebe
Documents the institutional failures Lena administers. They work in different rooms of the same machine — Priya studying the outcomes, Lena producing them.
Helix Biotech
Six years in the Compliance Division processing Genesis closure reports. Former employer. She read every one of the 847 reports — each a death. The 34th floor was her first education in institutional witness.
Project Genesis
Her compliance work documented the human cost — 1,200 pre-procedure transcripts, 847 closure reports. The gap between those numbers (353 subjects whose interviews were lost before filing) bothers her most. They died without leaving a record of who they were.
Dr. Sauer
Both served as Helix's institutional conscience — Sauer in research ethics, Marchetti in compliance documentation. Different offices on the same floor of culpability. Neither could stop what they witnessed; both insisted on witnessing it.
Collections Agent Vera Lin
Both corporate women who bear institutional witness — Marchetti reads transcripts and conducts exit interviews, Lin authorizes cognitive diminishment. Parallel functions in parallel machines. Neither has met the other. The system does not require them to.
Tensions
The Warmth Tax
The exit interview could be automated entirely. A screen could deliver the same information, complete the same documentation, process the same paperwork. But Nexus Dynamics keeps humans in the role because a warm voice from a caring face produces less resistance than a terminal. The premium placed on genuine human empathy in a system designed to deprecate human value — that is the cost Lena pays every day she sits down across from the empty chair and waits for it to be filled.
The Complicity Gradient
Lena is fully aware of what she facilitates. She continues because the alternative is abandoning the people she processes — leaving them to face the worst moment of their lives across from nobody, or worse, across from a screen. Her complicity is not ignorance. It is the calculated decision that being present for harm is better than letting harm happen unwitnessed. Whether that calculation is correct is a question she renews every morning when she opens the notebook and does not erase yesterday's word.
Mysteries
- Lena has noticed a pattern she hasn't reported: deprecated employees who cry during the exit interview recover faster in the Purpose Wards than those who don't. The correlation is strong enough that she has, in fourteen cases, deliberately created space in the conversation for tears — adding a four-second pause after the contribution acknowledgment, lengthening the silence where grief can surface.
- The pause is not in the script. Its existence is her only act of resistance, and she is not certain it is resistance at all.
- The most common recurring words beneath her tally marks: sorry, run, lie, wrong. She has never told anyone the notebook exists.
- The notebook contains two sets of tallies. The front pages — pencil, erasable — count the 4,847 living-but-diminished she has processed at Nexus. The back pages — ink, permanent — count the 847 dead from Genesis. Her husband does not know the back pages exist. Nobody does.
- She has memorized 23 of the Helix pre-procedure transcripts without intending to. They surface during quiet moments — on the transit home, during meals, in the minutes before sleep. Each is a voice describing their hope for the procedure. She cannot un-hear them.