Psycho Passive IC

[Draugvan]

Mayeda exited the taxi to a wash of autumn air.
"Why do I have to do this?" he poses to himself, as though he could have provided an answer.

Mayeda shut the car door and moved into the high-rise foyer before him, 'NOVA' shining overhead. A flush of warmth enveloped him in irony with cool office lighting playing off his sour face. A short lift ride later and he was greeted with the Ministry's uptown liaison on the 27th floor.

"Ministry of Welfare..." he clips to himself as he waddles through rows of cubicles, "...thousands of man-hours on deck, and a dozen officiaries in and out every day, and I've gotta be sent in at bloody midnight...?". Mayeda took a deep breath with a glance to the nearest clock - 11.35pm. A sigh escapes him. He felt blush. He be better to manage his colour, after all the proof was all around him.

A brief nod to himself and he was reassured in his commitment to continue these late-night data runs. The Ministry of Welfare took census on 80% of the modern and rural districts. With numbers like that, a perennial service is not only paramount, but necessary. He could have another job. Or he could have no job...so maybe this wasn't so bad in the scheme of things.

11.47pm and Mayeda is on his way back to ground floor. He watches out of a window at the western skyline. A sea of countless points, with the whale beginning to dive under the horizon. From here every light was a pin-prick on a city grid. Humanity on a spreadsheet. If you could draw a line from the western whale to the soon-rising sun in the east, how much would it tell you?

The elevator pings to the 27th.​

 

[Pf.D]

It was not unusual for Renjiro to be wondering the corridors of the Ministry of Welfare at such an hour. It was boring. Day in and day out, confined to the halls of a single building until called upon to do the dirty work necessary to wipe stains off the city streets. His hue was already clouded beyond the point of no return, it had been for years, but sometimes he wondered if he stared at the white of the walls for long enough if his Psycho Pass would return to a better shade, though those were hopeless ponderings.

There were round the clock analysts and inspectors on duty, so it was not odd for him to pass people as he went about, but it was odd when he saw an unfamiliar face, having done enough laps around the building to know most people by name and basically everyone but face--not that any of those people treated him well. He was a lowly, scumbag enforcer after all.

With a curiosity fueled by years of pent up boredom, he watched the stranger take the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor and after what he deemed a reasonable amount of time to prevent him from seeming like even more of a lowlife than he was already considered, he took his on ride up to the same floor, intent on meeting the new character.

When the doors slid aside and revealed the unfamiliar man, Renjiro found himself without anything to say. It had been years since he had interacted with anyone other than Ministry of Welfare employees and latent criminals, so when faced with someone who could be considered normal, words escaped him.

He settled for an unintelligible, "Going down?" and the slight pull of a grimace, finding it nearly impossible to smile after such a long time of having no reason to.