THE GLITCH#

Chapter Two#

DAVID SHAW: The Gravity of Achievement#

The pain was a bright, thin wire of white heat that started in David’s left buttock and unspooled all the way down to his heel — a particular cruelty, he had always thought, that the human nervous system had designed its alarm signals to begin somewhere undignified. It was his first waking thought, every morning at 5:45 AM. It wasn’t a medical mystery; it was L5-S1 nerve compression, a souvenir from twenty years of leaning over patients and, more recently, three years of leaning over a standing desk that promised “ergonomic liberation” but delivered only a $1,200 invoice and the specific shame of having believed the marketing.

David didn’t move. He lay on the $6,000 Stearns & Foster mattress — another “investment” in sleep health, another number that had seemed justifiable at the point of purchase and was now simply part of the monthly math — and waited for the ibuprofen to find the inflammation. Beside him, Clara breathed with the heavy rhythm of someone who had earned her rest. David had helped design the standard metrics for what that kind of sleep was worth. He knew precisely what she was recovering from. He was less certain what he was.

He reached for his phone. The screen’s blue light was a slap to his retinas.

Notification: Mountain View Highlands HOA (Bot-ID: 992-A) Violation Detected: Unit 402. Item: Unapproved Balcony Vegetation. Status: $150 Fine Applied. Recurring daily until remediation.

David stared at the text. He knew exactly what it was. It was the tomato plant — Clara had bought it for Leo’s third-grade science project, a reasonable thing to do, a normal thing to do, the kind of small domestic gesture that had presumably been possible throughout the entirety of human civilization up until the moment a drone had been assigned to evaluate it. The plant was currently four inches taller than the railing. The HOA’s perimeter drone patrolled the “luxury” complex every six hours. The drone had done its job.

“Bastards,” he whispered, which was the kind of thing you said when you wanted to feel like you had a position on something.

He opened his banking app. It was a masochistic ritual, the way some people check the news before bed, except that the news occasionally improved.

Balance: $12,402.11 Pending Transaction: Mortgage - $5,942.18 Pending Transaction: HOA Dues - $1,185.00 Pending Transaction: PITI Escrow - $1,240.00

The math was a slow-motion car crash you could not look away from because you were in it. After the property tax and the insurance — the “I” in PITI, which never seemed to actually cover anything so much as create the paperwork that preceded learning it didn’t cover it — he was looking at $8,300 a month just to keep the roof from being repossessed. He made $425,000 a year at Telexa. The math still didn’t work. This was, he understood, a data point that would have been incomprehensible to his father, which was one of many ways in which Bay Area wealth had evolved beyond the capacity of the previous generation’s moral vocabulary to describe it accurately.

He swung his legs off the bed. The wire in his leg snapped taut. He let out a low, hissed breath, his hand finding the edge of the nightstand.

“David?” Clara’s voice was thick with sleep. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he lied. “Just the back.”

“Did you call United? About the PT authorization?”

David closed his eyes. He was a doctor. He had spent a decade navigating the ICD-10 codes, the pre-auths, the peer-to-peer reviews, the entire labyrinthine apparatus of insurance medicine that rewarded people who were persistent, literate, and had time to be on hold. And yet, yesterday, a “Physician Representative” for United Healthcare — a man who sounded like he was reading from a script in a call center somewhere that did not share David’s zip code — had told him that his requested ten sessions of physical therapy were “not clinically indicated” based on the proprietary algorithm’s assessment of his recovery curve.

The algorithm had reviewed his case without examining him. The algorithm’s recovery curve was built on population data. David was not a population.

“I’ll call them from work,” he said.

“My mother wants to know if we can go to that organic nursery in Los Altos this weekend,” Clara said, shifting under the covers. “She says the kids need more greens. Real greens.”

“We have a $150 fine for the greens we already have, Clara.”

“Don’t start with the money, David. Not this early. It’s a scarcity mindset. It’s toxic.”

David stood up, his spine popping like dry kindling, which was his spine’s way of announcing each morning that it was prepared to function but wished to register an objection. He looked at his reflection in the en-suite mirror. Graying at the temples, eyes underscored by the permanent purple bruises of the chronically underslept. He was the Director of Sleep Wellness for one of the largest tech companies on earth. He had not had a solid REM cycle since 2019. He had written, peer-reviewed, published papers on the measurable neurological consequences of exactly this kind of chronic deficit. He understood the literature from the inside. The literature had not helped.

He walked to the window and pulled back the blackout curtain. Outside, Mountain View was waking up in a haze of expensive, filtered air — the particular quality of morning that distinguishes places where the air itself costs money. A self-driving delivery pod hummed past on the street below. The HOA drone circled back for another pass at his balcony.

He checked his watch. 6:15 AM.

Time to go promote wellness.