Signal Loss

The conference room smelled of stale coffee and the peculiar, synthetic warmth of electronics overheating. Elena sat across from him, her orange hair—a recent impulsive dye job after the divorce—vibrant against the beige cubicle walls. She'd always been the one who made decisions quickly. He was still deliberating whether to order the sandwich.

"They're eliminating your position, Marcus."

Her iPhone buzzed on the table. She didn't check it. That was new.

"Twenty-three years," he said, staring at the tangled cable snake pit beneath the conference table. Blue ethernet, black power, the occasional white HDMI—all knotted together like some electronic Medusa. "I started when cable was king. When people still said they'd call you back."

"It's not personal. The new director wants someone who understands cloud infrastructure. You've been... resistant."

He thought of his daughter, twelve now, asking him why he still used a flip phone. He'd tried to explain that some things were built to last, that planned obsolescence was a scam, but she'd already looked away, her face illuminated by her tablet's glow.

"Your hair," she said suddenly. "It's getting thin."

He self-consciously touched his crown. The cable guy who'd come to fix their internet last month had made the same comment, loudly, while Marcus stood in the doorway holding a coffee mug, feeling like an intruder in his own home.

"The severance is generous," Elena continued, her voice professional and distant. "You should take some time. Figure out what you actually want."

What he wanted was impossible. He wanted the world to slow down. He wanted to matter to people who still looked up from their screens. He wanted his wife back, though he couldn't remember her face without the iPhone filter she'd applied in every photograph for the past decade.

"Did you know," he said, "that in an orange grove, the trees are grafted? The roots are from one variety, the fruit from another. Nothing is entirely what it seems."

Elena checked her phone finally. "Marcus, sign the papers. Please."

He picked up the pen. The cable beneath the table twitched as someone in the next room disconnected something. Somewhere, a signal was lost. Somewhere, something was ending.

He signed his name for the last time.