Lena Marchetti
Also known as: Compliance Director Vera Osei · Jun-seo Park
Transition Specialist, Senior Grade · Nexus Dynamics (formerly Helix Biotech Compliance Division)
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.
Her 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.
Field Observations
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
The Jun-seo Park File
[RECOVERED FILE — Nexus Strategic Workforce Planning division, cross-referenced with identity compartmentalization records]
Between Helix and the Sunset Ward, there was the optimization.
Under the name Jun-seo Park — a clean identity created after her Helix departure — Lena spent two years in Nexus's Strategic Workforce Planning division. Her job: identify which departments could be automated and design the transition plans. She was exceptional.
Her AI testing protocol for the Neural Interface QA division was 40x faster than human inspection with 99.7% accuracy versus human testers' 94.2%. Twenty-three people received Sunset Packages. Lena received a promotion and a bonus equal to 200% of her annual salary.
She automated four departments in total. Ninety-four employees deprecated. Her transition efficiency metric — measuring speed, savings, and complaint reduction — was the highest in her division. Her own analysis suggested her role would be automated in 3-5 years. She processed this information the way she processed any design data: acknowledge, account for, optimize around.
The Eighteenth Walk
She walked past the Sunset Ward seventeen times during the optimization years without entering. Each time was a choice she didn't recognize as a choice. On the eighteenth pass, she went inside to observe the process she'd been feeding. She watched a Transition Specialist conduct an exit interview with a man whose department she had eliminated six months earlier. The specialist spoke in calibrated warmth. The man couldn't follow half the words — his firmware had already been downgraded. The specialist adjusted her cadence in real time, slowing to match his new processing speed.
Lena requested a transfer that afternoon. Not to escape the optimization work — to understand it from the other end.
The Jun-seo identity was never formally deactivated. Nexus HR records show "Jun-seo Park" as a former employee of Strategic Workforce Planning, and "Lena Marchetti" as a current employee of Transition Services. Nobody has connected them because identity compartmentalization is standard corporate practice and because nobody in HR reads across divisions.
The 34th Floor
[RECOVERED FILE — Helix Biotech HR transfer records, cross-referenced with Compliance Division audit logs]
Before the optimization, 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 Lateral 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 contains two kinds of tallies: marks for the living-but-diminished (front, in pencil) and marks for the dead (back, in ink). The dead cannot be un-tallied.
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.
Known Associates
Felix Otieno
They share the Sunset Ward space. She pauses at the succulent he named Davi — she doesn't know who Davi was. Felix was deprecated by one of her early automation projects. They share the same room of the same machine without knowing the connection.
The Sunset Ward
Warm amber counseling rooms are her workspace, clinical white corridors her commute. The botanical cleanness of the plants follows her home.
The Complicity Gradient
Level 3 as Transition Specialist — fully aware of what she facilitates. Level 4 during the optimization years, when she wasn't merely operating the process but improving it. The gradient traces her entire career.
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.
Maren Qian
Parallel: both corporate women who bear institutional witness. Marchetti reads transcripts and conducts exit interviews; Qian designs the systems that create the need for them. Different positions on the same gradient.
Nexus Dynamics
Three roles across two identities. Workforce optimizer, then Transition Specialist. Employee of the quarter twice. "Compassionate, professional, and aligned with organizational values." The corporation hired her empathy the way it hires engineering talent.
Helix Biotech
Six years in the Compliance Division processing Genesis closure reports. Her first education in institutional witness.
The Graceful Degradation Protocol
Her operating manual. She has memorized the three-movement script so thoroughly that deviation feels physical. The four-second pause she inserts after the contribution acknowledgment is the only line she has added to a document she otherwise follows without error.
The Managed Decline
Under the Jun-seo identity, she designed the four-quarter deprecation timeline for four departments — ninety-four employees automated. The architect of the pipeline now sits at its terminus.
The Competence Trap
Her competence at optimization — 40x faster AI testing, 99.7% accuracy — is what makes her exit interviews devastating: she knows exactly what she eliminated. The trap closed around her the moment her efficiency metrics earned the promotion that funded the Sunset Ward transfer.
Tensions
The Warmth Tax
The exit interview could be automated entirely. A screen could deliver the same information, complete the same documentation. 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.
The Optimization Irony
She automated four departments and deprecated ninety-four employees. Then she walked into the Sunset Ward and requested a transfer to the other side of the process. Her own analysis showed her optimization role would be automated in 3-5 years. The woman who designed the most efficient deprecation pipeline in Nexus history now sits across from the people that pipeline produces.
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.
▲ Unverified Intelligence
- Lena has noticed a pattern she hasn't reported: deprecated employees who cry during the exit interview recover faster. She has in fourteen cases deliberately created space for tears — a four-second pause after the contribution acknowledgment. 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 notebook contains two sets of tallies. The front pages — pencil, erasable — count the 4,847 living-but-diminished. The back pages — ink, permanent — count the 847 dead from Genesis. Her husband does not know the back pages exist. Nobody does.
- The Jun-seo Park identity was never deactivated. Nobody has connected the Optimization Officer who deprecated ninety-four employees with the Transition Specialist who now processes the people the system produces. Identity compartmentalization is standard corporate practice. Nobody in HR reads across divisions.
- 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.