Nobody's Number



I.



Karl wakes at 7:15. His alarm is set for 7:00. He lets it ring for fifteen minutes. This is not rebellion. It is habit. He has been doing this for two years, ever since the press accident, ever since the settlement, ever since his life stopped being a schedule and started being a series of small delays.



He gets up. He puts his feet on the floor. The left foot is solid. The right foot is solid minus one finger. He walks to the kitchen. He opens the fridge. He takes out milk and cereal and eats cereal for dinner because dinner is a word he stopped using three years ago.



His cat Mochi sits on the counter and watches him. Mochi is fourteen years old. Mochi has been old longer than Karl has been broken.



Karl checks his phone. The screen is cracked. He has meant to replace it for eight months. The crack runs diagonally across the display, cutting through the time and the date and his credit score in equal measure. The score is 310. "High risk. Low trajectory." That is what the app says. That is what the app says about everyone now. Everyone has a score. Everyone is being scored. No one talks about it.



He puts the phone down. He eats his cereal. He watches Mochi watch him. The morning passes the way mornings pass in Youngstown — slowly, without ceremony, like a train that has lost its engine and is coasting toward a destination it will never reach.



II.



Gary called at 11:03. Gary calls every week. Gary is a former mill colleague who now runs a YouTube channel about "hustle culture optimization."



"Bro, I saw your profile," Gary says. "Your score is tanking. You need to optimize yourself. Personal branding, Karl. Personal branding is the future. I just hit a 720. I posted my morning routine — 5 AM wake up, cold shower, protein shake, three hours of skill-building before the grind even starts."



Karl sits on his couch. The couch has a crack in the armrest. He has been meaning to fix it. He has a screwdriver somewhere. He cannot find it. "Gary," he says. "I lost my finger."



"Yeah, man, I heard about that. But you know what? I lost a toe in '16 and my score went UP because I used it as content. Storytelling, Karl. Tell your story. 'From steel worker to content creator — the Hendrickson hustle.' It writes itself."



Karl hangs up. He sits on the couch and looks at the crack in the armrest. The crack is not fixable. He has looked at it from every angle. The leather is split down to the foam. The foam is crumbling. The couch has been dying for ten years and nobody told it.



His phone buzzes. A text from Dolores. She sends money every month. Forty dollars. No note. Just the money, like a payment on a debt she never meant to incur.



He puts the phone on the coffee table. The screen is still cracked. The time reads 11:47. He has nothing to do until 3:00, when he is supposed to pick up his prescription from the pharmacy on Elm Street. He has not been to the pharmacy in three weeks. The prescription is for a medication he no longer takes. The insurance company stopped covering it when his score dropped below 400.



III.



Priya Narayanan finds him at the diner on Federal Street. She is a grad student from Kent State. She is wearing a blazer that is too warm for May and carrying a recording device that costs more than Karl's monthly grocery budget.



"Mr. Hendrickson," she says. "Thank you for meeting with me. I know this isn't comfortable."



Karl stares at his coffee. It is lukewarm. The waitress brought it twenty minutes ago and has not returned. The diner is almost empty. There is a man in the corner booth eating a sandwich and reading a newspaper that is two days old.



"I'm not a Mr. Hendrickson," Karl says. "I'm Karl."



"Right. Karl. I'm doing a study on data marginalization in rust-belt communities. Your experience could really help us understand—"



"What do you mean, data marginalization?"



"It's the process by which people with low data profiles — low credit scores, low employment stability, low social engagement metrics — become increasingly invisible to the systems that govern modern life. You can't get a job. You can't get credit. You can't even get a phone plan without a deposit. The system treats you like a ghost. And the more invisible you become, the harder it is to become visible again."



Karl nods. He has experienced this. He has experienced being treated like a ghost. He has experienced the invisible walls that go up around you when your score drops, walls you cannot see but can feel every time you swipe a card that is declined, every time an application is auto-rejected, every time a form asks for a number that you do not have and cannot get.



"Will you help me?" Priya asks. "Six weeks. Six interviews. I'll pay you fifty dollars per session."



Karl considers this. Fifty dollars per session. Three hundred dollars total. It is not much. It is more than he has in his kitchen drawer. He thinks about saying no. He thinks about telling her to find someone else, someone who wants to be studied more than he wants to not be studied.



"Okay," he says. "Six weeks."



IV.



The sixth interview is in Karl's apartment. Priya sits on the cracked couch and holds the recording device between her hands like a religious artifact. Karl sits in the kitchen and eats a microwave dinner that costs $2.99 and tastes like salt and regret.



"Tell me about your life," Priya says.



Karl eats. He swallows. He thinks about telling her about his life. But he has no life to tell. He has a routine that is almost a routine, if you stretch the word. He wakes at 7:15. He eats cereal. He watches Mochi. He goes to the food pantry on Thursdays. He sits on the couch. He waits for the next day.



"I don't have a story," he says.



"Everyone has a story," Priya says.



"No," Karl says. "You don't. I don't."



Priya writes something in her notebook. She is recording this, too. Everything is being recorded. Everything is being scored. Karl thinks about how the machine in the original story was made of brass gears and vacuum tubes. His machine is made of credit scores and health app data and productivity metrics and social media engagement and insurance premiums and loan interest rates and rental application algorithms and job application filters and background check databases and municipal database cross-references and data brokers who sell information about him to other companies who sell information about him to still other companies, a machine made of a thousand invisible parts, each one small, each one reasonable, each one a compliance, each one a surrender.



His machine has no basement. It has no brass gears. It has no typewriter mechanism that clacks out judgment on a strip of paper.



His machine is in the cloud. And it has been scoring him since the day he lost his finger.



V.



The study is published three months later. Priya's name is on it. Karl's name is not. He is Appendix C: "Case Study in Data Marginalization, Subject K.H." He appears in her writing as a collection of data points — interview transcripts, demographic information, a deviation score that Priya calculated using her own methodology.



Karl reads the study on the library computer. The screen flickers. The font is too small. He cannot read it all. He does not try. He closes the browser. He walks out of the library.



He sits in his truck in the abandoned mill parking lot. The truck is a 2008 Ford F-150 with a broken alternator and a radio that only picks up one station — a country music station that plays the same six songs on repeat.



Karl eats a sandwich. It is a peanut butter sandwich. He does not have any jelly. The bread is from the food pantry. It is slightly stale. It tastes fine.



The sun sets through the chain-link fence. The fence is covered in rust. The rust is orange and flaky and beautiful in a way that Karl has learned to appreciate. Rust is the visible form of time passing. It is the most honest thing in Youngstown.



Mochi is at home. Mochi will be home when Karl gets home. Mochi does not have a data profile. MochI does not need one. Mochi is not being scored. MochI is just a cat — old, fat, and content in a world that has no category for him.



Karl finishes his sandwich. He throws the wrapper in the truck's trash bin. The bin is full. It has been full for a week. He will empty it eventually. He will not.



The sun goes down. The sky is purple and gray and the color of a credit score that cannot be read. Karl sits in the truck and watches the light fade and thinks about nothing, which is the closest he has come to peace since the accident.



The machine runs in the cloud. The machine runs everywhere. The machine scores and scores and scores and no one is running it. No one is in charge. No one is to blame. The machine runs because it is what people built — a thousand small surrenders, each one reasonable, each one small, each one a compliance, each one a surrender.



And Karl sits in his truck and eats his sandwich and watches the sun go down and does not know what happens next.



And neither does anyone else.



---



OBJECTIVE TENSOR MEASUREMENT AND EVALUATION SYSTEM v2.0

──────────────────────────────────────────────────────



Source work: We (We) by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Variant: V-05 - Nobody's Number

Style: E - Dirty Realism

Date: 2026-05-17



TENSOR CODE:

TI: 78.2

Tragedy Level: T2 Disillusionment

M: [9.5, 0.0, 4.0, 9.0, 3.0, 3.0, 3.0, 0.0, 2.0, 2.0]

N: [0.10, 0.90]

K: [0.90, 0.10]

Theta: 270 degrees (Existential type)

MDTEM: V=0.90, I=1.00, C=0.90, S=0.20, R=0.00



Code String: WE-V05-M4-N2-T270-RUSTBELT-CLEAN



Cluster: DIRTYREALISMRUSTBELT



Similarity Distance to other variants:

vs V-01: 4.5

vs V-02: 3.8

vs V-03: 2.1

vs V-04: 2.8

Author Note & Copyright: