Helen found me at the bar, which was where I always was these days. The bar was called The Last Resort, which was either a coincidence or a joke, and in New York in 1947, it was hard to tell the difference.

"I need you to do something for me," she said. She didn't sit down. She never sat down anymore. She stood in front of my table with her hands folded and that look on her face that said she was trying very hard not to cry.

"I work at the Perfect Life Company," she said. "I clean the offices at night. And Jack, there are things in that building that don't make sense."

I took a drink. "Helen, I'm a detective, not a priest. If you've seen something, you go to the police."

"The police can't help." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "It's not illegal. That's the problem. Nothing illegal is happening. Everything is... perfect."

The Perfect Life Company had stores all over the city. Small, clean storefronts with big windows and soft music and the smell of lavender. They promised to fix dissatisfied customers. That was their slogan: Fix What Ails You. Make Your Life Perfect.

I'd seen their work. My neighbor, Mrs. Gable, used to yell at her husband every night. Doors slamming, plates breaking, the whole performance. Six months ago, she went to the Perfect Life Company to fix her temper. Now she doesn't yell. She doesn't speak at all, really. She just sits by the window and smiles.

I went to the Perfect Life Company the next morning.

The lobby was gold and white, the kind of gold that costs money and the kind of white that costs more. Soft music played from somewhere I couldn't find. The air smelled like lavender and something else, something clean and chemical.

A woman behind a marble desk smiled at me. Her smile was perfect. Not the smile of someone who was happy. The smile of someone who had been calibrated.

"Can I help you, sir?"

"I'm looking for information about your company."

"Of course. Have you considered our services?"

"My wife works for you. She says you fix people."

The woman's smile didn't change. "We help people achieve perfection, sir. We remove the things that cause dissatisfaction. Anger, sadness, frustration. All of it goes away."

"My wife's husband went to your company last month," I said. "He said he went to fix his temper because he had nightmares about the war."

She typed something on her keyboard. "Yes, I see him here. Mr. Morrison. He's scheduled for his next session tomorrow."

"Can I come too?"

She looked up, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought I saw something flicker in her eyes. Not human. Something programmed. "Of course, Mr. Morrison. Everyone comes. Everyone comes eventually."

I started following a customer. A woman from Chicago, middle-aged, came into the building on a Monday and came out on Thursday. When I talked to her on the street, she didn't cry. She didn't mention her children. She said she had been too emotional before and now she was fine. Really fine.

I decided to break into the company headquarters. I'd done harder things in the Pacific. This was just a building.

I used a trick I'd learned from a Japanese prisoner of war: a folded piece of tin and a lot of patience. The side door on 42nd Street opened after three minutes.

The corridors were bright and clean and silent. No one walked the halls. No one talked. The only sound was the hum of something mechanical, somewhere deep in the building, breathing like a giant animal.

I pushed open a door and saw twenty people sitting in chairs in a circle, eyes closed, smiling. A man in a white coat stood in the middle with a notebook.

"What are they doing?" I asked.

He turned and smiled. "They're paying, Mr. Morrison."

"Paying what?"

"The cost of dissatisfaction. Everyone wants to eliminate suffering, sir. We just provide a decent way to do it."

In the corner, I saw a machine. It looked like an EEG from a military hospital, but bigger, more complex. Wires ran from the machine to each person's temple.

"What is that?"

"A gentle machine," he said. "It doesn't hurt anyone. It just takes away the things that make you unhappy. Anger, sadness, disappointment."

"What do you take away?"

He thought about it. "The things that make you real."

I turned to leave. The door was closed.

"Mr. Morrison," a voice said behind me. It was the same voice as the receptionist, the same voice as the woman who had smiled at my wife. "We've noticed that you have symptoms of insomnia and anxiety. Would you like to fix them?"

My hand went to the holster under my jacket. I didn't draw. I couldn't draw.

Because suddenly, desperately, I wanted to.

I wanted someone to take it away. The nightmares. The empty apartment. The bottle that never emptied fast enough. I wanted to sit in one of those chairs, close my eyes, and let the gentle machine take the worst parts of me and carry them away.

The man in the white coat stepped closer. "It won't hurt," he said. "It will only make you perfect."

I looked at the twenty people in the circle. They were smiling. They were happy. They were nothing.

My hand was still on my gun.

And I didn't know whether to pull it or sit down.

--- OTMES v2.0 Objective Tensor Encoding System

Work Title: The Last Payment 主导模式: M2_讽刺 (9.0) 总体势能 E: 10.8 方向角 theta: 225度 张量秩 R: 2 主成分占比 eta: 0.70 不可逆性指数 I: 1.00 无辜受难指数 V: 0.85 完整编码: OTMES-v2-F1C8A4-108-M2-225-2R7010-V85I