The Alignment Score

Chapter One: Eleven Minutes of Gratitude

The Gratitude Walk lasted exactly eleven minutes, and Jeff Toomey had come to think of those eleven minutes as precisely how long it takes for a grown man to run out of things he is grateful for.

Minute one was easy. His wife. Minute two, his house, technically, in the sense that a bank owned most of it. Minute three, his health, which was fine except for a lower back that made a noise when he stood up. By minute five he was down to socks. By minute seven he was grateful for pavement. By minute nine he was standing at the edge of a retention pond behind an office park in Columbus, Ohio, watching a duck, and thinking that the duck did not have to do this.

"You're grateful for the duck," Denise Tang said beside him.

"I'm grateful for the duck."

"You say that every week."

"It's a consistent duck."

Denise checked her wristband. "Two minutes left. If we go back early it logs as Incomplete."

"What happens if it logs as Incomplete?"

"Nothing happens," she said. "That's what worries me."

The wristbands were called Pulses. They were matte gray, slightly too heavy, and shaped like something a hospital would put on you before a procedure you hadn't agreed to. Every employee of Bardo Wellness wore one. The Pulse tracked heart rate, skin temperature, hydration, step cadence, sleep duration, something called Postural Integrity, and one other metric, listed last on the display in a font slightly larger than the rest, which was the entire reason anyone paid attention to any of it.

Alignment Score.

Nobody knew what Alignment Score measured. This was not a secret; it was a mystery, which at Bardo was considered a feature. Alignment Score was the single largest component of every employee's quarterly review. It appeared at the top of performance summaries. It was referenced in emails from leadership the way weather is referenced in a farming community: reverently, and with the assumption that you were already thinking about it.

Jeff's was 61.

It had been 74 in June.

"Mine's up a point," Denise said, in the tone another person might use to report a mild rash. "I don't know why. I did nothing different. I did less. I actively did less this week and it went up."

"Maybe less is aligned."

"Maybe it's a random number generator with a good marketing department."

They turned back toward the building. Bardo Wellness occupied four floors of a glass box on the northwest side of the city, between a dental supply distributor and a place that made industrial gaskets. The gasket people ate lunch outdoors at picnic tables. Sometimes Jeff watched them from the third-floor window with the expression of a man watching a documentary about a happier species.

Bardo sold corporate wellness consulting. That was the actual business, the thing that generated actual revenue: you were a regional bank with high turnover and a health insurance premium problem, and Bardo came in with a program, a dashboard, some very nice-looking slides about cortisol, and a nine-month engagement. The consulting arm was competent. Boring, even. It had a sales team that wore normal clothes and complained about parking.

The rest of the company was something else.

Six years earlier, when Jeff was hired, Bardo had been a company that sold wellness. Now it was a company that performed wellness at itself, continuously, like a man doing push-ups in a mirror store. The transformation had been so gradual that Jeff could not identify the day it happened, which was, he had come to suspect, the entire trick.

They badged in through the lobby. The lobby had a water feature, a wall of living moss with a dead patch shaped like Florida, and four ceiling-mounted cameras that were not hidden, because hiding them would have implied that being recorded was a bad thing.

"Morning, Jeff!" called Spencer Wertz from the reception area, where he was arranging pamphlets. "Morning, Denise! Great walk energy out there. I could see it through the window."

"You could see our energy," Denise said.

"I could see the shape of it," Spencer said, without irony, and Jeff kept walking, because the only defense against Spencer Wertz was distance.

Jeff's official title was Workflow Harmonizer. He had been Workflow Harmonizer for four years, before which he had been Senior Coordination Associate, before which he had been a project manager, which was the last title he'd had that his mother understood.

What a Workflow Harmonizer did, in practice, was sit in meetings. When two departments were about to collide, Jeff sat between them and asked clarifying questions until the collision became a series of smaller, more polite collisions spread over a longer period of time. He was good at this in the way that a doorstop is good at its job. Nobody praised the doorstop. Nobody removed it either.

Six years made him the fourth-longest-tenured employee at Bardo Wellness. Turnover was ferocious. People arrived, glowed for a quarter, and then either ascended into leadership or evaporated. There was no middle path and no exit interview, only a Friday email announcing that someone was "moving into their next chapter of flourishing," followed by a Monday in which their chair had been removed for cleaning.

Jeff sat down at his desk. He did not eat at his desk, because eating at one's desk had been prohibited in March. In August the prohibition had been extended to chewing gum, on the grounds that gum simulated eating and therefore "produced ingestion signals without ingestion," a phrase that had appeared in a company-wide email and that Jeff still thought about while trying to fall asleep.

He opened his laptop and looked at his inbox. Every email began with an affirmation statement. This had been policy since July.

*I am present and receptive. Per our conversation, the Q4 rollout deck is attached.*

*Abundance flows toward the prepared. Reminder: the freight elevator is out of service.*

*I choose alignment. Hi all — does anyone have the login for the printer?*

Jeff typed his own affirmation, which he had been reusing for eleven weeks because nobody had ever once commented on it: *I welcome what today brings.* Then he wrote four sentences about a scheduling conflict between the Client Insights team and the Human Flourishing team, and sent it, and looked at the wall.

Over the top of the cubicle divider came a sheet of paper, held by two fingers.

"Forty-seven," Denise said.

Jeff took the paper. Denise had been keeping the list for two years. It was handwritten, in pencil, on a single legal pad page that she had photographed and stored somewhere off-network, because Denise Tang was a data analyst and a data analyst understands that a thing which exists in only one place does not really exist.

The list was titled POLICIES.

1. Gratitude Walk. 11 minutes. Not 10. Not 12. Logged.
2. No eating at desk.
3. No gum (see #2, addendum).
4. All emails begin with affirmation.
5. Meetings begin with a Breath.
6. Meetings end with a Second Breath.
7. "Problem" is a Non-Optimal Word. Use "opportunity texture."

And on, in Denise's small tight handwriting, down to:

44. Vending machines stock only Bardo Kelp Water (Original, Original Unsweetened).
45. Stairwell B is a Silence Corridor. Stairwell A is not. No signage explains which is which.
46. Personal photographs on desks must depict "aspirational states," not "past states." Wedding photo = past state.
47. Office plants are to be watered by employees as an act of reciprocity. Facilities no longer waters plants. Nineteen plants have died.

"Forty-six is new," Jeff said.

"Forty-six is why Marty Ogden turned his kid's photo around. He faces it at the wall now. He says it feels like a punishment but he doesn't know whose."

Jeff handed the list back. "You know if anyone found this—"

"They wouldn't care," Denise said. "That's the thing I keep failing to make people understand. There's no cover-up. Nobody's hiding anything. They'd read this list and nod and ask if they could use it in a deck."

She was, Jeff thought later, exactly right, and it was the most frightening true thing anyone had said to him in six years.

At 11:40 he went to the vending machine on the second floor because he wanted a bag of pretzels the way other men want to see the ocean. The vending machine had two rows of kelp water, four rows of kelp water, and a bottom row where the snacks used to be, now occupied by a laminated card that read A CRAVING IS A MESSAGE. WHAT IS YOURS TELLING YOU?

Jeff stood there for a while. His craving was telling him about pretzels. He said, out loud, "Pretzels," and the sound of his own voice in the empty alcove was so bleak that he laughed, and then, because he was tired and because it was Tuesday, he let his face do whatever it wanted for approximately four seconds.

There was a camera in the corner of the alcove. There were cameras in every alcove. Jeff had known this the entire time and had simply, for four seconds, not cared.

He bought a kelp water. It tasted the way a pond looks.

That afternoon he sat in a two-hour meeting about a client engagement with a regional trucking company. The trucking company wanted to reduce back injuries. Bardo's proposal involved a mindfulness app, a stretching curriculum, and a program called Cabin Presence. Someone from Client Insights asked whether the drivers had been consulted. Someone from Strategy said that consulting the drivers would introduce anchoring bias. The meeting opened with a Breath and closed with a Second Breath and in between produced no decisions, and Jeff harmonized the workflow by writing down what everyone said and emailing it to them, which caused three people to reply that they had not said that.

At 5:15 he walked to his car past the moss wall and the dead Florida. Denise was already in the lot, sitting on the hood of her Corolla, looking at her wristband.

"Anything?" Jeff said.

"Mine went down four points at 2:00 p.m. I was in the same meeting as you. I said nothing. I did nothing. I sat like a stone."

"Maybe that's it."

"Maybe." She slid off the hood. "Jeff, do you ever think about the fact that we're both extremely normal people?"

"All the time."

"Then why is this happening to us," she said, and got in her car, and drove home, and Jeff drove home too, and neither of them knew that the following Tuesday, at nine in the morning, Reed Dahlgren was going to announce Phase Five.