The Vacancy Rate

The heat arrived the way serious things often do: quietly, over several days, until it was no longer possible to pretend it was seasonal. By the fourth morning it had a name. Municipal systems across the city logged Thermal Event Class 3 — Extended Duration at 6:14 a.m., and the automated resource allocation engine began redistributing cooling buses, mobile hydration units, and paramedic clusters toward the neighborhoods it assessed as highest-risk. Dara Osei had worked in the Office of Predictive Municipal Services for six years. Her job title was Senior Data Reconciliation Analyst, which in practice meant she reviewed the edge cases the system flagged as anomalous and decided whether the anomaly lived in the data or in the world. Most mornings the work was dull in a bearable way. She would sit at her workstation on the fourth floor of the Civic Services building, drink bad coffee from the cart in the lobby, and route minor discrepancies back to their source departments. A school…