The Undo Button

Opening scene

You are Dara Voss and it is 6:40 on a Thursday and the key is under your finger. You have tested it twice on small things. A colleague's coffee order. The colour of a lanyard. Both held. Both stayed held after you doubted them, which is the part that unsettles you, because doubt normally fixes nothing.

Ellis is still at his desk across the aisle, the only other person on the floor, typing with the two-finger method he has never grown out of. Eleven years you have known him. You know the thing you would undo. You know exactly which load-bearing wall it is, and you have told yourself all afternoon that a wall is just a wall until you take it out.

You hover. The office hums its ventilation hum. Ellis says, without looking up, that you have been very quiet today, and asks if you are alright.

Turn 1 of 11

I take in the scene, and act on what matters most.

The ventilation hum is the only sound for a while after Ellis asks. You don't answer him. Your fingertip rests on the key — the unlabelled one, the one that shouldn't exist, the one that runs a degree warmer than every other key on this refurbished board. It has been there for forty minutes, and in that time you have learned the exact shape of its hesitation. It is not a button. Buttons click. This one absorbs.

You have tested it twice. The first time, Marguerite's tea — she drinks lapsang souchong every morning, the smell of it has been part of this floor for six years — became peppermint. You thought of her, thought the word lapsang, and pressed. When she passed your desk at nine-thirty she was carrying peppermint, and she said nothing about a change, and the supply cupboard had always stocked peppermint, and the requisition form for this keyboard listed it among standard provisions. The second test was Alderman's lanyard, which had been green for three years and was now blue and had always been blue and the photo on his badge showed him wearing blue at the 2019 summer do, which he had. Both held. Both are still holding. You checked twice. Doubt fixed nothing, which is the wrong way round for doubt.

Ellis is typing the way Ellis types — two fingers, left hand doing most of the work, right hand steadying the side of the keyboard like it might bolt. He has done this for eleven years. You have watched him do it for eleven years, across four desks, three reorganisations, and one entire restructuring where they nearly put you on different floors and you both knew it and neither of you said a word about it until the floor plan came back with you side by side, which was luck, which was nothing you earned.

He asked if you are alright. He is still waiting. He is the sort who waits — not patiently, exactly, but thoroughly, as though the question is a task he has logged and will close out once you respond. His desk lamp casts the same warm circle it always has. His coffee, half-finished, has gone to the temperature where it stops being a drink and becomes a prop. The screen behind him is logistics dashboards, the Thursday freight cluster, the same numbers you both look at every week.

You know the thing you would undo. You have known since three o'clock, when you tested it the second time and felt the key take and hold, and the knowledge came up out of the floor like a draft. It is not a small thing. It is not a lanyard. It is load-bearing, and you have spent the afternoon telling yourself that a wall is just a wall, and the building stands on many walls, and one wall less is not a collapse, it is only a renovation. You have not yet been able to make yourself believe this. Your finger is still on the key.