CURTISSLYNN PUBLISHING

In 2094, grief had a budget, a director, and seventeen sub-departments, and nobody found this strange.
I had come to New Geneva as a trade auditor, which is a way of saying I was paid to notice things that other people preferred not to. I had been assigned a desk in the Ministry of Grief and told to review the expenditure reports. My regional director had described this as a routine assignment. He had said this while not quite meeting my eyes, which I had attributed at the time to his general character and not to any specific foreknowledge.
The Ministry occupied a pale glass tower on the lake. Everything about it was designed to communicate compassion: the soft lighting, the ambient sound of distant rain, the staff who moved through the corridors with expressions of practiced sorrow. Their uniforms were a particular shade of blue chosen, I was told, by a committee of psychologists to suggest productive melancholy. The committee had published a forty-page report on the subject. I read it on my first evening and found it surprisingly convincing, which bothered me more than if I had found it absurd.
My supervisor was a man named Folger. He had a magnificent sorrowful face — the kind of face that seemed to have been engineered specifically for this profession, heavy around the eyes and slightly collapsed at the corners of the mouth, like a building that had decided not to quite fall down. He had been with the Ministry for nineteen years and spoke about grief the way a sommelier speaks about wine: with proprietary reverence and the faint suggestion that your relationship with it was unsophisticated.
"The Ministry," he told me on my first morning, "exists because grief, unmanaged, is a public health crisis. We process it. We regulate it. We ensure it occurs at the correct intensity and for the correct duration."
"And if someone grieves incorrectly?" I asked.
"Then we help them grieve correctly," he said, which was not an answer.
"And who decides what correct looks like?"
He smiled the way institutions smile. "The science does," he said.
The expenditure reports were extraordinary. Seventeen million credits on something called Preventive Sorrow Allocation. Eleven million on Grief Redistribution Infrastructure. A line item that read simply Ambient Loss Maintenance for an amount that made me put down my coffee. There were sub-categories within sub-categories, each with its own bureaucratic poetry: Calibrated Bereavement Scheduling, Emotional Throughput Management, Legacy Affect Stabilization. I had audited defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies and a organization that had once billed the federal government four million credits for what turned out to be a single conference room. None of them had prepared me for this.
"What is Ambient Loss Maintenance?" I asked the junior analyst assigned to assist me. Her name was Preet and she had the slightly dazed expression of someone who had been in the building too long, like a person who had gone into a particular room so many times they could no longer remember what they had originally gone in for.
"It's the background sadness," she said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Ministry maintains a baseline level of grief in the population. Just enough to keep people emotionally regulated. Too little sadness and people become reckless. Overconfident. They make poor financial decisions and start wars." She said this with the calm of someone describing a weather system. "The Ambient Loss Maintenance division manages the distribution infrastructure."
"And how," I said carefully, "does one distribute sadness?"
She looked at me as though I had asked how water becomes wet. "The water supply, mostly. Some atmospheric dispersal in high-density areas. The music in public transit was redesigned in 2089." She paused. "Did you not wonder why you felt slightly wistful on the tram this morning?"
I had, in fact, attributed this to leaving my coffee at the hotel.
I went back to Folger.
"The Ministry," I said, "is medicating the entire population."
"Managing," he said.
"Without consent."
"The Accord provides the legislative framework," he said. "And frankly, consent is a complicated concept when the alternative is unregulated emotional chaos. We tried that. You may recall the 2060s."
"I recall the 2060s as a period of significant political upheaval."
"Exactly," he said. "People were feeling things on their own schedule. The results were catastrophic." He folded his hands on his desk with the patience of a man who has explained something obvious many times and expects to explain it many more. "Monsieur, the human nervous system was not designed for the modern world. The stimuli are too many and the losses too frequent and the distances between people too great. What we do here is not manipulation. It is infrastructure. Like roads. Like clean water."
"The clean water," I said, "is one of your delivery mechanisms."
He acknowledged this with a small incline of his head that managed to be simultaneously an admission and a refusal to apologize for it.
I spent three more days with the reports. The numbers were, in their way, a masterpiece. Billions of credits spent ensuring that eight billion people felt exactly sad enough, exactly often enough, that they would never feel sad enough to do anything about it. It was the most elegant system I had ever audited. It had no waste, no redundancy, and no obvious point of failure except the one I was currently representing, and I had the distinct impression that this had been accounted for too. There was, I noticed, a line item under Personnel Management that read Auditor Reintegration Protocol with a not insignificant budget attached to it.
I asked Preet what it covered.
"The tram ride home," she said. "Mostly."
On my last day I filed my audit report. It noted several procedural irregularities and recommended a review of the Ambient Loss Maintenance contracts, which were significantly over budget. It did not mention the water supply, or the atmospheric dispersal coordinates, or what Folger had said about roads and infrastructure, or the Auditor Reintegration Protocol, which I had decided not to think about too carefully.
I am an auditor, not a revolutionary. The distinctions matter, and I have spent considerable time since then assuring myself of this.
I returned to my regional office and submitted my expenses and have not spoken of it until now, and likely will not speak of it again. The world continues to feel a carefully calibrated sorrow about this and about everything else, and the Ministry's lights burn pale and blue above New Geneva, and somewhere in the pipes beneath eight billion people the correct amount of loss moves quietly toward them, and we are all, always, just sad enough to endure it and never quite sad enough to ask why.
My regional director, when I returned, looked me in the eyes for the first time in years.
He said: "Good trip?"
"Fine," I said.
"Good," he said, and that was all, and I have thought about that exchange more than I would like to admit, particularly on Tuesdays, when the grief is always worse, and I am never entirely sure it is mine.