Chapter 4 : Palace Construction
Kenneth's clipboard note said: Myers — new. Watch for potential.
That was it. Albert read it upside down while Kenneth explained the afternoon assignment schedule, and filed the information under not an immediate problem. Potential was vague enough to be harmless. Watch for potential meant keep an eye on, not launch an investigation. He'd been a page for seven hours. Nobody investigated pages in their first seven hours.
"The archives are in the basement," Kenneth said, tapping the clipboard. "Sub-level two. Filing system hasn't been touched since 1998, which is fine, that's totally fine, that just means there's an opportunity to make it better." A pause. "I was going to do it, but I have the audience staging thing, and you seemed like—"
"I'll take it."
Kenneth brightened. "Really?"
"Quiet work. I can do quiet work."
He meant it. The floor was still vibrating with the residual energy of Tracy's shark situation and the achievement broadcast and four different people suddenly thinking his name for no reason they could identify. Basement archives: no people, no proximity indicators glowing in his peripheral vision, no audience for anything. Albert signed the task sheet and took the elevator down.
Sub-level two smelled like the 1980s.
Not metaphorically — the archives had that specific institutional smell of old paper and whatever cleaning product had been used in the Carter administration and never fully stopped being used. The shelves ran floor to ceiling, brown banker's boxes stacked with the organizational logic of someone who had stopped caring around 1994. Labels were partial, or absent, or written in a handwriting that had since become illegible through moisture damage.
Albert found a folding chair, sat down with the first box, and started sorting.
TGS budget reports. Sketch submissions from seasons that hadn't aired yet from his perspective — he set those face-down automatically, not ready to process future knowledge with no organizational framework for it. Audience metrics going back to The Girlie Show era. Internal memos with headers in the specific bureaucratic font that meant they'd been written by someone in Standards and Practices who took themselves seriously.
The HUD glowed amber. Proximity indicator. Something in this basement was a hidden achievement trigger.
He ignored it.
He'd made that decision in the supply closet: understand the mechanics before chasing rewards. The broadcast problem was more important than accumulating points. Every achievement meant another ripple, another set of people suddenly aware of him, and right now he was still new enough to explain away. Furniture didn't get noticed. Furniture was safe.
He kept sorting.
The problem was the volume. Thirty years of NBC New York production records, and his brain was trying to do what it always did — track, file, cross-reference — but without structure, the information piled up wrong. Sketch approval dates linking to budget overruns linking to personnel changes linking to casting decisions. Patterns everywhere, none of them organized. His eyes went to the same date on three different documents and his brain tried to build a connection that had nowhere to live.
His head started to hurt.
Not a headache exactly. More like pressure behind the eyes, the specific feeling of a hard drive running out of space. He set down the memo he was holding and pressed two fingers against his temple.
The basement went quiet. Not the ambient quiet of an empty room — a different kind of quiet. Like the volume had been turned down on everything.
Albert was somewhere else.
Not physically. His body was still on the folding chair in sub-level two; he was still in the basement; if someone had walked in they would have seen a page sitting motionless with his eyes half-open. But his attention was somewhere completely different, and the somewhere had architecture.
A lobby. Bare. High ceilings with diffused light from no identifiable source. The floor was clean concrete, the walls unfinished, the space the specific emptiness of a building that had been built and not yet furnished. Doors led off in multiple directions — some open, showing dim rooms; some closed; some that appeared to be more suggestion than construction.
It wasn't what he'd expected. He'd understood from the HUD that a Memory Palace existed as one of his system abilities, but he'd pictured something more like a computer interface. This was spatial. Three-dimensional. He walked forward and the footsteps made sound — real, specific, echoing against the concrete.
The open doors led to rooms that were half-formed. One had shelves that went to the ceiling with nothing on them. Another had a filing system that ended at M. A third had a corkboard with no pins.
The system had built the infrastructure. The contents were his job.
Albert stood in the middle of the lobby for what felt like two minutes. Then he started working.
Entertainment Archive first — the room with the tall shelves. He pushed the knowledge of TGS's production history into those shelves, organizing by season, by episode, by character arc. The information he'd brought from his previous life went into neatly labeled boxes: cast dynamics, episode outcomes, production decisions, the sketch that bombed versus the sketch that became a cultural touchstone. The specificity surprised him. He'd watched this show in the background of a life that hadn't amounted to much, but apparently his brain had recorded it with archival care.
Corporate Archive next — the filing system room. NBC org chart, Sheinhardt Wig Company structure, Kabletown's eventual acquisition, Devon Banks' history with Jack Donaghy, the internal politics that turned every budget meeting into a chess game. He filed it all, and as he filed it, the pressure behind his eyes eased.
He spent what felt like twenty minutes in there.
The basement came back gradually, like a television warming up.
The memo was still in his hand. The humidity was still oppressive. The shelves were still a disaster. But his head was clear in a way it hadn't been since the apartment ceiling that morning, and the information he'd sorted before the Palace opened was now — organized. Catalogued. Accessible in a way that felt like reaching into a labeled drawer instead of rummaging through a pile.
He checked his watch. Seven minutes had passed.
His upper lip was wet. He touched it and his fingers came back with a small smear of blood — a nosebleed that hadn't gotten going yet, just the first warning of one. He pinched his nose, tilted his head back slightly, and sat with it for a minute while the basement stayed quiet.
The cost was real, then. Mental work had a physical price. First visit, first bleed. He'd need to track the relationship between how long he spent inside and how bad the after-effects were.
First Palace session: approximately 7 real minutes, 20 perceived minutes. Cost: minor nosebleed. Useful output: full organization of entertainment and corporate archives.
He filed that in the Palace as he was thinking it, which was an interesting feedback loop.
The HUD's amber glow pulsed once. Whatever the hidden achievement was, it was aware he'd been in the basement for an hour without triggering it. Not today.
By the time Albert carried the first reorganized box back to its shelf, the nosebleed had stopped.
The apartment was smaller at night.
He'd been in it for twelve hours total now, which was enough time to stop registering the spring in the mattress and the water-stain Florida on the ceiling. He sat on the floor — the chair was at the card table and the card table had a wobble he hadn't fixed — and practiced.
In. Out. In. Out.
Each visit cost something. He could feel the deficit accumulating: a tightness behind the eyes that wasn't quite pain yet, a slight lag between deciding to go in and actually crossing the threshold. Third visit in the last hour, and the lobby's light was slightly dimmer than the first time, like a battery indicator running toward amber.
He stopped. Four visits was too many for one day. The Palace needed maintenance, not abuse.
He sat on the floor of the apartment and ate a sleeve of crackers from the kitchen cabinet — the host body's groceries, which ran to crackers, protein bars, and a disturbing quantity of ramen — and thought about tomorrow.
The Cat Accountant sketch.
He knew it the way he knew the shows: background knowledge, absorbed over years of half-attention. It had aired in the actual show. It had bombed, mildly, the way sketches bombed when they had a good concept and a timing problem. The punchline came too late. The catchphrase was buried in the second half of the sketch when it should have been doing structural work from the beginning. Two minutes of runtime that wanted to be ninety seconds.
Liz would cut something. Pete would argue for something different. The sketch would air in its compromised form and underperform and nobody would understand exactly why.
Unless someone said something before dress rehearsal.
Albert ate another cracker and stared at the NBC peacock pin he'd set on the card table.
He was a page. Pages did not give notes on sketches. Pages poured coffee and wrangled audience members and absorbed the ambient chaos of a television production without contributing to it. Any suggestion he made would be noticed. Any noticing was a problem.
The trick was making the suggestion feel like it came from somewhere else.
He'd need access to Liz. He'd need a moment that didn't look like a moment. He'd need the Palace organized enough to pull the right information on cue without triggering the nosebleed response in a hallway.
Thirty-six hours.
He went to bed with the crackers still in his hand and the HUD minimized to its grey border, barely visible in the dark.
Support the Story on Patreon
If you are enjoying the series and would like to read ahead, I offer an early access schedule on Patreon. I upload 7 new chapters every 10 days.
Tiers are available that provide a 7, 14, or 21-chapter head start over the public release. Your support helps me maintain this consistent update pace.
Patreon.com/TransmigratingwithWishes