Chapter 43 : Documentation Round Two
"HR is putting together files," Liz said, to the whiteboard.
She was writing the week's sketch roster, back to the room, the marker moving in the efficient shorthand she'd developed across years of production meetings. It wasn't an announcement — it was the kind of thing said while doing something else, the administrative aside that lived between the items that actually needed discussion. Albert was at his desk with a script and his coffee, and the sentence arrived in his chest the way bad news arrived when it was delivered by someone who didn't know it was bad news.
"Standard acquisition procedure," Pete said, from his clipboard. "Kabletown wants full documentation on all staff above a certain productivity threshold." He looked at his clipboard. "That threshold is defined as writers and above."
"When?" Albert said.
"Four weeks," Pete said. "Standard thirty-day review period. They sent the request this morning." He made a note on the clipboard. "Nothing to worry about unless you have something to worry about."
He said this as a general statement to the room. Not to Albert specifically. But Albert filed the distinction between the words and their weight and went back to the script in front of him without adjusting his posture.
The break room water fountain at 11 AM — the good one on thirteen, the one Kenneth had shown him during page orientation — produced two cups of cold water that Albert drank standing at the fountain before he trusted himself to go back to the floor.
The conditional clearance form. He'd signed it in that HR office five months ago, with Karen who delivered difficult information in the standard register, and his hand had been steady because he'd practiced. The form that said: continued employment contingent on satisfactory performance and completion of any additional documentation requests HR might generate. The form that Devon had engineered to stay open rather than close. The form that was currently in Albert's NBC file with a flag that read probationary extension — documentation review pending.
Devon's flag. Devon's tool, kept in a drawer.
Kabletown's HR review would read Albert's file. Kabletown's HR reviewers would see the flag. They would either note it as resolved and continue, or they would note it as unresolved and ask questions. The quality of the documentation he'd assembled — the Vasquez confirmation, the CUNY transcript, the burner reference numbers — had held for Devon's deliberately incomplete scrutiny. Devon had wanted the inquiry to remain open rather than close. Kabletown had no such motivation. Kabletown was doing due diligence, which was a different animal: thorough rather than strategic, bureaucratic rather than targeted.
He entered the Memory Palace at the second floor service stairwell landing, which had become a reliable location for brief sessions — private, untrafficked, with a good ceiling to look at when he exited.
Ten minutes. Under threshold.
The Host History archive held the same fragments it had held since the December excavation: pay stubs, the CUNY transcript, the ConEd bill, the birthday card. The burner reference numbers. The Vasquez contact. He walked through the room methodically, touching each item in the mental space, checking for new risks.
The CUNY transcript showed one full semester and a W-F withdrawal. Kabletown's HR might cross-reference the NBC application language — graduate-level coursework — against the actual transcript. The delta between those two things was explainable as aspirational phrasing, which was common and defensible but required a person to ask the question first.
The burner reference numbers were the weak point. Devon hadn't called them. Kabletown's standard due diligence might. If they called and a stranger answered a number that was supposed to be a former supervisor at a consulting firm that no longer existed, the call would not resolve cleanly.
He couldn't prepare for every scenario. The documentation he had was the documentation he had.
What he could do was change the calculus of the review — make himself visible enough as a functioning, valued asset that the documentation review became a formality rather than an investigation. Investigations got triggered by anomalies. If Albert wasn't an anomaly, if he was instead TGS's obvious ongoing creative value, the review file would go into the processed stack rather than the flagged stack.
He exited the Palace, clean, and went back to the floor.
His appetite was gone. He noticed this at 1 PM when he realized he'd been sitting with an untouched sandwich for forty minutes, and he ate half of it mechanically, and the act of eating didn't produce the usual function. This had happened twice before: after the Mitt Disaster, and during the week he'd been assembling documentation for Devon's inquiry. His body's version of threat response was apparently to stop wanting food, which was the physiologically incorrect response to stress but was consistent.
He ate the other half of the sandwich and wrote three times in his notepad: indispensability > documentation. If they had no reason to question him, the flag wouldn't be pulled.
He had four weeks.
The pitch session at two ran for an hour and a half and produced two usable sketches and one that was going to take another pass. Albert contributed to all three, his instinct operating separately from the anxiety — the two processes running in parallel, the anxiety in the background, the work in the foreground, which was the only functional arrangement.
After the session, Liz stopped at his desk.
"The HR review is routine," she said. "I want you to know that." She said it without making it emotional — purely informational, the register of a manager ensuring her staff had accurate context. "They do this with every acquisition. The productivity threshold is standard."
"I know," Albert said.
Liz looked at him for a moment. The puzzle expression that had been evolving across six months from assessment to recognition to something more settled. "You have the face you had before the Kabletown announcement," she said. "The one where you're doing math."
"I'm always doing math."
"The other math." She picked up a script from his desk and set it back down. "Whatever the math is, the answer is that you've earned your spot. That's visible to anyone reviewing the file."
She went back to her desk.
Albert thought about this. Liz thought the anxiety was about merit — that he was worried about whether his contributions were sufficient. The actual anxiety was about whether the documentation of his existence before those contributions would survive scrutiny from people Devon hadn't already shaped toward inconclusiveness.
He picked up the other half of the sandwich he hadn't eaten and finished it.
Four weeks. Start with Jenna.
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