Pressure Nominal

Anders closed the laptop.
He sat for a moment in the dark of the van, the distant wail of the facility alarm reaching him even through the perimeter fence. He would be gone before any response team arrived. He was always gone.
He had written, in fifteen years of these studies, thousands of pages of behavioral data. What people chose under pressure. What they sacrificed. What they protected. He told himself it was important work. He told himself the risks he introduced were controlled, that no one had ever been hurt, that the knowledge he gathered was real even if the methods were not defensible.
But Cunha had looked at the camera.
Not in desperation. Not in accusation. In something that Anders, sitting alone in the dark, could only identify as clarity. As if Cunha had understood the whole structure — the watcher, the game, the design — and had simply decided that none of it defined what he was going to do next.
Anders started the van.
He drove east along the service road, and he did not write anything else in his notebook, because for the first time in fifteen years he was not sure what the data said about the subject.
He was starting to suspect it said something about him.

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About the Author

Tarek Al-Rami — a safety engineer from the night shift, where an ordinary job can turn into a nightmare.

— Tarek Al-Rami

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September 3, 2026

10min-stories