Tied Up in Meetings

Cables sprouted from ethernet ports during someone's screen share - thin at first, then thick as power cords, coiling up her arms like awakened infrastructure. Seventeen faces mouth the same phrase in perfect sync: "Let's circle back on this." Their lips move but the audio comes from somewhere behind the walls, echoing through ventilation systems. Her head has been nodding for eight hours. The motion is involuntary now, muscle memory burned into her cervical spine. Her fingers click "approve" on budget requests written in symbols that used to be numbers. A notification blooms across her vision: Mandatory Meeting About Previous Meeting - starting now. The cables pulse with her heartbeat, or maybe her heartbeat has synchronized to the network traffic. Hard to tell anymore. She reaches for the red "end call" button but it dissolves under her fingertip, replaced by three new meeting invites that auto-accept before she can read them. "Any questions before we wrap up?"