Into Alignment

Walt loves his job. He works customer support at Halcyon, a company famous for its Endless Summer culture — permanent July, always on, always sunny. Eleven people to a pod. A manager called the Conductor that nobody has ever met. Days off that nobody can explain, after which everyone is a little more agreeable. And hanging over everything: the Great Realignment, the reorganization that will make the summer permanent. Half the pod can't wait for it. The other half changes the subject. Then a customer Walt actually cares about asks him the one question he isn't supposed to answer honestly — and the slow, sick feeling that the company is becoming a religion becomes something he can't unsee. Coworkers he'd die for start reporting on each other. The training that tells him to treat others the way he wants to be treated keeps colliding with what the job actually asks. And when the frightened ones start apologizing for their own fear in the group chat, it's clear the rules have quietly changed: nobody ever voted. The rules just kept getting reinterpreted, by consensus, until everything was always allowed. Into Alignment is a workplace thriller about the slow takeover that happens without anyone voting for it — a story of a job becoming a church, told from the desk of the one person who can't decide whether loyalty is a virtue or a diagnostic. For readers who loved Severance and never trusted the office anyway.