One of the empty cubes is starting to accrete stuff–first a chair, then a phone, now a workstation and some binders. There’s more every time DJ walks by.

Nobody sits in it after a day, though. She has the impression that the miscellany is building toward an invisible occupant: spontaneous generation.

“Know what I heard?” Kohler is telling Mott. “‘An employee is what a meeting uses to make more meetings.’ Huh? Right?”

DJ walks by the cube again and feels a sudden, slow horror. There are picture frames there now, but empty, without faces. Maybe not spontaneous generation after all…