Emblems
Images and the lines that go with them.
I found out what they bill for me on a Tuesday, by accident, off a spreadsheet somebody left open. Four times what I take home. I waited all afternoon to feel robbed, which is at least a clean feeling, and it never came. What came was worse: if I had done nothing that day, the invoice would have gone out the same. The gap between my wage and my price isn't theft. It's a rounding error.
A steelworker knows what he made. He can put a hand on it. I make files. Files on a server in a county I'll never visit, sentences chopped into packets and shot under an ocean, reassembled by a protocol with no opinion on the words, arriving as a document somebody opens for ninety seconds and forwards. The file becomes a number, the number pays the mortgage. The man who poured that slab could find it in the dark. I couldn't tell you where last quarter's work is stored, or whether it still exists, and in three years nobody has asked.
The building is always on the horizon and always lit, and the men inside it discovered that a country busy examining itself will never once look up.
It was the neatest theft in the republic's history: they took class, which is a thing you can count, and swapped it for identity, which is a thing you can only confess, and then charged tuition for the confessional.