Señor Briceño nodded, clutched the baby, and disappeared back into the beige labyrinth, a willing participant in the machine at last.

She had become one of them. And she had never been more efficient.

She slid the form across the counter to the 112-year-old man.

Her coworkers were ghosts. There was La Gorda Miriam, who spent her days alphabetizing a drawer full of staples. There was El Ingeniero, a man who claimed to have once been a nuclear physicist but now spent his time calculating the exact angle at which the ceiling fan would eventually fall and decapitate him (he predicted a Tuesday). And there was the mysterious "J-7," a position that had been vacant since 2005, but whose payroll checks were still cashed every month.

The office was a labyrinth of beige corridors on the 14th floor of a building that leaned slightly, as if tired of its own existence. The air smelled of old coffee, desperation, and carbon paper. Her supervisor, a man named Teodoro who hadn't smiled since the last millennium, handed her a single, mildewed folder.

"They gave me the money," he said, his voice trembling. "But they subtracted it from my birth certificate. Now, according to the MPPE RRHH, I was never born. And they've reassigned my pension to this baby."

"Find the folder?" Elena asked.