Chapter 12: Teams Are Temporary
The notice arrived without ceremony.
No alert tone. No priority flag. Just a quiet update nested into the morning schedule like it had always been there.
TEAM ASSIGNMENTS — UPDATED
That was all it said.
No explanation. No rationale. No warning.
I felt it before I processed it. A tightening in my chest, sharp and immediate. Around me, the dorm stirred with the same subtle shift—students checking wristbands, pausing, rechecking, as if the information might change if viewed twice.
It didn’t.
219 looked up from his bed across the room. Our eyes met for half a second before he looked away, already checking his own display.
312 was faster. “They moved me,” he said flatly.
I checked mine.
Unit designation changed. New identifiers listed beneath it. Familiar names—designations—missing.
501 wasn’t there.
Neither was 219.
The absence hit harder than I expected.
Not panic. Not grief.
Calculation.
My brain immediately began adjusting—rerouting expectations, re-evaluating how I’d need to behave around people I hadn’t learned yet. That reflex scared me. It meant the system was already working deeper than I wanted to admit.
In the atrium, the effect was visible.
Clusters had shifted. Old formations dissolved, new ones forming awkwardly at the edges. People stood closer to strangers than they had to friends, as if proximity to the unfamiliar was somehow safer.
The rankings board remained unchanged.
The gap was still there.
But now the names—designations—beneath it had been rearranged.
I found my new unit near the west wall. Four of us. None familiar.
A tall girl with cropped hair stood rigidly, hands clasped behind her back like she was bracing for inspection. A shorter boy kept glancing at the exits, counting them, maybe. The last member—a girl with a calm face and unreadable eyes—watched everyone without appearing to watch anyone at all.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
No one introduced themselves.
We all knew better.
A supervisor approached, tablet glowing softly. “Team assignments are effective immediately,” he said. “Previous configurations are obsolete.”
Obsolete.
Not dissolved. Not rotated.
Obsolete implied inefficiency.
Someone nearby spoke up. “Is this permanent?”
The supervisor didn’t look at them. “Teams persist only as long as they remain useful.”
That answer landed with a dull thud.
As we moved to our first session, I caught sight of 219 across the room. He was standing with a different group now, posture slightly hunched, eyes flicking between his new teammates like he was trying to predict which one would be the liability.
He noticed me looking.
We didn’t nod. Didn’t acknowledge each other at all.
That hurt more than if he had.
The session itself was procedural—joint problem-solving exercises under time pressure. No context. No clear “right” answers. Just constraints that shifted mid-task.
I noticed how people behaved when paired with strangers.
Politeness vanished quickly. So did patience.
Everyone was assessing value.
The cropped-hair girl—my new team lead, apparently—made decisions quickly, decisively. She didn’t ask for input unless she needed it. When she did, she listened just long enough to extract usefulness.
Efficient.
Cold.
Effective.
The calm girl adapted seamlessly, filling gaps without drawing attention. The anxious boy hesitated, second-guessed, tried to anticipate what others wanted him to do instead of acting.
He slowed us down.
I saw it register—not just in our expressions, but in the system itself. Micro-delays. Subtle haptic feedback through the wristband when he spoke out of turn.
Feedback without instruction.
By the end of the session, he barely spoke at all.
During the break, I overheard fragments of conversation.
“They split us up on purpose.”
“Of course they did.”
“Attachments create noise.”
“I thought—”
“Don’t.”
No one finished sentences anymore unless they had to.
That afternoon, I passed 501 in the corridor.
She didn’t stop.
Neither did I.
But as we crossed, she said quietly, “You’re adjusting.”
It wasn’t a compliment.
“I don’t want to,” I replied, just as quietly.
She snorted. “That’s not the metric.”
Before I could respond, she was gone.
The words stayed with me.
That’s not the metric.
In the evening, a student broke.
Not loudly. Not dramatically.
He simply refused to move.
We were lining up for transit when he stopped, feet planted, arms crossed tight over his chest.
“I want my old team back,” he said. His voice shook, but he didn’t back down. “We worked. We were effective. This doesn’t make sense.”
No one responded.
The supervisor approached, expression neutral. “Your previous configuration no longer meets current optimization parameters.”
“That’s not an answer,” the student snapped. “You can’t just—”
His wristband chimed.
Once.
He froze.
Then another vibration followed. Longer this time.
His shoulders sagged. The fight drained out of him like someone had pulled a plug.
“Proceed,” the supervisor said.
The student did.
No further resistance.
That night, lying in my bed, I realized something uncomfortable.
It wasn’t just that teams were temporary.
It was that continuity itself was being punished.
The more familiar you became with someone—how they thought, how they reacted under pressure—the more likely that familiarity would be identified as inefficiency.
Predictability.
Bias.
Noise.
Helix didn’t want loyalty.
It wanted adaptability without attachment.
I thought of 219. Of 312. Of the way we’d begun to anticipate each other without speaking.
That had felt like progress.
Here, it was a flaw.
My wristband vibrated once before lights-out.
A new line had been added beneath my unit designation.
COHESION — UNDER REVIEW
I stared at it for a long time.
Teams weren’t temporary because they failed.
They were temporary because, if they lasted long enough, people might start caring who stood beside them.
And caring, I was starting to understand, was the most dangerous inefficiency of all.
