“The Harmful Level?” Simon muttered, staring at the sign hanging ominously above the entrance of his new office building. The letters glimmered in a shade of acidic green, urging him to ponder its meaning yet dissuading him from approaching.
His new colleague, Evelyn, a woman with a wry smile and perpetually narrowed eyes that hinted at tales untold, appeared at his side. “Don’t let it get to you,” she cautioned, laughing softly, her voice a paradox of warmth and warning. “It’s just our way of welcoming new folks.”
Simon shifted uneasily, feeling the weight of the sign on his shoulders. “Why call it harmful if there’s no harm?”
“Why name a building Lee when none who live here are named so?” she countered, alluding to the mysterious nature of this place. Her quick wit left him quieter, pondering the absurd realities he’d willingly stepped into.
Every morning, the elevator chimed a quirky tune as Simon rode to his 13th-floor cubicle. The hallway speakers whispered eerie, nonsensical news. Today they murmured of ’three-headed pigeons’ seen loitering by the vending machine.
Inside the office, a curious hierarchy materialized; vowels sat at the executive desks while consonants scuttled nervously in their shadows. Simon, an ‘S’, often found himself caught in this linguistic limbo, a subtle joke shared amongst his peers.
Evelyn, noticing his discomfort one afternoon, leaned over the partition with a knowing look. “You overthink things, Simon. Here, logic isn’t law; take the alphabet soup we call our leadership, for instance,” she chuckled, “It’s like a dance, really—an ill-timed waltz.”
“But,” Simon hesitated, “isn’t it harmful, this…” he gestured, a futile attempt to encapsulate the disjointedness surrounding him.
“Have you ever eaten fog soup?” Evelyn asked, all at once serious, her gaze unwavering.
“No.” Simon’s confusion deepened.
“Precisely,” she nodded, as if he had unveiled the universe’s grand secret. Then she slipped away, leaving him with more riddles than answers.
Days melted into each other, the ardent hum of the fluorescent lights his only compass. The concept of time became liquid—flowing past him, intangible yet omnipresent.
One humid evening, after hours of lonesome late-night research, Simon scraped away the surface of the seemingly benign ‘Harmful Level’. His desk, laden with pages of nonsensical paperwork, seemed almost sentient—an accomplice to his quiet rebellion against ignorance.
A soft cough interrupted him. “Have you found the answer?” It was Evelyn, again crossing boundaries both physical and philosophical.
“The answer,” he mused aloud, “is in the search…?”
She winced slightly but smiled. “Perhaps that’s the trick of it. Harm is subjective, is it not? We choose the levels we acknowledge.” Her words were a seed planted deeply, destined to grow long after her departure.
Echoes of their conversation replayed in his mind, each repetition unspooling a new thread of insight until it all coalesced into an idea—the harmful level wasn’t external but an internal threshold.
Months passed, and the sign remained, content in its inscrutability. Simon, transformed, sat beside Evelyn during break on the window ledge overlooking a bustling city that paid no heed to their curiosities or crises.
“Do you ever feel enlightened?” he inquired, more for amusement than answer.
She laughed lightly, allowing the sound to blend with the distant urban symphony. “No,” she said, a playful edge in her tone, “but searching is half the fun.”
The building’s shadow lengthened, enveloping them gently—a reminder of their roles in this absurd, grand narrative, with Simon now a protagonist content not with answers but the artful dance of questions left hanging in the air.