The clock above the queue display said 21:47. The queue display said 000.
On the last night of the quarter, that was the only zero I was happy to see.
I sat at Counter 3 with my blazer buttoned, my long hair still tied low at the nape the way the dress code required, and my Service Smile still on my face. The last customer had left four hours ago. The smile hadn't noticed.
Four years in customer service will do that. My face no longer asks permission before it smiles.
On my monitor, a spreadsheet glowed in the empty branch.
Quarterly deposit target: 100%.
Achieved: 96.4%.
Three point six percent, I thought. Three point six percent is a very small number, until you have to explain it to a branch manager.
At noon, I had been at 101.2%.
Then Pak Darmawan came in.
He had been our customer for twenty years. He brought fried bananas for the security guard every month and always asked about my mother. He sat across from me, smiled his kind, grandfatherly smile, and asked to move his entire time deposit to the bank across the street. They were offering a quarter percent more.
"I'm sorry, Mbak Sekar," he said. "It's just business."
"I understand completely, Pak," I said, smiling. "Thank you for trusting us all these years."
Twenty years, I thought, as I processed the form. Twenty years of trust, and it was worth zero point two five percent.
My phone buzzed on the desk. The branch group chat.
Pak Haris (Branch Manager): Team, Q3 closes TONIGHT. Branch is at 98.7%. If anyone can still close a deposit, please give it everything!!
He added three praying-hands emojis and a flexed arm.
Mbak Rini (Teller): Sekar is still at the office, Pak. Our hero
She added a crying-laughing face.
I'm not a hero, I thought. I'm just bad at going home.
I picked up the desk phone and called the last three names on my prospect list.
The first went to voicemail. The second went to voicemail. The third picked up, listened to my opening line, said, "Mbak, it's ten o'clock at night," and hung up.
"Thank you for your time," I said to the dial tone. My voice was perfectly pleasant. My face was perfectly calm.
Inside, I was lying face-down on the carpet, slowly becoming one with it.
At 22:10, Pak Ujang, the night security guard, tapped on the glass.
"Mbak Sekar. I need to lock up."
"Of course, Pak. I'm sorry for keeping you."
I logged off, locked my drawer and picked up my bag. I did not notice that the little rubber date stamp was still in my blazer pocket, where I had slipped it after stamping Pak Darmawan's closing form.
I would think about that stamp a great deal later.
Outside, it was raining the way Jakarta rains at the end of September: suddenly, completely, as if the sky had been saving up all year. I took a motorcycle taxi home in a plastic raincoat that smelled of someone else's cigarettes, and climbed the stairs to my rented room. Three by three meters. One bed, one fan, one window that looked directly at another window.
I meant to change.
I really did. I sat on the edge of the bed to take off my shoes, and the bed was soft, and the rain was loud on the tin roof, and my phone was charging beside my pillow, and I thought:
Just five minutes. Then I'll change. Then I'll shower. Then I'll set three alarms and think of a way to explain three point six percent.
I lay back with my blazer on, my lanyard still around my neck and my shoes still on my feet.
I did not get five minutes.
When I opened my eyes, I was at Counter 3.
For a moment, I felt nothing but professional despair. Of course, I thought. Of course I'm dreaming about work. Even my dreams are doing overtime.
Then I noticed the walls were missing.
The counter was there. My chair, my monitor, my little desk calendar with the bank's logo on it. The waiting chairs stretched out in front of me in neat rows, but they didn't stop where the glass doors should have been. They kept going, row after row, until they faded into a pale gold sky with no sun in it.
The queue display above me flickered.
A-001.
Ding.
"Queue number A-zero-zero-one," said the recorded voice, warm and polite, "please proceed to Counter Three."
My body stood up before my brain had finished screaming. My hands folded in front of my blazer. My Service Smile arrived exactly on time.
"Good evening," I said. "Welcome. How may I help you?"
Someone walked toward me down the endless aisle.
They were young, or looked it, though I couldn't have said whether they were a man or a woman. They wore a long robe in colors that had once been bright and were now the color of old laundry. A frayed ribbon was wound around both their wrists, and the edges of their body flickered like a candle in a draft.
In both hands, they held a crumpled queue ticket, the way people do when they've been waiting a very long time.
They sat down in the customer chair, bowed slightly, and smoothed the ticket flat on my desk.
"Good evening," they said. "I'm so sorry to come this late. I've been in the queue for about three hundred years."
Three hundred years, I thought. Okay. It's a dream. Dreams are allowed to be stupid.
"I sincerely apologize for the wait," I said. "May I have your name?"
"Lumeth." They glanced around the empty branch and lowered their voice. "Keeper of Promises. I'm a god. A small one. From another world."
A god.
A god took a queue number.
A god took a queue number and waited three hundred years, and our branch still has a customer satisfaction score of four point two.
"I see," I said. "And how may I help you today, um—"
I stopped.
Bapak or Ibu?
In four years, I had never once had to ask. Calling a customer by the wrong honorific was a complaint waiting to happen. Calling a god by the wrong honorific was probably worse.
"—today?" I finished smoothly, and left the honorific out entirely.
Customer-service technique number fourteen. When in doubt, restructure the sentence.
Lumeth didn't seem to notice. They reached into their robe and slid a folded piece of paper across the desk.
It was a brochure. A glossy, tri-fold brochure, exactly like the ones in the rack by our entrance, except the cover said:
A NEW LIFE AWAITS YOU!
Limited-Time Offer for Selected Customers Only
"I studied your world's methods of persuasion," Lumeth said, with a hopeful look. "Before I came."
A god is using a sales brochure on me.
On ME.
I hand out forty of these a week.
"I need someone to come to my world," Lumeth said. "Someone like you. And I'm prepared to offer... benefits."
They opened the brochure and pointed at the first bullet point.
"Beauty. I can make you beautiful. The most beautiful woman in my world."
I looked at the brochure. I looked at Lumeth.
Did a god just tell me I'm plain?
...Fair. But rude.
"Thank you very much for the offer," I said, smiling. "Unfortunately, that product doesn't suit my needs at this time."
Lumeth blinked. They pointed at the second bullet.
"Power, then. Magic strong enough to split mountains."
"Thank you, but I don't currently have any mountains that need splitting."
The third bullet.
"Long life. Three hundred years, at least."
"I appreciate it," I said. "But respectfully, I'm not sure I want to work for three hundred years."
"...You're assuming you would be working?"
"I'm a bank employee," I said. "I always assume."
Lumeth closed the brochure. The edges of their body flickered a little more.
"You," they said slowly, "are very difficult to sell to."
"I've been trained on the other side of the counter."
Wait.
Wait wait wait.
I just turned down a god. Three times. In a row. My mother would faint. Is there a penalty for this? Is rejecting a god worse than a customer complaint? Does it go on my performance review?
My face, as always, said nothing at all.
Lumeth was quiet for a long moment. Then they reached across the desk and laid one hand flat beside my keyboard.
"Then let me stop selling," they said, "and show you instead."
My monitor flickered. The spreadsheet vanished.
In its place was a town.
It sat at the bend of a wide brown river, all stone bridges and crooked rooftops and smoke rising from a hundred chimneys. It was night. The picture moved closer, through a shuttered window, into a small room that smelled—somehow, I could smell it—of flour and cold ashes.
A woman knelt on the floor.
She was perhaps fifty, with flour on her sleeves and a tired, square face. She had pried up a floorboard. Beneath it lay a cloth pouch, and she was counting the coins inside by candlelight. She counted them once. Then she counted them again. Then she looked at the shuttered window, listened, and counted them a third time.
I knew that look.
Everyone who has ever worked a bank counter knows that look. I had seen it on the market vendor who brought me fifty thousand rupiah in wrinkled notes every month, smoothing each one flat on her knee before she handed it over. I had seen it on the retired teacher who asked me to print her passbook twice, just to be sure the number was still there.
And long before I ever worked a counter, I had seen it on my own mother. Every night after closing our little grocery shop, she counted the day's cash into an old biscuit tin and hid it behind the rice sack. She had stopped trusting banks in 1997, the year sixteen of them closed at once. I wasn't born yet, but I grew up with that biscuit tin.
It was the look of someone afraid that if they looked away, their money would disappear.
The picture changed.
A merchant on a muddy road, standing beside an overturned cart. His guards were gone. So was everything else.
The picture changed again.
An old man in front of a house that was no longer a house, only black beams and grey ash. He was on his knees, sifting through the ash with his bare hands, looking for something that had melted.
"In my world," Lumeth said quietly, "nobody keeps money safe for anybody else. They hide it. They carry it. They bury it. And when it's lost, it's simply gone. Nobody promises to keep it, because promises about money always break."
They lifted their wrists. The ribbon wound around them was fraying, thread by thread.
"I am the Keeper of Promises. When people stop trusting each other, I fade."
I looked at the woman on the screen, still kneeling over her floorboard.
"Excuse me," I said. "Does your world have banks?"
Lumeth tilted their head. "What is a bank?"
Something happened inside me then. I am not proud of it.
No banks.
No accounts. No deposits. No competitors.
An entire world with a funding achievement of zero percent.
That's not a target. That's a—
No. NO. Stop it. Stop doing the math. You are looking at a woman counting her life savings by candlelight, and your brain is calculating market share. What is WRONG with you?
"I can't," I heard myself say. My voice was calm. "I have a job here. Responsibilities. Customers."
"Darmawan," said Lumeth.
I stopped.
"He trusted you for twenty years," Lumeth said. "Not the building. Not the logo. You. He asked for you by name every time he came in. And when he left today, who will your manager thank for those twenty years?"
I didn't answer. I didn't need to. I could already see it: tomorrow's morning briefing, the quarterly numbers on the screen, Pak Haris saying, Thank you, team, the branch did well. My name in a single spreadsheet cell, highlighted orange because it was below one hundred percent.
"In your world," Lumeth said, "the trust you build is written under someone else's name."
They leaned forward. Their flickering edges steadied, just for a moment.
"In mine, it would be yours."
My face didn't move. It never does.
But something behind it did.
Lumeth reached into their robe one more time and slid a single sheet of paper across the desk.
It was a form. It had been copied, I realized, from our own account-opening form: the same font, the same blue header, the same little boxes. Only the title was different.
AGREEMENT OF TRANSFER
Below it were paragraphs and paragraphs of very small text. At the bottom sat a single empty box, and in its corner someone had stuck a ten-thousand-rupiah duty stamp: the little meterai sticker that makes a signature legally binding back home.
A god bought a meterai, I thought. A god went to a post office and bought a meterai.
Signature and Stamp
"Would you be willing," Lumeth asked, "to try?"
I looked at the form. Then, because some instincts survive even in dreams, I asked, "Is there a trial period?"
Lumeth thought about it. "There is... a beginning."
That is not an answer, said the part of me that had handled four years of complaints. That is exactly the kind of non-answer we are trained to flag.
But it's a dream, said the rest of me. Tomorrow I'll wake up, take a cold shower, eat instant noodles over the sink, and go back to three point six percent. What's the harm in saying yes to a dream?
I took the ballpoint pen from my breast pocket and signed across the meterai, the same quick signature I had written on thousands of forms. Then I reached into my blazer pocket.
The little rubber date stamp was there, as if it had been waiting.
Out of pure habit, I rolled my thumb across the date wheel to set it. The numbers turned, then kept turning on their own, faster and faster, until they blurred into shapes that weren't numbers at all.
Huh, I thought. That's new.
I pressed the stamp into the box, right over my signature.
The ink should have been purple. It came out gold, and my signature beneath it, still wet with blue ink, turned gold along with it.
A sound rang through the endless branch, clear and high, like a bell, or like a promise being kept. And somewhere at the very back of my mind, a single word settled into place, as neatly as a coin dropping into a drawer:
[Validation]
Lumeth looked down at the stamped form. Then they looked up at me, and for the first time, they smiled. The colors of their robe brightened, very slightly, like laundry that had just been washed.
"Thank you," they said, "for your trust."
That's my line, I thought.
Then the gold light swallowed the counter, the chairs, the sky and me.
The first thing I noticed was the smell.
Fresh bread. Wet stone. Woodsmoke. And, very strongly, horse.
The second thing I noticed was that I was sitting on the edge of a stone fountain, in bright morning sunlight, in the middle of a market square I had never seen before.
People moved around me in every direction: women with baskets on their hips, men leading mules, children weaving between stalls of cabbages and onions and bolts of rough cloth. They wore tunics and long skirts and leather boots. They spoke a language I had never heard, and somehow I understood every word.
"—told you, three bits a dozen, not four—"
"—get that mule out of the—"
"—who's that?"
That last one was about me.
I looked down. Navy blazer, crisp and spotless, as though it had just come back from the laundry, even though I had slept in it. White blouse. Pencil skirt. Black work shoes. ID lanyard around my neck, my own face smiling politely out of the plastic card.
In my right hand, the little rubber stamp. The ink on it still shone faintly gold.
My phone, I remembered, was charging on my bed. In another world, apparently.
Okay.
Okay. Calm down. Customer-service rule number one: never panic in front of the customer.
There are no customers.
There is a CHICKEN.
There was, in fact, a chicken. It stood in front of my shoes and stared up at me as if I owed it money.
I stared back. My face stayed perfectly calm.
Two merchants walked past, slowing down to look at me.
"Look at her," one muttered. "Strange clothes, sitting in the square like she owns it. Not even surprised."
"Must be someone important," said the other.
I am not someone important, I thought. I am someone about to have a complete mental breakdown next to a chicken.
And then, as the market noise rose around me and the morning sun climbed over the crooked rooftops, I remembered the form.
The paragraphs of small text. The meterai. My signature. The gold ink.
For four years, I had told every single customer the same thing, in the same pleasant voice, with the same smile.
Please read the terms and conditions carefully before signing, Pak, Bu.
I had signed and stamped mine, over a meterai, without reading a single word.