"I don't think you want solutions Wallace, nothing that you do or say tells me you have any desire to resolve the struggles you deal with. I think, you want me to tell you magic words you can use to convince them. That’s not why we're here, that's not something I can do or even or want to do, you know that" he said to himself. Wallace hadn't been to see the therapist in over a month. Partly, this was due to all the work he had to do, but, if he was honest with himself, a large part of his reticence was due to the persistent voice in his head. The voice it seemed was similarly skilled to the therapist he had been assigned. “Of course, you know that’s not true, this monologue you have with yourself; however, internally reflective is still just that, you talking to you.” The question often crossed Wallace’s mind, when one spent as much time talking to themselves as he did, was he crazy. “I don’t think so, after all, you don’t confuse these conversations with reality”, then again he thought, maybe he did, how would he know “you are lapsing uncomfortably close to solipsism, and this is getting uncomfortable similar to a dialog”.

Wallace was an engineer, or a programmer, or a data scientist, job titles were fluid, at BainTech. For the narrative his work is almost incidental; however, visa vis creating a complete historical record he was employed to model the effects of induced magnetic fields on the conductivity of the high voltage super conductor lines that ran between the peripheral domes of the city and the central dome. It was boring, and only arguably important work. That it matters at all is only because this job required Wallace to sit in front of a terminal all day considering the next command to issue to line of code to write. The reader might then, very reasonably ask, why is it important for me to have this approximate understanding of this man’s life. The answer to that lies in what this narrative aims to be.

The Narrative

We intend to tell you a story, not an interesting story, in fact a quite banal story. We intend to relate the story of a Thursday for Wallace. Do not be tempted to think that this was a formative, important, memorable, remarkable, or even notable Thursday. No, this was a Thursday in Wallace’s life which he will remember exactly 3 times, once at breakfast the following Friday, a second time that afternoon when he tried to recall where he had left a pen, and a final time one week later when he read a single line comment he had made in a piece of legacy software. After that final remembrance this Thursday died in the truest way a memory can. This day is remarkable in its unremarkable-ness. Why, of all the days in Wallace’s life and in all the lived hours on that same day, we were there, at that time, in that place. Wallace happened to be the one whom we scanned. Make of this what you will, but we recommend you make nothing of it.

Wallace woke up from a comfortable if not heavenly sleep “You should get yup, yea, okay”. A shower, making the bed, having breakfast, drinking coffee all these things passed uninteresting by him. “You’re melancholy today that’s similar to yesterday, maybe you should talk to someone, go back to the therapist”, no he didn’t think he would. Wallace was lonely but not to such an extent it affected his life. “Your a functioning adult aren’t you, no that's a silly criteria, plenty of people are functioning but need help”. Off to work.

“Why does my head feel fluid” [Narrative Note: physiology of subject race unsure, perhaps this is a result of field scan] “That’s a weird thought”. Wallace sat as his desk, in his office, and opened a remote connection to the company server. There was a segmentation fault he had been chasing for the last couple weeks and a post it on his desk from the day before held the clues to his investigation. “You dissociate while programming, did you know that, obviously you did, how long has it been, not a bad way to spend time all things considered”. Wallace found the issue, a script to parse one file format to another had introduced an additional white space character, a subsequent program expected an alpha numeric character, this threw off counting of the total number of numbers in a file, by the end of the file the cursor was pointing outside of the allocated memory. “If you had spend 15 more minutes looking at the target file a week ago this would not have happened, this killed 7 or 8 hours of time so that’s a win I guess”

Wallace went to lunch, “You really should see the therapist you know acting like your own self referential therapist is hubristic” chicken frontine was always a good choice. Always amazing how fast food disappears, he talked to someone during lunch “Annie asked you about the commit, make an effort with faces, you work with these people”. He sent an pull request to Annie, it was approved. Check that off the list, post it notes to into the drawer “that’s cute you store those, keep doing that, its healthy to remind yourself of accomplishment”. He leaned back, “Why did I leave the office door open”. Meetings were next in his day.

Wallace packed his bag and left sometime after the day was over but not too long, there was work to do but he was not overcommitment “You should work harder, this is you dream you need to prove it” “Stop working as hard, its not healthy, look at yourself your lonely and depressed, go see the therapist”. The light turned green and Wallace drove through the D3-D1 “Do they make cars with pressure seals any more? What if the dome lost atmosphere, huh”. His apartment door was a mild irritant because of his general clumsiness “maybe you should get that looked at, not going to the doctor because it took an extra two second to align a key with a door, what if its serious, there are other people with more serious, real things”. The apartment was quite, he had turned the music off when he left that morning “House, resume the music from this morning” and some quite jazz started. “Most interaction you had today was with your house, that’s not true and its self serving of you to think that, you sat with Annie for lunch and talked about work, accept the people in your life, she’s barley in my life, yea but still”.

Three or four hours after getting home, eating dinner, having a tea, “Nothing else really to do is there, go to bed, its 7 pm, how is that different than 8, okay”. He crawled into bed, “Today was a bad day, but tomorrow will be a good day, you always say that, only on the bad days, exactly.”

Wallace thought about that day three more times, never again. Nothing remarkable happened. He was perhaps more melancholy than an average day, but then again perhaps not. We present Wallace as a case study into the mean day, physiology focus, of a male citizen of the Human Lunar Colony Tricyclia.