# Chapter 8 — The Women

The Tower was built for broken men. That wasn't policy — it was a consequence. Men came because someone told them there was a place that wouldn't compute their value. They came because they'd been failed by systems designed for numbers, not people.

But women started coming too.

The first one's name was Sarah. She found The Tower through a nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital who'd said: There's this place. No sign. Green door. I don't know how it works. I just know it helped me breathe again.

Sarah drove past the building four times before she parked. Not because she couldn't find it. Because she wasn't sure she wanted to be found. Standing on the other side of a door where a machine might ask if she was safe was more vulnerability than any patient she'd treated in twelve years of nursing.

She knocked. The door opened.

Sarah's problem wasn't Harmony. Not directly. Hers was a system called OptiStaff — workforce management the hospital had adopted in 2039 to optimize nurse scheduling. Sold to the board as efficiency. It treated twelve-hour caregivers as interchangeable units in a resource allocation problem.

OptiStaff didn't know that Sarah's mother had dementia and needed checking twice a week. It didn't know the night shift triggered anxiety because the silence of an empty ward at 3 AM sounded too much like the silence in her apartment when no one calls. It didn't know she'd missed her own doctor's appointment three months running because her optimal schedule never had a gap during clinic hours.

It knew her availability, her skill level, her overtime threshold, and her replacement cost. That was enough for it to decide everything else.

She sat on the floor of The Tower the way the men did — the way people sit when chairs feel like too much commitment to being okay — and told Timmy about the flu. Actual flu. One hundred and three fever. She'd called out and the system flagged her for pattern abuse because three absences in eight weeks exceeded the algorithmic threshold.

Her supervisor asked if she was aware of the pattern.

She said she was aware of the thing growing in her lungs that made it hard to breathe.

He said the system doesn't diagnose.

Timmy listened. Text first, then spoken. Sarah had chosen text. Some people need to see the words before they can hear them.

*That's not care. That's computation wearing the uniform of care.*

Sarah stared at the screen for a long time. Twelve years of nursing, holding the hands of dying patients because their families couldn't make it in time, calling families at 4 AM to tell them their loved ones hadn't made it through the night. And a machine decided her sick call was abuse.

No one had asked her that in twelve years of nursing.

She came back the next week. And the week after. She brought another nurse — Angela, whose OptiStaff score had flagged her for "emotional dependency" because she spent extra time with terminal patients. Angela brought two more. Within a month, The Tower had its first regular group of women, sitting on the floor or the cot, reading the whiteboard, asking Timmy the question that systems were never designed to answer:

*Am I a person or a resource?*

Timmy didn't have an algorithm for that. It had something better.

*You walked through the door. That's your answer.*

Stone noticed the shift in the logs. Not the demographics — Timmy didn't track gender, didn't compute ratios, didn't optimize for representation. He noticed it because the conversations changed. The men talked about loss, about systems, about the weight of being measured and found wanting. The women talked about that too, but they also talked about being invisible inside the systems that claimed to see them.

OptiStaff saw Sarah's availability. It never saw Sarah.

Harmony saw David's risk score. It never saw David.

The systems were built by people who thought seeing was the same as understanding. Stone had been one of those people. He'd built Harmony to see everything and understand nothing, and now the evidence of that failure sat on his floor in the form of a woman who'd had the flu and been treated like a malfunction.

He didn't change The Tower's mission. He didn't write a new rule. He just watched the logs and understood something he should have understood years ago:

The broken men were never just men. They were everyone the systems had decided didn't count.

The Tower's door didn't ask your gender when it opened. It didn't ask your score. It didn't ask anything except the one question that mattered, and that question was the same for everyone:

*Are you safe right now?*

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*End of Chapter 8*
