The Elongated Week

The first time K. distinctly felt something was wrong was on what should have been a Friday afternoon. Sunlight slanted through the blinds, casting long, tired patches of light on the floor. The air was thick with the false sense of ease that heralded the coming weekend. However, when he habitually glanced at the wall calendar, he found the mark next to the date wasn't pointing to a day off, but rather a symbol he had never seen before – scrawled, yet possessing a certain official authority. It resembled a distorted character for 'work', tightly enclosed in a circle. He rubbed his eyes, but the symbol stubbornly remained.

"Isn't... isn't today Friday?" he muttered, his voice barely audible, as if afraid of disturbing something.

His colleague across from him, a middle-aged man perpetually expressionless and buried in documents, answered without looking up: "It's a 'Work Extension Day', K. Did you forget? It was mentioned in last week's internal memo, for... uh... 'optimizing time resource allocation'."

K. tried desperately to recall, but only vague official jargon about improving efficiency and "flexible work" came to mind, nothing specific about a "Work Extension Day". He pressed further, "Extension Day? What does that mean? Is it... overtime?"

The colleague finally raised his head, his eyes behind the glasses appearing hollow and weary. "Not exactly," he said slowly, seeming to weigh each word. "You could understand it as... a kind of... adjustment... of time itself. Not simply extending working hours, but... well, the day itself has been endowed with extra density." Having said this, he lowered his head again, as if the explanation had drained all his energy.

K. felt a wave of dizziness. Extra density? What kind of talk was that? He looked out the window. Pedestrians hurried along the streets, vehicles flowed endlessly – everything looked normal. Yet, an indescribable sense of sluggishness pressed down on him, as if the air had turned viscous, and the speed at which time flowed had become eerie. He felt like he was inside a vast, invisible container, being slowly stretched and compressed by an unseen force.

In the following days, this feeling intensified. Days that should have been the weekend were filled with various euphemistically named "Supplementary Work Periods" and "Efficiency Enhancement Windows". The office lights seemed never to go out, footsteps constantly echoed in the hallways, and the fatigue on people's faces seemed fixed by some rule, becoming the norm. Nobody complained, or rather, complaints were replaced by a deeper numbness. Everyone just worked silently, processing seemingly endless documents, attending long and empty meetings.

K. tried to find the source of this "adjustment". He went to the Human Resources Department, a dimly lit room deep within the building. He was received by a pale-faced woman who spoke in a soft, thin voice. After listening to K.'s query, she offered a formulaic smile that conveyed understanding but offered no help.

"Mr. K., the policy regarding 'Time Optimization' is based on considerations for overall operational efficiency," she recited proficiently. "All details are elaborated upon in Internal Regulations, Appendix B, Clause 7. You'll need to fill out a 'Time Perception Anomaly Consultation Form', number T-AEQ-03, and submit it to the Process Approval Section. They will provide preliminary feedback within... hmm... approximately fifteen 'Work Units'."

"Work Units?" K. asked, puzzled. "What's that? Is it counted by days?"

The woman's smile froze for an instant before returning. "'Work Unit' is an internal unit of measurement, Mr. K. It doesn't perfectly correspond to the traditional concept of dates. It's designed to more precisely measure... well... workload and time value." She handed K. a form, densely packed with grids and terminology, daunting to behold.

Holding the cold form, K. felt a surge of powerlessness. He seemed to have fallen into a huge net woven from countless rules and terms; the more he struggled, the tighter it became. He tried discussing it with colleagues, but most just shrugged, saying "You'll get used to it," or looked at him with almost pitying eyes, as if he were an outsider who didn't understand the rules.

Only once, in the breakroom, an old employee nearing retirement, seeing no one else around, quietly told K.: "Don't try to figure it out, kid. It's like the weather, you can't change it. You just need to... adapt to it. Otherwise, you'll find even breathing becomes difficult." The old man's eyes held a weary, fearful insight into the ways of the world.

K.'s life completely lost its rhythm. He no longer knew what day it was, or even how many days had passed. The symbols on the calendar grew increasingly strange – sometimes a gear, sometimes an eye, sometimes just an indescribable inkblot. Work seemed endless, and sleep became brief, anxiety-ridden stupors. He felt his body and spirit being slowly stretched, diluted, merging into this boundless expanse of 'optimized' time.

One evening, he was dragging his heavy steps home. The city remained brilliantly lit, but K. saw only distorted lights and shadows. He looked up at the sky; the moon seemed to have been stretched into an oval, emitting a cold, eerie glow. He suddenly stopped, struck by an absurd thought: perhaps it wasn't that the workdays had increased, but that the time of the entire world had been stretched, like a rubber band, relentlessly and endlessly pulled by an unseen hand. And all of them were merely insignificant specks of dust on this rubber band, involuntarily following its distortion.

He stood there, letting the night wind blow against his numb face. He didn't know where to go, nor what tomorrow would bring. He only knew that the familiar world with clear boundaries had vanished. He was trapped in this elongated week, with no beginning and no end, only endless, 'optimized' time and a bone-deep sense of absurdity. He even began to suspect that perhaps, from the very beginning, he had been living in such an elongated reality, only now sluggishly perceiving it. He took a deep breath; the air was filled with industrial exhaust and a certain... smell of decaying time. Then, he resumed walking, towards the indistinct direction of home, which seemed forever unreachable.