Story code: ST-000796
Part 2: Every Mistake Landed in My Lap
By the time the first reading started, Dahlia had managed to turn one access problem into a running accusation with my name attached to it. Her calls kept reaching Evan, Evan kept hurrying them to me, and each time I took the phone I had to lower my voice because somewhere in the room a microphone was live. I stayed behind the memorial chapel streaming table with one laptop on the main feed and one on guest access. Noah worked the side aisle with his spare headset around his neck and a rolling case of adapters beside him. Every few minutes he gave me a time stamp on a scrap of program paper. He had started doing that on his own after the third repeat of the same problem. Dahlia’s tile was still not in the VR room, but she was not cut off. She could call, text, and answer instantly whenever Evan picked up. That was part of what made the whole thing so slippery. She was always reachable enough to keep directing traffic, just not reachable enough to finish the one task that would stop the disruption. During the eulogy, Evan crouched beside my chair and held his phone near my ear. “She says the code you gave her expired,” he whispered. “It expires after ten minutes,” I said. “I told her that.” Dahlia cut in before he could answer. “She read it too fast. And now the room says host approval required. Why am I in a waiting space? Why am I not with the family?” I clicked the guest log. Her name was not in the waiting room. “You’re not in the queue on my side,” I said. “Well, I’m staring at a floating panel that says request access again.” Floating panel. I wrote the words down on the back of the guest access QR card. “Okay,” I said. “Select request access.” “I did that already. Nothing happened.” “Then stay on that screen. Don’t back out.” A beat passed. Fabric rustled over the phone speaker. “It disappeared.” Noah stopped beside me and kept his eyes on the monitor. He did not say anything until Evan stepped away. “She’s changing environments,” he said quietly. “That panel floats only in headset mode.” “I know,” I said. From the front row, Mrs. Lenora Pike turned her program over and over in her hands while the speaker at the lectern paused for a drink of water. She never looked angry. She just kept having to watch other people stop and start around one remote voice. Then came the flowers. Halfway through the video tribute, Evan hurried back with his phone out and said, “Dahlia says her memorial bouquet wasn’t placed near the portrait. She says if she can’t be there physically, the least we can do is make sure her arrangement is visible on camera.” I looked at him for a second. “I’m in the middle of switching slides.” “She says she paid for overnight delivery.” The slideshow timer was running. The music track had twelve seconds before the next image cue. So I stood, crossed in front of the side camera, found the card attached to a white arrangement near the back wall, and moved it beside the framed photo because Evan was already reaching for it wrong and nearly pulled the ribbon loose. Noah covered the slide transition from the laptop while I fixed the placement. When I got back to the table, Dahlia was saying through the phone speaker, “Now the audio is echoing. Is anyone there actually monitoring this?” Evan did not repeat that one. He just looked at me, waiting. I pointed at the meters on the stream laptop. “The room feed is clean. The echo is on her end or a second device.” He nodded, but only halfway, like he was still saving space for her version. Later, during the family remarks, she called again. Same complaint, same helpless tone, different vocabulary. “I can’t get back to the lobby anchor,” she said. “It keeps recentering my view off-axis.” Noah looked over at me so fast the spare headset bumped his chest. Lobby anchor. Recentering off-axis. Those were not words from the simple guest guide. Those were headset terms. Exact ones. I took the phone from Evan before he could start apologizing for me. “Dahlia,” I said, “are you on the phone browser, or inside the headset?” “I’m on whatever you people sent me. I don’t know the difference.” Her voice stayed breathy and put-upon, but there was no searching pause before the jargon. It came out clean every time. At the edge of the room, Noah opened the spare headset case an inch, then shut it again. We both knew what he was thinking without having to say much. We had a guest flow, a backup browser flow, and a manual code flow. She had claimed confusion in all three, but her mistakes kept drifting toward controls that only appeared after someone already knew how to move deeper into the system. Evan pressed his fingers against his forehead and checked the time again. “Can we please just get her in before the closing prayer?” he said. I kept my eyes on the guest log. “Only if she stays where I tell her to stay.” He gave a short nod that meant hurry. So I made Dahlia repeat each visible label on her screen before I gave the next step. Twice she skipped ahead. Once she named a menu I had not sent her to. The second time, Noah wrote the time down and underlined it. The closing music had started by the time her tile flashed on the confidence monitor again. Just for a second, I saw her hand reach up with no hesitation, tap the small headset icon in the corner, dismiss a permissions banner, and angle the view with one smooth drag. Then she froze, like she had remembered where the chapel camera was, and said into the phone in that same.