D-0005 Please turn off the multifunction printer when you leave for the day

On the eleventh floor of a rented office near Hamamatsucho Station, the clerk who arrived first in the morning found a stack of paper left in the output tray of the shared multifunction printer. The office was almost empty after 7 p.m. on weekdays; only the printer remained in standby for fax reception. The pages carried timestamps and abbreviations apparently derived from seat order, with short utterances recorded verbatim. The clerk took them for leftover minutes someone had printed, it is said, and set them on a shelf in the kitchenette. Just past ten that morning, in a meeting, she noticed that a complaint she had made about the air conditioning was in the same phrasing as the third line of the morning’s pages, and she fell silent mid-sentence, according to a memo written afterward.

The pages resemble minutes, but include details no one would normally keep. Lines such as “silence,” “the sound of something being set down,” and “laughter from the hallway side” are inserted in the same register as the utterances. No job names remained in the printer’s history; only the page counter increased overnight. The maintenance contractor treated the sheets as self-diagnostic output following a paper jam. The correspondence between the pages and the conversations has been left unexplained. Among the employees, a way of putting it remains: that a machine kept awake through the night, waiting for faxes, may be receiving something ahead of time — the next morning’s share included. Whether the machine receives it first, or whoever reads the pages ends up speaking as written, has not been settled either way.

The clerk who first found the pages is said to have started coming in earlier than anyone after that. She collected the sheets from the tray before the others arrived, folded them in half without reading them, put them in envelopes, and stored them in the bottom drawer of her desk, which she kept locked. Asked why, she reportedly answered only: because if I read them, I feel like I will say exactly what they say. The envelopes appear to have been taken home at the end of each month, and their whereabouts are unknown.

The utterances around 9:17 a.m. were printed twice on most mornings. Still, on one morning only a single line came out, with no second copy — or so the same memo says. One copy bears an attendee’s abbreviation; the other is assigned the number of a window seat where no one sits. That seat has not been used since the office layout was rearranged the previous year. In a meeting at the corresponding time, one attendee stopped mid-sentence and stayed silent for several seconds, looking out the window — this is preserved in another employee’s memo. The attendee later said only that it had felt as though someone had murmured in agreement.

The printer was replaced at the end of January, and the phenomenon is said to have stopped. But on the morning when leftover copy paper from the old machine was loaded into the new one, a sheet in the same format was output a single time. Only the timestamps were lined up; every speech field was blank. The clerk who had kept collecting the pages did not put this one in an envelope; she reportedly tore it into small pieces and took it home. Even now, when she is the last to leave, she switches the printer off before going. That the fax can no longer be received at night is something no one points out.