Arcturus Training Facility 12 is a purpose-built corporate education center occupying a three-story building on the northern edge of the Circuit district. It was constructed in 2211 to provide onboarding, continuing education, and professional development programs for Arcturus Industrial Solutions employees. It has classrooms, a lecture hall, breakout rooms, a computer lab, a small library, and an administrative office. It is staffed by four instructors, two administrative assistants, and a facilities manager. It runs five orientation programs per month for new hires who do not exist.

The orientation program is a standard five-day corporate onboarding sequence. Day one: company history, mission, and values. Day two: workplace policies, benefits enrollment, IT systems setup. Day three: department-specific training (varies by cohort). Day four: compliance and safety. Day five: assessment and certification. The program is delivered by instructors who stand at the front of classrooms, advance through presentation slides, pause for questions that nobody asks, and administer assessments that nobody completes. The instructors grade the assessments anyway. The grades are entered into the HR system. Completion certificates are generated and filed in employee records that belong to employee IDs that do not resolve to human beings.

The instructors know. They have always known. Lead instructor Marguerite Okafor-Strand has been delivering orientation programs to empty classrooms for six years. She is, by all accounts, an excellent instructor — she was recruited from Arcturus's actual training division, where she received consistently high evaluations. She treats each empty classroom session with the same professionalism she brought to sessions with real students. She makes eye contact with the empty chairs. She pauses for emphasis. She tells the joke on slide 47 of the Day One presentation and smiles at the silence where laughter would be.

When asked why she continues, Marguerite says something that stops you: "The material is good. The program is well-designed. If someone did show up, they'd receive an excellent orientation." She delivers the program as a performance — not for an audience, but as an act of craft. The program exists. The program deserves to be delivered properly. The absence of students is a logistical detail, not a reason to do the work poorly.

The assessments are the strangest part. At the end of Day Five, Marguerite distributes assessment packets to the empty desks, waits the standard 90 minutes, collects the blank packets, and grades them. The grades are not random — she applies the rubric to the blank pages and scores them according to a standard she has developed over six years: the blank assessment receives a 72%, which is the minimum passing score. Every non-existent new hire passes the orientation. Every completion certificate is valid. Every ghost employee begins their ghost career with a properly documented, properly graded, properly certified onboarding experience.