The Fade Test

Every morning, Dobie Lubin wakes from the same dream: a vast, open-air parking lot where the stripes have dissolved into ghosts. He walks its length, fingers trailing over the asphalt, feeling for the paint ridges that no longer exist. Then the alarm sounds, and he opens his eyes to darkness. Beside him, Sylvie is already pulling on her stockings.

And so begins another day.

Dobie tests barcodes for a living. Not their contents—he couldn’t tell you what medication XK-4927 delivers—but their ability to endure. He works at the Verification Solutions Division of GS1 US, a concrete box tucked behind a Sam’s Club parking lot. The HVAC system breathes through its vents like a terminal patient.

The procedure never varies. Each morning, Dobie feeds labels into the Q-Sun Xe-3 xenon-arc chamber, where seventy-two hours of exposure simulate five years of grocery-store light. The spectrophotometer records reflectance values. His logbook tracks X-dimension decay. ANSI X3.182-1990 dictates the acceptab…