The time is twenty years from now. The location is a run-down city neighborhood that could be anywhere. Here local city administrators take their orders from the national dictatorship. On a back street, a middle-aged woman named Lola manages one of the seedy rooming houses that warehouse older single men. Lola is always looking for an easy buck, even at the expense of the people around her. She recently learned that she could earn financial rewards by turning in borders who are deemed “counter productive” by the government. Unfortunately for such boarders, upon identification they will be sent to a statistical-adjustment center.

Last week, Lola contacted state security and told them that one of her borders, named Felix, has remained idle for several months by pretending to be sick. A day later government agents arrested and took him to the adjustment center facility where counter-productive people are given a sumptuous meal that results in death during sleep.

Felix did not succumb to the poison but was nonetheless later buried, along with fifty others, in a shallow common grave. An hour afterwards, he regained consciousness and dug himself out from under the loosely packed dirt. The boarder returned without attracting attention to the rooming house where he told the manager what happened. Lola was shaken by her boarder’s story but recovered after several days and called state security to tell them they botched the job.

A day later he’s re-arrested and interrogated. But, convinced he doesn’t know how he survived the treatment, the interrogators send Felix to state researchers who perform medical tests to find out why the poison failed to do its job. Later, looking disheveled from the testing, he escapes out an open window and again returns to the rooming house. As he enters, two lower-level government inspectors are asking the manager why she has continued to collect state-subsidy rent for her now non-existent boarder. Lola points to Felix and says, “There! I told you he was still living here.” Felix confirms her explanation, saying he has been getting subsidized treatments for his illness at a nearby hospital. The investigators leave and he returns to his room.

But, Lola now fears her boarder will figure out that she turned him in not once but twice. So she entices her dimwitted nephew Nester to break into Felix’s room and stab him to death. She’ll report the break-in after the nephew leaves. Nester, however, comes to the boarding house too early and mistakenly enters Lola’s room where she went to bed early to create what she thought would be an alibi. As he is about to stab her, thinking she is the boarder, she awakens and yells, “Not me you fool!” Felix hears her scream, comes running, opens her door, and enters. For a moment all three stare at each other in astonishment. Then she yells, “He’s the one! Get him!” The nephew takes two steps toward Felix but stumbles falling dead on his own knife.

Coincidentally, the two rooming house inspectors have decided to return because they found out Lola was the one who turned in the very boarder who had backed up her story. They hear the commotion and enter her room. One of them asks what has happened. Felix speaks up first, explaining that the manager and young man were fighting and that he tried to stop them, but was too weak from his illness to save the young man.

Despite protesting Felix’s explanation for what has happened, Lola is arrested for killing her nephew Nester and sentenced to a short time performing community service across town. Later a state commissioner comes by and appoints the boarder Felix as new manager of the rooming house.

When Lola finishes her community service she returns to the boarding house as the only female roomer in the facility now supervised by Felix. Of course she is idle without her old job. Felix could seek revenge and turn in Lola as a counter-productive citizen. But he has learned from Lola’s losing her dimwitted nephew Nester and then doing community service as a consequence of taking the low road.

Lola once again comes up with a scheme to make easy money. She tries to convince Felix that they can invent non-existent roomers to increase the state subsidy payments. She suggests that her now-dead nephew Nester could be the first bogus name. Soon she comes up with several other non-existent people’s names to add to rooming house’s clients list.

Since Lola has no official managerial role, the paperwork for requesting state subsidies must be submitted solely by Felix. But because he was initially reluctant to file the bogus reports Lola had actually written and signed them, using his name. True to form, several weeks later Lola turns Felix in to state security accusing him of filing false reports to obtain extra subsidy money.

Now for a third time Felix is arrested and taken to central headquarters for interrogation. When asked to account for the bogus subsidy requests he has submitted he points out to interrogators that the forms were not written in his handwriting, but in Lola’s. The interrogators want to know why he let her fill out the forms. He denies doing this and speculates that she destroyed the honest subsidy requests he had written and substituted her own inflated version, planning to blackmail him after the fact into giving her the extra money.

Surprisingly the interrogators believe his explanation, freeing him to go back to managing the rooming house. But they later arrest Lola. She is sent to the adjustment center where she talks her way out of receiving the sumptuous meal to create one less citizen to be noted in the city’s official statistics. In fact she is hired to work at cetral headquarters looking for fraudulent claims. In one last surprise, the subsidy payments for the rooming house are inexplicably raised in the amount of the false request Felix had unwittingly submitted. He reports this twice but the payments continue.

The end