05:47, I wake and put the water on.
Before it boils, I take the tea tin down from the second shelf of the cupboard. A requisition label is stuck to the tin, in my own handwriting: pre-rain, about 40 percent left. I weigh out 3 grams of tea into a white porcelain cup, wait for the water to fall to around 80 degrees, and pour. The liquor turns yellow; the steam climbs. I hold the cup and smell it 3 times. The first is heat, the second is fragrance, the third I can't name — something like the pre in pre-rain.
I don't drink it. Never drink it. When the tea is down to room temperature I pour it into the sink, rinse the cup, set it upside down on the drying rack. 20 years, this routine every morning, 4 minutes.
I don't know why I brew this cup of tea. All I know is: if I don't brew it, the day is wrong.
Tea poured out, I grind ink at the old table by the window. The ink is ordinary student ink; the inkstone is the one Lao Zhou left me when he retired, stone, a small chip gone from one edge. I pour in half a cup of water, grind 50 circles, write 5 characters — today's date — in Liu style. When I'm done I don't wash the inkstone. What is left in the well grinds again the next day. The inkstone has been in my hands 11 years, and the well has never gone dry. When Lao Zhou handed it over he said one thing: When the inkstone dries, the characters float. I asked why. He didn't answer; he went off to tidy his drawer. The day he retired, the drawer was empty; what I saw was full — he took nothing with him, the seal gauge, the paperweight, 3 pens, all of it left behind, like a man stepping out to buy cigarettes.
I write the date, press the paper under the inkstone. Out the door.
06:12:00, the commuter car pulls in. The doors open for 8 seconds and I board; the car has 30 seats, all empty. 06:12:08, the doors close and the car moves. The buildings outside slide backward one by one, every facade clean: no laundry poles, no air-conditioner units. On platform 07 a dispatch screen, red characters scrolling: Run 1094 today, on-time rate 100.00%.
I get off at the Head Office stop. The platform is empty too. As far as I know, this train has always been empty, and it has always been on time. I once put those 2 facts side by side and thought about them, came up with nothing, and let it go.
Passing city hall you can see the board at its door. White characters on red, 3 lines, left to right: water meter reading, power meter reading, review stamp rate 99.9997%. Three kinds of number hanging side by side, same typeface, same size. Citizens glance at it going past; no one can tell which number belongs to whom. The board's corners were repainted last year. I smelled the paint on the commuter car for 2 days.
The year of onboarding training, the instructor showed us the archived file of an appeal letter. 4 characters in the header: To the one who can see me. The letter closes with no signature, only a number. The instructor said that citizens never meet a reviewer, that no one has ever seen a reviewer walk out of the hall, and that this goes by the name of strict discipline. I wrote the line into my notebook that day. Later, flipping back, I found I had drawn a question mark beside it and could not remember what the question was.
A maintenance notice is taped up inside the elevator, dated April, 3 years back. The issued-by field carries a stamp; so does the review field. Every time I look, it is still there. The elevator takes 19 seconds from B2 to floor 1. I have counted it 730 times.
The elevator opens onto the Head Office hall.
The lockers line the left side of the entrance, 800 in a row, staff numbers on the doors. Locker 4471 holds my coat, spare sleeve guards, a strip of bandages, half a bottle of ink. Taped inside the door, a handover slip; the previous user's signature field is empty. Word is the review tier's lockers never change hands — the number goes with the seal. On the day I started, the locker held exactly these things. I assumed the man before me had cleared it out. Then I noticed the ink was full, and the bandage batch number was recent. I take this as the Head Office being thoughtful.
Three thousand desks, spreading from the entrance to where the eye gives up. The light comes down from above, even, stable, landing on the desk tops with no shadows and no waver. Whether the sun is out, you can't tell from in here — there are no windows. I hear other agencies talk about daylight, about orientation. The review tier doesn't. I like the light here. Light is a constant; people are the variable. A place where work is done should keep the variable outside.
My desk is in Zone C, no. 4471. The staff number is engraved into the top left corner of the desktop: HZ-4471. Second compartment of the right-hand drawer: the ink pad.
2 empty desks over on my left is Lao Ge's place. Lao Ge arrives later than I do and leaves earlier; 20 years second in the nation, a little over 8,000. Every morning he clears his throat stepping into the hall, like reporting for duty. Our conversation for a whole year adds up to fewer than 10 sentences, most of them the length of Lend me your paperweight. He doesn't look at the standings screen. He knows he is second, and he knows why he is second: he reads every document twice. I have never asked him why he reads twice; he has never asked me why I read once. In the review tier that isn't rudeness. It's measure.
Before 07:00 the hall has a sound of its own. Before the 3,000 desktops light up one after another comes the wind of the ventilation system, and then the sound of 30,000 drawers being pulled open at different moments, dense, like hail coming down. I stand at the Zone C entrance and listen a while. It is the one moment of the day when the hall is out of step.
The ink pad changes every 77 days. On the morning it falls due, the new box is always already in the drawer, film unbroken, and the old box is always already gone. The requisition form is clipped to the inside wall of the drawer. Format as follows:
> Item: cinnabar ink paste (review tier only, batch no. HH-0317) > Cycle: 77 calendar days > Replacement: automatic > Handler: (blank)
The handler field has been blank for 20 years. My first year in, I asked Lao Zhou, my master, who was supposed to sign there. Lao Zhou said: Not a turn that ever comes to you. I said, understood. I stopped asking after that. Lao Zhou has been retired 11 years now, and the field is still blank, blank very smoothly, like a box that never planned on being filled.
07:00:00, the desktop lights. The day's first item pops out of the document slot.
My work is simple: read, stamp, return.
Documents come down from the proposal tier: a number in the header, a body that states the matter, a review field left open on the last page. I read the body and check the rights grade — Grade 3 and above, anything touching people, must be stamped. Only sealed decisions are valid; of the Natural Person Review Act, that is the one provision still alive. The seal comes down, the document exits through the out-slot, and the execution tier does as decided. The whole process averages 2.17 seconds.
The things I have stamped don't sound like much when listed, but they are real: dredging volume for Pump Station 17. Streetlight brightness for one alley. Replacement of 42 desks at a primary school. A surname correction for someone — Shào (邵) changed to Shé (佘) — signed by the man himself, with a carbon copy of the birth registration attached. Scheduling for radiotherapy. A load limit on a bridge. A death benefit converted to monthly payments. The disaster determination for the rain of March 2089. Every one of them has passed through my hands. For every one of them, I was present.
The seal is in the drawer's third compartment. Wooden handle, brass collar, 2 lines on the face: the top line ASSIZE · REVIEW, the bottom line the number 4471. The face was already old when Lao Zhou handed it over, edges worn round, its age unreadable. Among all the review seals on the register, 4471 is neither the oldest nor the newest. It fits my hand the way something fits that was measured off the web of my thumb. That thought can't be pressed far. Good seals all fit the hand.
The execution tier's straddle seal is machine-pressed, embossed steel, set along the page edge. Mine presses the review field on the last page: cinnabar, dried in open air for 3 seconds, must not be smeared. Two seals layered on one document: one proves the pages were not swapped, one proves a person looked. The manual's own words are drier: the straddle seal verifies integrity; the review verifies responsibility. The public recognizes only the red one. They call it the human seal.
The Assize computes fast. The textbook has one line: Machines compute fast; humans answer for it. I recited it as a child, and the standing sign at the hall entrance still carries it, with a line of small print beneath: stamp rate 99.9997%, posted at the city hall door beside the water meter and the power meter, red ground, white characters.
09:15, my hand trembles.
0.4 seconds. The stamp stops in midair, then comes down. Face square, document valid, no error out of the out-slot. Only I know about those 0.4 seconds. I have timed them: 09:15:02 to 09:15:02.4, every day, never off by more than a second. 20 years. It doesn't change with the day or the hour; it reads like something scheduled in. The annual physical comes every year and the conclusion is the same every year: fit. I asked a doctor whether a 0.4-second tremor was anything to worry about. The doctor said the report has no such line item.
I call it an old habit. An old habit is the kind of ailment you don't treat.
I have timed it on the kind of old stopwatch from gym class. Stop, look, press. 0.4 seconds — shorter than the watch's scale; you have to read it by estimate. When Lao Zhou was still here I showed him once. He looked at the watch, didn't take it, handed it back, said: As long as the seal lands square. I said it landed square. He said then it was fine. That was 20 years ago. I stopped showing people after that. The watch lives in the drawer's first compartment, beside the error notebook. Every year after the physical, I take it out and check it against the time. It is still running.
At noon I eat in the canteen. 3 dishes; I eat 2. The people at the next table eat 2 as well. Nobody talks, and the chewing keeps in step. I don't find anything in that. Where work is done, eating is one more procedure.
Halfway through the meal, Lao Ge passes half a napkin across a table and points at my cuff. A trace of cinnabar on the cuff. I say thanks. He says: The seal keeps the man. Then he goes back to eating. The remark has no head and no tail; I carried it the whole way and couldn't make it out, and I don't plan to ask. That is how talk goes in the review tier: the words get tossed out, and whether they land is up to them.
Afternoon as usual. A proposal comes up: relocation of District 9 of the city-south cemetery, human impact Grade 3, 617 names listed in the annex. I count them one by one — counting names is my rule, taught by Lao Zhou: Before the seal lands on the number, it lands on the people. 617. Not one missing. I stamp. A 2.17-second job, and I take 4 minutes over it. At times like this I don't look at the watch.
16:44, day-close. Today's numbers surface on the desktop:
> Reviewer: HZ-4471 > Stamps today: 10,080 > Net time: 6 hr 05 min > Average: 2.17 sec/item > Errors: 0 > Cumulative errors (twenty years on the register): 0
10,080, first in the nation. Second is someone in Zone D, a little over 8,000; I have never seen him. The standings screen hangs above Zone C, red characters, my staff number on the first line, 20 years running. The year I came in, Lao Zhou pointed at it and said: The numbers don't look bad. Don't work for the numbers. I said okay. Ever since, I pass the screen every day and still give it a look. Then I go do whatever the day needs.
In the first compartment of my drawer there is a notebook, kraft cover, 3 characters on it in my own hand: error notebook. What it records are not mistakes I have made — I haven't made any. It records the ones that almost happened, the ones somebody else would have made. Last month's entry: read 卯 (mǎo) as 卯 with one added stroke — which is a different character (卵, luǎn). Caught it on the second read, before stamping. The month before: ink paste not yet dry, ghosted impression, withdrawn and restamped. 40-odd entries in the book, and not one of them ever happened. Open it anywhere. This entry, say: No. 4021, applicability clause for the death-benefit standard, prior year's parameters used by mistake, caught before the stamp. Or this one, from last winter: applicant's surname, 冉 (Rǎn), read aloud as 丹 (Dān) by the clerk taking the paper. Verified verbally, then stamped. Neither of these things ever happened. Ms. Rǎn did not exist that day. I write down the things that never happened, and I write them so they read as true. Lao Zhou flipped through it the day he retired, handed it back, said: Keep it. I asked, keep it for what. He said: When you commit your first one, you'll know what they look like.
I said okay.
From 15:00 to 16:00 is the smoothest stretch of the afternoon: hand quicker than mind, reading and stamping fused into one motion, the out-slot swallowing documents in one unbroken line of sound. This is when the mind drifts easiest. The manual has words for it: a reviewer shall not stamp continuously in a state of inertia for more than 90 minutes, and shall break off on his own initiative. The way to break off is to stand, go to the water dispenser, draw a cup, 40 steps out and back. Every day at 15:37 I get up and draw the cup, carry it back full, set it at my right hand. It sits there until end of shift; I never drink any. That's a habit too. A habit has only one rule: it doesn't touch the seal.
16:51, I close the error notebook, and the desktop enters seal return. The 3,000 desks go dark one after another, like a tide going out, from the farthest rows of Zone D, rank by rank, Zone C last. The manual requires reviewers to leave the hall once the desktops have gone dark, the day's totals already filed; before 07:00 tomorrow, the hall needs no one in it. I stow the ink pad, lock the drawer, push the chair back into the scribed line at the desk's edge. Lao Ge has already gone; his paperweight, as always, hasn't been put away.
Right then, my document slot lights up.
There should be no document in the slot during seal return. In 20 years there never has been. This one is an old item, scan format, the pages yellowed inside the image, a straddle seal bled open in the lower right corner. Header number: 77413. The status field shows a word I don't know from anywhere. 2 characters lit there, red:
Red light.
My desk is the only one still lit in the hall. The light comes down from above and lands on those 2 characters; the red is steady, no flicker, and in no hurry. I glance toward the Zone C entrance. Nobody. I stand there and look at it, maybe 4 seconds.
Then I sit back down.