November 28, 6:50 in the morning.
I drew water and watered the pothos. The soil was dry. 3 grams pre-rain, smell it 3 times, pour it out. Two drops of water into the ink, 20 strokes of grinding. One bandage changed; 7 in the drawer. The new badge pressed 3 times. The log has a column for each of these; I did them in order, none left out. Doing them, I knew why each one is what it is. Knowing is knowing; the order of the hands never broke.
At 07:00, 77413 resent — the 14,841st time. The reroute overdue by 494 hr 09 min. The head-of-queue item: day 23.
At 09:15:02, the hand tremor, 0.40 seconds. Routine program, run no. 7,330.
At 8:20 I reached the Audit Office, floor 12, room 1204. Ji Lan was in. On her desk lay the copy of the suspension decision; the sealed bag with my seal in it stood on the iron rack at her left hand, barcode out.
I took the page from my bag — folded in 3, every crease still there — laid it on her desk, and opened it out.
I say: Page 1 of the 77413 main file. When the main file was pulled on November 9, I took it. On the checkout register I ticked "original not removed." That line was false. On November 22 you said only one item was true; the true one was the curve and the physical. The missing page — that one is me.
She looked at the page a long time. Footer: main file 77413-01, November 3, 2065, reviewer Shen Yan, seal no. 4471. The last time she saw this page, it was missing.
She took her pen and entered the 3 sentences into the inquiry record, dated today. When she finished she asked: What do you want now.
I say: Process 77413.
She says: The seal is in the sealed bag. The fitness mark hasn't been lifted; under the manual, during a suspension the seal is not returned.
I say: No need for the seal. I need two people to make this trip with me. One is you — the records desk can call up Vault Zero; the authority is yours. One is A He from the Archives; the outer door keys are with her.
She says: To do what.
I say: To look at a thing no one has attested in 40 years.
She took the sealed bag down from the iron rack and clamped it under her arm. She says: Bring it. Under procedure, the one handling the item and the seal don't separate.
At 9:40, the Archives. A He was already waiting in the outer room — blue smock, no blueprint tube, the key ring pinched in her hand. She gave me one look, asked nothing, and led us down to the inner stacks. The fire door, 64 steps, 114 meters of level way, enamel plaques one after another. At the steel door, the third key turned twice. She stopped outside the threshold.
She says: I'm only in charge of what's inside my door.
Ji Lan went first. The glass gate lit blue: Records desk JH-0117, authorization verified, cleared. I followed, and the screen lit again: Registrant Shen Yan, standing authorization, cleared.
First compartment of the low cabinet. I drew out the 0001 kraft bag and laid the 3 things on the registration table: the registration form, the approval page, the summary page of the founding log. Ji Lan went through them one by one. At 09:15:02 she stopped for 2 seconds. On day 5 she had drawn the curve up to 09:15, stopped 2 seconds, drawn on past it. Today she stopped on those 4 digits again — this time there was something to see.
She turned the summary page to its back. The Source Register. 3 lines. She read them aloud: Shen Yan, built in. Lin Xiumei, on the register. Shen Yan (1), built in.
She says: When was this written.
I say: 40 years ago. 20 years before I joined.
She says: Who wrote it.
I say: No one. It is the founding log. It came with the day it took effect.
She asked nothing more. She went to the search terminal, called up 0001, and read it line by line. Status: living. Location: the Municipal No. 7 Nursing Home. Approval delegated to: the Assize. Condition for the delegation to end: her own presence and her own stamp. Remarks: no record of presence in 40 years.
She says: Death registration, February 9, 2083. The register says living. I'm calling the basis on both sides.
I say: The death registration governs her person; the register governs her seat. The day she died, the person went to the death registration, and the seat went on waiting for her. It couldn't wait her in, so it had the whole Head Office wait in her place.
She says: That isn't logical.
I say: It's lawful. Article 1 recognizes only natural-person approval. Every day she stays on the register is a day the condition stands. The system doesn't process people. The system processes conditions.
She filled out retrieval requests for both lines of basis, numbered under a JH filing, dated today. Doing it she didn't look at me again; her hands kept the order from day 5, recording the inquiry — number first, then write, not a sentence skipped.
She came back to the registration table, turned the summary page face up, and looked at the last-attestation field. 2125, attested by blank. She pulled the pen from her chest pocket and wrote in the field: Attested. Ji Lan, JH-0117, November 28, 2125. When she finished she flattened the page and read it through once.
Forty years and 7 months — the first time anyone had filled this field.
She says: Carry on with yours.
I took two blank form sheets from my bag. There was ink on the registration table in the vault; I had brought a pen. I stood at the table and wrote. The characters have to be written stroke by stroke — I have written for 20 years, and these 2 pages took 40 minutes.
> Disposition page (objection to a natural-person review 77413) > Document disposed of: Health Admin Refusal [2083] No. 007 (review field empty, void from the outset for 42 years) > Disposition opinion: The original rejection is revoked. The applicant Lin Xiumei's application to terminate her own life support is granted. > Reviewer (natural person) field: machine. Unit no. HZ-4471, second holder. Not a natural person. > Stamp: (not stamped). Handwritten by the stamper, above. > Date: November 28, 2125.
In the natural-person field, the two characters, machine, went down in one pass. The strokes were tight. This font has been out of the factory 40 years, and this was the first time it wrote those 2 characters.
Ji Lan read it through behind me. She says: Under Article 1, this item has no effect.
I say: Under Article Zero: first the test, then the truth. The test record is on the receipts of the four gates — 4 sheets, sample source non-biological. I have submitted to testing; now I am truthful. Whether it takes effect is its affair. Whether I write it is mine.
She had no reply. Procedurally she could find no fault: Article Zero prescribes no penalty, no procedure, and no bar against a machine's filling it in. She took my 4 receipts, examined them one by one, then added a line to the inquiry record: 4 test receipts examined. Examiner: Ji Lan.
I took the rejection order original out of the case file — the page with the empty review field — and pinned the disposition page behind it. Pinned, the whole file went back into the 0001 bag, the seal strip onto its old marks. From January 17, 2083, this item had waited for a signature. What it waited until today for was this word: machine. Whatever the word is, that is what the field says. A document doesn't lie.
Out of the vault. When the steel door closed, Ji Lan didn't come out. She set the sealed bag on the registration table and opened the low cabinet's compartments one by one. First compartment, 0001: everything in the file. Second through sixth: dust on the bottoms, an even dust. She looked through every compartment, closed each, and pressed each door to confirm the catch. Her way of checking a repository runs the same school as the blue-sleeve woman at Personnel: seals first, then compartment bottoms, fingers never touching the paper.
Nineteen years in audit; the red-light records she had seen totaled 4. The fifth she didn't come back out for. She left herself in the vault and read it through in one sitting. The steel door closed behind me; the white light in its seam cut to a line, then went out.
At 11:30, the outer room of the inner stacks. The main-file box sat on A He's table, its string broken. I handed her the page.
I say: Return it to the file.
She took it, footer first, then the creases. She squared the loose sheets of the main file on the table and counted them page by page. At page 11 she paused, set page 12 on top, and squared it.
She says: 12 pages. Complete.
For 15 days — since the day of the 307 consultation — the number had stood at 11. Today it was complete. She restrung the thread, 2 passes of cotton, the knot at the back, and in the paper register book wrote: seven seven four one three, main file 12 pages, received. In the handler field she signed her own name.
I say: The supplementary file is still one page short.
She looked up.
I say: The disposition page I wrote — one page, the copy — goes into the supplementary file this afternoon, pinned behind the copy of the rejection order. When you count, count it in.
She says: After page 19?
I say: Page 20.
She says: Good. I'll hold the page number for you.
Back at the hall at 2:50 in the afternoon. The hall's light down from above, 3,000 desks, the stamping running together into one sound. My own desk was still under its cloth; I lifted the cloth and folded it. The screen was lit, head of queue pinned, the red light walking second by second. I opened the details and read its bottom one last time:
> 77413 · Details > First dispatch: April 11, 2085, 07:00. > Cumulative resends: 14,841. Disposition receipts: 0. Signed for: 0. > System-wide view records: 1. > Basis of dispatch: objection decision, operative clause item 2, "This objection is permanently in effect." Termination condition: (none).
Forty years, more than 44 million copies dispatched; one hand had clicked it open, and today that hand gave it a receipt. I typed into the disposition field, character for character the same as the paper: Original rejection revoked; application granted. Reviewer (natural person) field: machine, HZ-4471, second holder, not a natural person.
I pressed submit.
The screen went gray for 3 seconds. Then a panel popped up, red ground, white letters, no confirm key given:
> Legal alert FA-0001 > A non-natural-person declaration has appeared in the natural-person reviewer field. > Under Article 1 of the Natural Person Review Act, acts of approval shall be performed by a natural person. > Effective immediately: all seal faces across the Head Office frozen, 3,000 seats in total. > All stamped records transfer to pending review. > Triggering item: 77413. Trigger time: 15:47:02.
15:47:02. Two seconds off a full 8 hours — exactly the first whole second after this morning's 0.4 seconds finished their run. When the system keeps a time, it has only ever taken whole seconds.
The sound of stamping stopped. It stopped unevenly: the east end of Zone C first, one desk, then the next, westward one after another. Each desk's screen turned red at intervals of about 2 seconds, neither fast nor slow. The red lights lit past one by one, like stamping. At that rhythm, all 3,000 would take better than an hour and 40 minutes to finish. In the hall some people stood up; some sat without moving. The ventilation had never been this loud.
Lao Ge stood at the edge of his station, both hands hanging, looking at the red-lit screen. Xiao Zheng ran 2 steps in from the mouth of Zone C, stopped halfway, stood in the gap between 2 desks, looked at me, then at the screen, backed up a step, and settled at the mouth of Zone C. No one spoke. Their packages don't carry this passage.
At 4:05 another panel popped up in the corner of the screen, gray ground:
> System notice > 77413 status change: pending review (disposition record attached). > Resend procedure: suspended. Cumulative resends stop at the 14,841st. > Records stamped under HZ-4471: 7,319 working days, all transferred to pending review.
A queue 43 years in the waiting, 40 years of resends, stopped on a disposition a machine reported about itself. Last year the whole Head Office stamped 10.5 billion items; 217 were changes of substance. From 15:47:02 on, that 10.5 billion has to be counted again, and the count holds only one question: at the time, what was present. My own 7,319 days are inside it. I handed every one of them over with my own hands.
On the day-close sheets, the fields after 15:47 all stood empty. 3,000 lines, cut off at the same moment. The last time this hall went a whole day without a stamp was 80 years ago.
At 4:00 the intranet posted an authorization record: records desk JH-0117, retrieval of the Assize's founding log, Source Register included. Time of authorization: 10:58. Ji Lan was still in the vault. An account unreconciled for 40 years and 7 months, reconciled in one sitting. She can't recite the definition of a natural person; the vault is at her hand now, and it is written in the first line of the founding log.
At 4:20 a text message came in on the terminal, sender a landline number, the old post office building's block. Six characters: Received. Everyone is watching. No signature. Under the analog clock in 307, for the first time in 80 years, the screen knew the news before the person did.
At 4:40 a receipt came in on the intranet, sent from the Archives, no. 0417. Two lines: Supplementary file 77413, page 20, copy of the disposition page, received. In the handler field, one name: A He.
I cleared the desk. The cloth folded and put back in its place by the seal pad. Pen cap up. The front of the slip of paper held 14 lines; the last line was built in. I struck it out and added a 15th: truthfully. The 2 lines on the back stayed as they were — those 2 lines have their answer now. Whoever wrote them knew 40 years ago that someone would come to check them.
At 17:12 the commuter car stood in its old spot, door open, no one inside. I got on. As the car came out of the Head Office gate I looked back: every floor of the main building had its windows lit red, floor by floor, from the bottom up — that too like stamping.
Home at 6:30. Water first.
The pothos has been dead a year; the watering I have kept up for 11 years. The log has a column for tea, a column for the font, a column for the tremor, a column for maintenance. No column for watering the pothos. Of everything I have done in 20 years, this is the one thing that isn't entered on any books anywhere.
The water went down; one patch of the soil's surface darkened and soaked in slowly. A thin ring of water gathered in the tray.
I waited for the water to finish soaking, put the cup back where it belongs, and turned off the light.
Tomorrow morning at 6:50, one more round.
