Chương 17: FLAG

I had my hands two knuckles deep in a record that didn't want them there, and the record was winning. The access pane sat in a dead inspection alcove off the hold's section, a hand-width of cold blue interface-glow where the Tiers let the maintenance schema show through, clean and even and lit from nowhere, like everything up here. Nowhere to hide a hand. I'd come to it like you go back to a door you're sure you locked, except the thing I'd left open the night before was me.

"Every time you reach in to wipe it, you sign it," Errata said.

"I'd like that on the record before you do it again. The System doesn't forget. It itemizes."

"Then it can itemize this," I said, and reached. The trace was where it had warned me it would be: my own shape, the loud bright reading the sweep had taken of me, sitting in the record like a wet print on a swept floor. I read it like I read everything, not the words, but how it moved. It wasn't one mark. It made copies of itself, each copy handed to the next desk down, every desk stamping it and passing it on, and I'd come to stop the passing. So I read the direction of the passing and laid my hand across it.

Peeled a copy. Smeared a stamp. Turned one desk's certainty into a question it had to ask twice. By the time it asked, two more copies had already gone down two other lines.

"It's faster than I am," I said.

"It's a machine for being faster than you. That's the whole of its job description.... Nineteen, by the way. Still nineteen, while you wipe, which I'd admire more if wiping weren't also a use." I stopped chasing copies. Chasing copies was losing: you don't catch a thing downhill of you by running after it, and every copy I caught had spawned three more while my back was turned. I went up the slope instead, past the single desks to the one that kept spawning them: the source-desk, holding the original print.

I put both hands on that. For a moment the spawning hesitated, the whole line of it stuttering the way a queue does when someone near the front does a thing it has no form for. And the core under my forearm chose that moment to wake to the work, it always did when I read this hard, throwing its cold light up through my sleeve into the alcove's clean blue. The thing I'd cobbled out of corpses to keep myself alive, lit and humming at the exact second I was trying to make myself unwritten.

I pressed my arm to my side out of three days' habit and knew, even as I did it, that smothering the light didn't quiet the read. The read was the loud part. I had my fingers on the System's own spine, reading the place a record is born, and everything about me that could be read was reading at once.

"This is the part where you tell me to stop," I said.

"Twenty," Errata said, in the voice she keeps for a number she wishes she weren't reading.

"And yes. This is the part where I tell you to stop. You reached into a loud thing to make it quiet, and the reaching was the loudest thing in the room. It hasn't got a column for meant well, Carole. It keeps one for again, and you're filling it in by hand." A beat, and the clerk softened out of it.

"Take your hands off the spine and walk. It's already moving. You're only teaching it your grip." I could read the passing. I could lean on the passing. What I couldn't read was the deciding: the place under the desks where the System looked at a smeared bright nothing and chose what to call it. That door had no handle I could find, no seam, no cheap clamp, no half-second of trusting its own asking. It was the one part of the machine that wouldn't let me in.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I reached one more time anyway. For the wall behind Renn. For forty people being furniture in the dark. That was the reach the deciding noticed. [Anomaly profile: 21/100. Correction notice issued.] The clause changed. No correction class on record had meant we can't file you, so we can't come for you, the words I'd read off every box that ever turned me away.

Now they were gone, three in their place that meant the reverse. The number had a name now. The name was a verb.

"There it is," Errata said, and didn't dress it. A pause.

"You spent yourself last night to keep these forty off the System's desk. The spending is what set them on it. If the thing had a sense of humour, that would be the kind. It hasn't. It just keeps the receipts." The second box came soft and blue and far too polite, like the worst of them always did. [We've noted irregularities in your asset profile. A correction has been opened to help restore conformity. Please remain available. Thank you for your continued compliance.]"Errata's note," she said, flat against the box's warmth.

"They've opened a file with the shape of you in it, since they still haven't got your name, and the only verb the file knows is close.

'Restore conformity' is the phrase to read twice: conformity is the state of not being you.

'Remain available' is them asking you to hold still while they see to that. They do ask. It's the one courtesy that's never cost them anything." I should have stood up and walked. I didn't, not yet, because I could still read the record, and the record had begun to lean. The correction sat in me as a number. In the schema it sat as a place: a bright bothered spot the System now meant to get to.

And a thing it means to get to, it gets to by reading the ground around it, asking the same downhill question over and over: what's near it. The desks were already asking. And the loudest spot in two sections had a neighbour: a maintenance void off Service Block C, where the grid had quit counting. Forty people in it, holding their breath; a place that had lasted years by being exactly the kind of nothing the System never had a reason to look at. It had one now. The reason was me, standing too close to them.

"I made them visible," I said.

"No." The clerk went out of her voice.

"You made yourself visible. They're just standing next to you." It wasn't comfort. Just the opposite, said plain: the hold wasn't flagged. I was. The hold was only the ground I burned on. Adoma had set the terms the hour I came in, in a voice that wasn't asking: the day you get us looked at, you go, or we do. I'd carried an eighteen through her door and promised her my nothing would hold.

The pane in front of me read twenty-one and correction and remain available, and the woman who'd had me measured from the first breath was about to learn I'd spent her margin down to the floor. For thirty-one years, being no one was the only thing I'd ever been good at, and the only thing that had ever kept me breathing. You can't correct what you can't find, and nobody had ever once found me worth the finding. The System had just done the thing not one person in my whole life had got around to. It wrote me down.

I closed my hand on the empty air where the print had been, still there, still climbing, twenty-one and reaching now for the next number Errata wouldn't say out loud, and left the alcove glowing behind me, and went down to tell her the day had come.