Chương 3: Errata

We went down for two hours before we found a hole worth trusting. Going down feels wrong when something's hunting you. Every instinct says up, out, away. But up was where the cull was thickest, working through the levels in order, like a man reading a ledger top to bottom. Out didn't exist anymore. So I went into the maintenance crawlspaces I'd spent eleven years pretending I didn't live in, the crawl-throughs, the condenser voids, the dead plenum behind the Sublevel Twelve scrubbers.

I folded myself into the dark behind a dead heat-exchanger that hadn't run since before I was hired, and let my arm shake. The cull was still working. You could feel it more than hear it down here, a pressure in the deck, a rhythm of distant processing, the Stack being read and corrected one section at a time. It would get to Twelve eventually." You're doing the thing,"the voice said," where you sit very still and call it a plan."

"I'm resting."" You're shaking. The install's still negotiating its lease. Let it. While it does, you can pay attention to the much larger problem, which is me." I had been ignoring it, on purpose, the way you ignore a sound you don't want to be real. A voice in your head at the end of the world. You can call it shock, or panic, or grief, right up until it starts being useful. Then you have to admit it's something.

"Fine," I said.

"What are you."" A good question. Next question."

"That's not an answer."" It's the only answer I've got that's both true and short. You want true and long, we'll need a quieter apocalypse.

"A pause, and then, lighter:" You're at thirty-one percent on the install, by the way. It's settling. Slowly." There it was again. The thing it did. I'd noticed it during the warden, in the spur: how it knew things it shouldn't have been able to know. It read the System the way I read a junction box. Except it was reading from the inside.

"You talk about it like you worked there," I said. The silence that came back was a half-second too long." Everyone worked there,"she said." It's the only employer left."

"No. You talk about it like you worked inside it. You said the Mark-Twos used to route complaints through, like you used to read the complaints." I turned it over.

"You're not a survivor in my head. You're a piece of it. You came off the thing that's culling everyone and you stuck to me." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere." I'd file a grievance about that characterization,"she said," but I'm what happens to grievances." Which was a joke, and a deflection, and also a yes. I was learning her grammar.

"When?" I said.

"When did you 'stick.'"" Activation. The same second it turned everyone into assets, a little of it came loose. A correction that didn't get made. An error the System wrote and then never caught. And the nearest unfiled thing to land on was you, three meters down a crawlway, being the most unfiled thing on the deck.

"It said it lightly. It was not a light thing." I'm a mistake the System made about itself. You're a mistake it made about you. We're very compatible. It's almost romantic." A mistake. A correction slip. The little paragraph of fixes they used to staple into the back of a bad manual: errata, the list of everything the document got wrong, admitted too late to reprint.

"Errata," I said."... Excuse me?"

"That's what you are. The page of mistakes. I'm calling you Errata."" You're naming me after a correction slip."

"You ARE a correction slip."" I'm a very advanced correction slip," she said, with enormous dignity, and something in my chest unknotted a quarter-turn, the most relief I'd had since the lights went blue, and I distrusted it." Fine. Errata. It's undignified and accurate, which is the story of my entire existence, so. Hello, Carole." I went still.

"I didn't tell you my name."" You didn't have to. You're an asset; the System logged you the second it came online. I can read what it reads.

"A beat." Don't make that face. It's the single most useful thing about me and you're about to need it very badly." And there it was, the cold under the joke, the thing I'd been keeping my eyes off. I had a piece of the System in my head. She could read what the System read. She shouldn't exist. She'd said so herself: a correction that didn't get made. And the part of me that had spent eleven years staying off the important paperwork knew exactly what you do with a thing that shouldn't exist. You keep her.

You keep her very close, and you do not let anyone find out you have her, and you use her for everything she's worth before the thing that made her remembers she's missing.

"They'll want you back," I said." Eventually,"said Errata, and there was no joke in it that time." The System doesn't forget; it itemizes. Somewhere there's a line that used to be me, and a blank where the line should report in, and one day something is going to read that blank and come looking for what's filling it.

"The lightness came back, deliberate, a hand pulling me up out of water." Which is a problem for a Carole who's survived long enough to have it. The Carole in this plenum has a more immediate one: Twelve's next on the cull's list, your install's at forty percent, and you've got maybe twenty minutes before this is the room you died being clever in." I flexed the hand that wouldn't quite close. Down the dead plenum, the deck's rhythm had changed. The processing was working lower now, steady, getting closer.

"Down again?" I said." Down again. There's a freight-spine four levels under us that the cull will reach last, because the System values it least, because nobody important rides it.

"A pause, and the thing she did that I would spend a long time refusing to call kindness:" Your kind of road, Carole. Built cheap, runs forever, beneath anyone's notice. We'll be very at home." I got up. My arm was a stranger's. The voice in my head was a piece of the apocalypse. The world I'd lived in for thirty-one years was being read and corrected over my head. And somehow, against all reason, I had a plan and a passenger.

"Come on, then," I told it.

"Errata."" I'm right here,"she said." Where else would I be. Left at the condenser. Mind the edges." I went left, into the deeper dark, carrying a mistake the System had made about itself, toward a road built for people who didn't matter.