Chương 7: Quota

The fork Sefa swore was unswept let us through clean, and I should have known better than to take that for a kindness. Nothing down here came free. It only came later. The corridor didn't end. It just opened out. The walls fell away and we were standing at the lip of a room that ran back past where the light could reach, a long dark hall with a belt down the spine of it, and the belt was moving. Cradles rode it, hundreds, each holding a thing in a different state of done. At the near end, raw frames.

Farther down, frames with plating. Farther still, plating closed over and seamed and starting to look like the warden that had nearly killed me on the first day. Arms came down out of the ceiling on long booms, set a panel, ran a seam, lifted, came down again on the next, and again, and again, never once in a hurry. The air was wrong for the Underdecks: hot metal and curing resin, the clean chemical bite of something being made, sitting on top of the cull's ozone-and-rot like a tablecloth thrown over a body.

I stopped. I knew the shape of this. Eleven years on floors that ran lines, keeping other people's honest, and my hands understood the place a half-second before the rest of me did and wished they hadn't. Errata had gone quiet. She did that so rarely that the quiet landed like a dropped tool. Then:"Oh." Small, and not for me.

"Oh, they're still making them. Of course they are." The contempt came back into her voice, but slow, like it walked in from a distance.

"There's a quota, Carole. There's a quota, and we just walked into the middle of it." Sefa came up to my shoulder and stopped hard. She'd understood the Mark-Three; you could watch her price it and decide to live anyway. This she had no price for. She looked at the belt with her whole scavenger's face, a girl who stripped the dead for what they were worth, doing the sums on a hall of bodies that weren't bodies yet, and coming up with nothing she could use.

"These aren't dead," she said. Quiet. Almost a complaint.

"You can't strip something that isn't dead yet."

"No," I said. I didn't tell her to look away. She wouldn't have, and it would have lied about what we were standing in. Across was the only way on, and across meant the belt: it ran wall to wall, and the one door I could see sat in the far wall, a maintenance hatch, small and honest. Between here and there: the line, and everything riding it. A terminal stood at the belt's head, an amber readout cycling figures to nobody in particular. Errata read it over my shoulder, fast and unkind.

[FAB LINE 9 · UNIT 11, 026 OF — · CYCLE NOMINAL · WITHIN BUDGET]"'Within budget,'" Errata said, and amended it, an erratum filed against the machine that had named it after its own mistakes.

"That's the line you want to scream at. Somebody costed this. Somebody decided how much a thing built to kill you is allowed to spend on the job, and the figure they wrote down was: less. Less than the last one. Cheaper every cycle, because…" a hitch, half a beat, there and then stepped over.

"…because for there to be a budget, somebody has to be keeping it."

"And the dash." I'd seen it. Eleven thousand and twenty-six of nothing.

"And the dash." Her voice flattened out.

"They're not counting up to a number, Carole. There's no last one written on the order. They'll build these until there's no one left to flag, and the order still won't read done. It'll read resupply. That's your quota. There's no number to hit. It's just a direction, and they keep walking it." I needed to move before the place noticed it had a guest.

"How do I cross it."

"You walk." Brisk now, back on the clock, and I'd have kissed it for the brisk.

"Statute of their own make: an asset isn't an asset until it's stamped. The conformance plate seats dead last, up at the head, and until it does, none of this is awake. It's stock. Unclassed." A pause she enjoyed too much.

"For about four meters, Carole, you and a hundred Enforcers are the same thing to this room, inventory it hasn't finished pricing. So walk. Don't run. Running has a signature. Be a part." Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. I put Sefa at my back, told her to step where I stepped and touch nothing that wasn't floor, and I walked out onto the floor of the thing that made the things I killed. Up close the unfinished ones were worse.

Open along the spine, their insides showing, and the insides came to almost nothing, a kinetic line run straight past the coolant because routing it right cost a fitting, no redundancy, no shielding worth the word.

"Look at that," Errata said, offended on behalf of craft itself.

"All label. A wine that's all label and vinegar under the cork. They don't have to be good, you understand. They only have to be more." We were three meters across when the cradle at the head reached the terminal and stopped, and the arms over it came down in a flurry, finishing. A flat plate the size of my palm lifted off a rack and seated over an open chest with a sound I'd spent a career learning to listen for, a stamp coming down on a form. The thing's head came up and turned to me, not Sefa.

I was the loudest unclassed signature in a room that had just remembered what classed meant, and it decided I was the difference. It came off the cradle fast, all the speed the line had poured into it and none of the sense, and I did the one thing four meters of walking had taught me. I read the plate. A conformance plate seated is a bolt thrown, and a bolt thrown is still warm in its seat the half-second before the housing takes it. I'd thrown enough bolts to own that half-second.

I went in under it, not at the chest the plate had just sealed, but at the throat-seam it hadn't reached, the hand's-width where the new lock hadn't finished telling the body it was allowed to be. I put the vent into it. Cold went down my arm and out. The clamp knocked once on the way, that small wrong stutter, a hair worse than last time, the maintenance I kept refusing arriving on schedule of its own.

Then the coolant hit the unsanctioned seam, and the half-made thing seized around a cold it had been built too cheap to dump. I went through the throat with the blade. It came apart along lines that had never been welded, only budgeted. It dropped back onto the belt. The belt carried it forward a foot and indexed, because a unit short doesn't read as a loss on an order with no total. It reads as a rounding error. In the open chest, one finished thing: a coupling, line-fresh, never run. I pulled it.

It came without a fight; nothing in it had lived long enough to learn how to hold on. [HARVEST: Kinetic coupling, line-fresh. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 19%.]"Nineteen," Errata said.

"Not a gift. That's just how new it is, never run, never fought, no bad mornings on the clock yet. Bank it. We are not doing surgery on a factory floor with the floor still open for trade." I banked it. And the room finished pricing me. [Anomaly profile: 11/100. Unsanctioned signature logged in restricted fabrication.]"Eleven."

"Eleven, and bought in a room we want behind us. It'll read where the signature stood, and the signature stood here. Hatch. Now." I read the hatch open with a hand and got Sefa through it. She went, and looked back once, and I watched her do what I'd done a minute before, feel for the edge of the number and not find it.

"It didn't even notice," she said. She didn't mean the kill. She meant how big it was, a kid revising upward what she was up against.

"No," I said.

"It wouldn't."

"How many," I said then, and it wasn't to her. Errata knew the how-many I meant, and it wasn't the ones on the belt. A pause. For Errata, a long one.

"It doesn't run to a total," she said.

"Eleven thousand and twenty-six of nothing. That's the number that should empty you out, not how many they've made. That there's no last one drawn anywhere. They'll keep building the thing that corrects us until there's nobody left needing corrected, and then they'll build one more, and file it under spare." I put the hatch between us and went to find the climb. Behind it the line came down on the next cradle, on time and within budget, and didn't miss me at all. It was already pricing the next of us.