Chương 104: Duplicate Persons

Duplicate Persons arrived while Juniper still had wet socks, cold coffee, and no patience left for a clean answer pretending it was mercy. Duplicate Persons did not arrive with teeth showing. It arrived politely, during ordinary work, and that was why Mateo kept one hand away from the stamp until someone had read the polite part for blood. The first read of duplicate persons sounded harmless enough: The system flags people who were counted by multiple stations.

Juniper made them say who would carry it if the harmless version stopped being harmless. Nobody ran from duplicate persons. Juniper had learned that panic gave paperwork a chair at the table. The first witness read it aloud once for the words, once for the blank spaces, and a third time for the person it wanted to appoint by accident.

"That wants a person," Rosa said.

"It is going to get a process."

"Processes bite when nobody names the teeth," Althea said, and duplicate persons gave the room a fresh set to count. JUNIPER NOTICE: Duplicate Persons Detected pressure: clean-interface pressure Touched function: routes Known risk: the clean field will later claim the messy people who made it possible Available counter: bell-and-board notice; public witness; correction before consent Mateo wanted to stamp duplicate persons because stamping was faster than fear.

Rosa put her elbow on the stamp pad and made him wait for the slower answer, the one with enough witnesses to survive being useful. The room refused to let duplicate persons stay as outline. Instead of correcting the duplicates away, Juniper uses them to show that people have multiple civic relations. Rosa put that part on the board and made the nearest witnesses name what the sentence was trying to skip. The routes table took the first copy of duplicate persons, but only the first copy.

Juniper had paid too much for that distinction to let one touched station become a mouth, a boss, or a place where dissent went to disappear. Horace wrote the distinction in block letters for duplicate persons. Maribel checked the spacing, because bad spacing had a way of turning into bad law when everyone was tired enough to accept it. Inside duplicate persons, the useful piece and the ownership claim arrived braided together. Rosa appears in routes, safety, communications, and rest needs.

Horace copied the useful piece in black pencil and left the claim in blue where everyone could distrust it. The trap in duplicate persons was that it did not look cruel. It looked tidy. Juniper had learned to fear tidy whenever the tidiness required one exhausted person to become a handle for everyone else.

"Fast is not proof," Rosa said, tapping the card for duplicate persons against the communications board.

"If it is clean, it can survive witnesses. If it cannot survive witnesses, it was never clean." So they read duplicate persons out loud: the words on the page, the blank line under them, and the consequence that would crawl out tomorrow if nobody named it today. The room did not calm down. It became harder to fool. Mrs. Vance rang the bell for duplicate persons, then rang it again because Darren looked tempted to narrate. Maya slid a bowl into his hands.

"Eat or object," she said.

"Do not do both badly." Then duplicate persons had to become useful instead of clever. The room named the need, the harm, the correction window, and the part the system was pretending not to understand. Senn would not let anyone advance the card until all four were visible. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

SORT DUPLICATE PERSONS Function touched: routes Need first, owner never Consent field: open until affected seats answer Record status: witnessed, dirty, correctable The notice for duplicate persons stuttered at the edge of the letters. Not defeat. Irritation. The kind a clean machine made when a dirty room insisted the missing people counted too. Murray found the boring sentence duplicate persons needed and looked offended by its usefulness. No answer could carry more authority than the work it actually touched.

He underlined actually like the word had personally wasted his afternoon. The blue folder accepted the underline for duplicate persons without blessing it. Good. Blessings were how systems charged extra later. Juniper only needed the folder to admit the limit existed. By then people knew to test duplicate persons against the person with the least spare breath. The duplicate-person standard becomes evidence against single-category governance.

Maya asked what happened if that person said yes because no sounded too expensive. For one minute after duplicate persons, nobody became Juniper's mouth, owner, receiver, patron, debtor, road boss, or official memory. The room stayed annoyingly plural. Juniper had started to treat that annoyance as a vital sign. After duplicate persons, Juniper won an interval, not peace. Intervals were ugly little victories. People spent them on water, soup, socks, and the brief luxury of not being converted into functions.

"Write the limit before the answer," Mateo said.

"Write the people before the limit," Maya said. Horace wrote the limit for duplicate persons before the answer and the people before the limit. Records were not there to win. Records were there to stop a convenient summary from murdering the argument later. On the public board, duplicate persons stopped being a title and became a list of hands, limits, and names. Ugly, yes. But ugly was harder to counterfeit than clean.

The final line for duplicate persons went up in Horace's careful hand: applies only to this work, remains correctable by affected people, and creates no receiver. Mateo read that last part twice, just to enjoy it. Mateo kept circling back to the physical part of duplicate persons. Where did the paper sit. Who had to carry it. Who would be blamed if the weather ruined it, if the route changed, if someone with a cleaner badge arrived and asked for the name of the person in charge.

Juniper had survived too many traps that began as storage questions. Maya tested duplicate persons against dinner because dinner was where theory went to be embarrassed. A rule that could not survive bowls, tired hands, children leaning on knees, and someone asking for seconds was not ready for the public board. Horace grumbled about soup stains on civic records. Maya told him stains were how records proved they had met people. The bell-and-board notice for duplicate persons did not feel heroic while they built it.

It felt like arguing over commas while the ceiling dripped. But the comma decided whether a helper became an owner, whether a witness became a boss, whether a need became a debt. Juniper had become painfully respectful of punctuation that could stop a future ambush. Senn made them read the quiet version of duplicate persons, the one a tired person would hear after missing half the meeting. The system flags people who were counted by multiple stations.

If that quiet version created a single mouth, a hidden owner, or a person too useful to refuse, the answer went back to the table. Nobody liked this rule. That was one of its better qualities. LOCAL STANDARD UPDATED Added: bell-and-board notice Relation: Census Weather Next pressure forecast: The People Outside the Doors No reward banner appeared for duplicate persons. Unit Seven honked once outside anyway, a flat civic punctuation mark that made Mrs. Vance say, "Language," to a truck.

When the routes witnesses checked duplicate persons one last time, they used the tired-person test. A rule that could not survive someone asking 'what about me?' was not a rule yet. It was only furniture with handwriting. They tested duplicate persons against the people least able to object: the asleep, the hungry, the injured, the person standing outside the circle because the circle had forgotten them. Rosa wrote each failure in the margin before anyone could call the answer kind.

Horace read the card for duplicate persons backward, then as a hostile clerk, then as a tired neighbor trying to get soup before the pot emptied. The third reading found the hook. He broke his pencil crossing it out. Maya made them say what happened when duplicate persons came with pressure attached. Nobody liked the answer. That was how Juniper knew it had found the right bruise. Darren tried to declare the duplicate persons edge cases handled. Mrs.

Vance looked over her glasses until he discovered three more and developed a temporary respect for silence. Juniper returned from duplicate persons in pieces: kitchen, routes, clinic, records, chairs, floor. The card stayed public where anyone could point at it, ruin its elegance, and make it more true. That was how duplicate persons failed to crown anyone. Not by magic. By friction, witnesses, and too many tired people refusing to let a clean sentence replace them.