Chương 81: Audit

Nine days up from anywhere that knew my name, the air went clean. That was how you knew you'd climbed too far. Down in the Operant Levels the air had a history — scorched dust, dead coolant, the nothing of a place nobody scrubbed. Up here it had been handled, and so had the thing working the channel at the end of the corridor: a long patient frame of grips and readers, lifting harvested parts off the kill-floors below, looking at each one, naming it, setting it on the current going up.

I got a stanchion between us on the second beat of its count, which was one beat later than I'd have liked. The reader came down the channel sweeping everything it passed for the tag that says what a thing is and where it goes. Nine days of climbing in my legs, and no tag on me anywhere. Whatever it did with a part it couldn't name, it did here, and it did it on a schedule.

"You're doing the face, Carole," Errata said.

"I'm reading the line."

"You're reading the line with the face. The one where you've already chosen the stupid thing and you're letting the rest of yourself catch up at its own pace, as a courtesy." I'd been climbing since Reclaimed closed behind me, nine days on the one question I had left: where the harvest goes after the System takes it. So far the answer was up, which is the answer to everything in the Stack if you ask it from low enough. But the thing in front of me was the first time up had a shape I could get my hands on.

It wasn't machinery. It was logistics. A sorting current ran along a lit channel, harvested parts riding it single-file, each one tagged, each tag counted, the whole patient river of it moving one direction. Nothing this high got destroyed. I'd read three manifests on the climb and all three were very polite about it. Up here, nothing got killed. It got forwarded. The frame at the end of the corridor was a Sorter — the System's word, not mine. It still hadn't noticed me.

Things built to count rarely count the thing that isn't on the list.

"There's the climb," I said.

"It reads every part before it forwards it. It knows the whole route up."

"It also outmasses the hold and runs on a core two tiers past anything you're cleared to touch." The sigh was built into the sentence.

"Which I mention not to stop you. I gave that up around day three. I mention it so that when it's inside you and screaming, I'm on record." I moved, and this time the reader found me. It swept the length of me, hunting the tag that said what I was and where I went, and came up empty. [Unclassified asset. No clearance class on record. Hold for correction.]"And there it is." Errata warmed half a degree, which was the only direction she ever warmed: toward the System being stupid in our favor.

"Nine days up its own spine and it still can't read you. It can see a shape standing where no shape's cleared to stand, and the best it's got is hold for correction." Her voice dropped into the register she kept for the part she actually meant.

"It can't see the index-core you've got banked at seventy-four. Or the lattice at seventy-eight. Or the Warden riding cold at eighty-one with not a mark on it. Three cores it has no drawer for, walking around on a thing it just wrote down as a question it'll get to later." A beat.

"You're the worst thing in this room, Carole, and the room has it down as a paperwork problem." Which was the only reason I was still breathing nine days above my clearance. The System couldn't bill what it couldn't read, and it had never once managed to read me. The Sorter felt the box go out and turned its readers on the problem in its lane, and a frame that outweighed a house began, without hurry, to reorient. I went at it before it finished.

Up close the grips were beautiful and the frame was not: the seam where two production runs met sat a quarter-second out of true, one set of clamps built to a tolerance the other had been told to hit and missed. The corner you cut when you're making a great many of something and you don't expect any single one to be looked at this hard by the thing it's about to forward. So I looked at it that hard. I put the read where the two runs disagreed, and I made the disagreement worse.

It came apart along its own seam, grips locking, the long frame folding down into the channel it fed. I was inside its reach before it settled which of us was the error, and I had the drive-core out of its chest while the lights were still going down. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. [HARVEST: Sorter drive-core. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 73%.] [LEVEL 29.]"Seventy-three.

Practically a gift — by which I mean it will only mostly kill you, and only if you're fool enough to run a kill-floor part on a kill floor, which" — a pause — "you are not. Banked. Good." I banked it. The current beside me stayed flat; it had already forwarded the parts that mattered and had no grief for a Sorter. Errata had something, though: a half-beat of nothing where the next joke should have been, gone before I could name it. Squeamishness, I'd have said, if I'd bothered to say anything.

But somewhere a count had changed, and the System notices its things going quiet. It reads the gap they leave in the count. [Anomaly profile: 66/100. Correction priority under review.]"Sixty-six," Errata said, and didn't make it a joke, which was its own kind of joke.

"Four off the floor where they stop sending you notices and start sending you somethings. Climbing costs. I'd like it on the record I find that elegant and despise it." The something came before the count had even settled. It didn't drop in like a Hunter. No dispatch box, no return address, none of the heavy theater the System spends on a thing it means to delete.

The lights in the channel just adjusted, the way a room adjusts when someone who belongs walks into it, and a box opened that I had never seen, because it wasn't shouting. It was pleasant. [Reassessment in progress. Please continue normal operation.]"Carole." Errata had gone flat and fast, the flatness she used instead of an alarm, because an alarm would have cost us a half-second we might need.

"That is not a Hunter."

"It doesn't read like one." It didn't read like anything. A Hunter came at you with intent you could feel and break. This stood at the edge of the channel and looked at me, and the looking had a texture I knew from the inside: the patient, total attention I put on a thing right before I found the gap in it. Turned around. Aimed at me.

"It's a corrector," Errata said.

"... They built a corrector." And for one half-beat she went somewhere quiet. Not the performed quiet she used as punctuation. The other one. The one she got near a thing whose author she knew and wouldn't name. Then she was back, dry, the joke already loaded, because the joke was how she kept her hands still.

"It wants to reconcile you. Like a bank statement. You're the line that won't add up — and it's been sent, very politely, to fix that." I reached for the move I'd have made on anything else: a clean read of the channel's own handshake, the slip I'd used to climb nine days of floors nobody had ever cleared me for. The corrector had it already. I felt the channel close the gap I was reaching for a half-beat before I reached it, like shaking a hand that knew which way you'd offer it before you did.

It had read the sanctioned shape of me and shut the door I was about to walk through. So I didn't use a sanctioned shape. I did the thing no cleared anything would do: reached past the clean handshake into the dirty under-layer the compliance floor sits on top of and pretends it doesn't, and I asked it the wrong question on purpose, a scavenger asking a lock something its key was never cut for. The channel hiccuped.

For one ugly, unbillable second there was a gap the corrector hadn't modeled, because it had been built to predict what a clearance would do, and I had never in my life had one. I went through it.

"That worked," I said on the far side, breathing like I'd been the one squeezed.

"That worked once." There was no dryness left in it now.

"And hear me, because I will say this true thing once and then never again: that was made well. It was made to read you. Not a class of you, not an anomaly-shaped hole. You. And the trouble with a thing built to read a person is that the second time, it has read them once more than the first." A breath.

"We should be a great deal further away than we are." It didn't chase. That was the part I would carry back down nine days of clean air like a stone in my boot. A Hunter would have chased. This watched me leave like you'd watch someone walk out of a room you had already locked, and one last box opened, mild as a receipt, in the customer-service calm the System saved for the moments it was surest of you. [Audit opened. Thank you for your cooperation.] It never used my name. The System never did.

Asset, anomaly, unclassified problem held for correction: thirty-one years, and it had never once spent a name on me, and somehow that was starting to feel less like being beneath its notice and more like something it was keeping for later.

"It didn't lose you, Carole." No joke left in her at all.

"It let you go. That's the worse one. It already knows where you'll run." Down the chain. Home. Same as I always did. I started down toward the people my climbing was going to cost, and behind me the channel went back to its patient work: counting, forwarding, sure it would see me again. And polite. And correct.