Chương 84: Up the Chain

Adoma was right about the cost. That was why I went up instead of staying to pay it where she could watch me do it. I knew the Operant Levels like my own hands: every service crawl and dead junction, which patrols ran lazy, which seams stayed warm. Above them I knew nothing, and I needed that. The corrector was somewhere below and behind me, where it had read me once and filed me and let me walk, because it already held a model of where I'd run.

The one direction it couldn't have modeled was the one no sane version of me would take. So I went there. The tier-gate sat at the head of a freight spine, a clean white throat of corridor where the grime stopped like a line someone had drawn and meant. Operator clearance ended at it. Auditor began past it. I was neither: an unclassed scavenger running stolen tech and a bad habit of reading locks nobody built for me to open.

"Stratum Three," Errata said, in the voice she saved for menus she didn't approve of.

"Cleaner floors, faster patrols, and something up top the System won't let me pull the spec sheet on. Everything below us is the kitchen. We're climbing toward whoever eats."

"You sound almost happy about it."

"I'm previewing the hazards. First course is the door in front of you. It reads everything that touches it, and you read as a complaint."

"And the next course?"

"I'll describe that one when I can see it. Try not to be the special." A sanctioned door would ask my clearance, find nothing on record, and call something down the spine to collect the discrepancy. So I didn't let it ask the sanctioned question. I set my palm flat to the housing and felt past the bright compliance layer to the old maintenance handshake underneath, the part of the door that predated the System bolted on top of it.

It still answered a servicer's knock out of sixty years of dumb habit, loyal to nobody alive. I gave it the knock, and it cycled open like I belonged, because the thing it had been built to recognize was never a person. It was a routine. I can be a routine.

"Elegant," came the dry voice in my ear, as the white throat swallowed me.

"Also undocumented and unsanctioned, which a clean floor notices the moment it gets a quiet minute. Walk like you're billed for the trip." I went up into the processing-strata for the first time. I'd braced for machinery. Stratum Two ran on machinery, pumps and culling-floors and the wet industrial work of a place eating its own. Up here, none of that. Just clean, and lit, and quiet.

It opened over me like the inside of something meant to outlast everything it processed: sorting-lines running in patient parallel out past where my eyes quit, manifest-light strobing pale down a thousand consignments, the air scrubbed to ozone and nothing else. The consignments were the bad part. Each was a sealed grey unit about the size of a person folded small, racked and queued and sliding up the line on a cadence, every one labelled, every one moving toward an exit I couldn't find the end of.

No blood up here. No noise of it. Whatever reached this floor had finished being a person two strata down, and now it shipped as freight.

"Tell me you're reading this," I said.

"I'm reading it. The harvest doesn't end where the killing is. It starts there, and up here they only tidy it."

"That's a gentle verb for it."

"It's the gentlest one they've got. The words get worse the higher we go. I'll spare you the glossary until you need it." Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Closer in, I watched the floor take a single unit. A reader-arm passed over it, found whatever it needed, and a gate dropped open and shunted it down a line I hadn't seen, under a second, start to finish, no hand laid on any of it. Nobody worked here. The machine worked itself.

Not cruelty; cruelty I could have read. Just throughput, and that sat worse in me than cruelty would have. And the floor watched itself. Not the door, the whole vault: a slow catalogue-sweep that walked the lines end to end, reading each consignment as it passed, checking it off against the manifest. It would read me the same way the instant I crossed as myself. So I didn't cross as myself. The units came up the line on a rhythm, one every few breaths, and the sweep was timed to them. I went when they went.

I put my body where the sweep expected a body, a beat where it expected a beat, and let it find cargo running on schedule. Thirty years of slipping through other people's machinery had taught me how to do this: match the cadence until the machine can't tell you from its own freight. Then a unit jammed two racks ahead, and the rhythm broke.

"Objection," Errata said, fast.

"That stall isn't on the manifest. The sweep is going to stop and recount the whole rack to find out why — and the only unscheduled thing in it is you." The line stalled. The sweep didn't. It kept coming, and for one open breath I stood still on a floor where nothing stood still, a body with no box around it, lit.

"Don't run. Be the fault it's already writing up, not a new one." So I did the dirty thing instead of the sane one. I stepped into the stalled rack, set my shoulder to the dead grey unit like I belonged to the stoppage, and went still inside the jam. The sweep reached the fault it was already recording, found the count it expected, and walked on up the line. The rack shunted free, and I went with it.

A manifest glowed at the head of the line I rode behind, and I read it going past, because reading is the one thing I have never managed not to do. [Consignment 9, 140 of —. Contents: conforming. Sorted. Forwarded for receipt. Within budget.] A dash where the total belonged. Not a count climbing toward a number. A direction, with no end drawn on it."' Forwarded,'" I said.

"He wasn't killed," Errata agreed, and she used their word the way they meant it, which was the worst thing she could have done to it.

"He was forwarded. Sorted, consigned, received somewhere up the line by something that signed for him and found the count within budget." I had nothing to lay on top of that. There was a smell I'd come up the spine expecting, and it never came, and the missing of it sat worse than the smell would have. I ran the place like a kill-floor read anyway: where the rhythm broke, where a thing my size could ride without tripping the sweep, which line climbed and which fed back down.

And in the middle of the read, the size of it arrived, not as awe but as arithmetic. The lines ran on without an end I could find, patient, an accounting so old that the end of the world came to one quarter's intake. I was a mote in it. A rounding error walking upright through a sum. The floor blinked. Too clean not to. [Anomaly profile: 67/100. Unscheduled presence logged above clearance. Compliance review pending.]"Sixty-seven," Errata said.

"Three under. You lit the whole floor up just by standing on it."

"I know."

"Then here's the part you don't." Lower now, the read under the number, the part meant for me.

"This clean floor can inventory every line in the vault, and it has no entry for the thing reading the vault back at it. You're the only consignment up here nobody signed for." That helped, the way her cruel-sounding things did. I knew by now what it was worth, and what it cost. I let the read run itself out, and only the last of it changed anything. Nothing on this floor decided anything. The lines only carried; the gates only cycled. The count was bookkeeping for a choice made somewhere I couldn't yet stand.

Whatever administered this didn't live down here with the machinery it ran. It lived higher, up where all the patient counting finally added up to a name, the one that signed for the dead and found them within budget. I wasn't cleared to read that name. I started up toward it anyway.