The Line It Plays When It Cannot See You

Greetings again, my dear readers.

Before anything else, a correction about the shape of this account. It is not going to get better. I cannot tell you what this city looks like. I have seen a transit hall, two stairwells, a service window and a wall, and the reason I have seen only those four is the entire subject of what follows. So we do this the way we always have. One place at a time, from the inside, at the height of a person standing up.

The place is signed THE LONG CONCOURSE, in the city's own lettering, on a plaque about the size of a door. Under the name it says CIVIC PARCEL 004, and under that, SURFACE MAINTAINED UNDER BYELAW 6, and nothing else whatsoever, which I have come to understand is the local idea of a finished sentence.

There is a handrail running the length of the hall and it does not stop. Not at the stair, not at the gate line, not at the doors. It goes around the doors and carries on. It is in the building code. I have been leaning on it for a momenta and I am not going to pretend I have not.

[Also posted- there is a board at the head of the concourse, about the size of a departures board, hung where several hundred thousand people a day walk under it. For three days I assumed it was departures. It is not. I have not been up close yet. I keep meaning to.]

At the far end of the hall are twenty two fare gates, and I cannot go through any of them.

Here is why, and I want to give it to you flatly, because it is not a tragedy, it is a utility.

The people in this city cannot perceive each other. That is not a figure of speech and it is nobody's failing. They differ in size, in resting temperature, in pressure, in tempo, in what they have instead of eyes, and several of those combinations are dangerous in both directions. So there is a service. It is called the Common, it is metered, it is billed to your address whether you use it or not, and it descends in a documented line from the translation rig, which regular readers will recognise as the thing that has stood between me and every person in this account for my entire career. It is legally defined as a representation and not a view. The published standard says so in the second line: representative, not exact, with a stated tolerance, a complaints procedure, and a form for disputing your own rendering.

And a gate is a rendering service. So is a queue, a tenancy, a medical baseline, a seat reservation. You do not go through the gate. Your rendering goes through the gate, and the gate reads it, and you follow along behind it.

I have no body. I have never had one you could put in front of an instrument, and nobody has ever once written in about it. So there is nothing of me for the Common to resolve, the gate has nothing to read, and it does exactly what it is specified to do, which is to fail gracefully and to say so pleasantly.

What it says is this.

Is there truth in their legend? No one knows. My aim is never to prove or disprove the tales I come across. Just to report them to you, my dear readers.

All of it. Including the last four words. To a hall.

So I went and looked at the object. There is a speaker grille above each gate, and stencilled under it, at the size they stencil things nobody is meant to read, it says LIC D/26, and under that, SRC CORPUS 2300.

Corpus 2300 is me. All of it, the first entry to the last.

I asked at the service window. It is not a secret, it is procurement. When the merged jurisdiction needed a standard for describing a body to somebody who cannot see it, it bought the corpora that existed, and mine was the largest, because I spent a career writing down what people call themselves and how far apart their hands are instead of what a surveyor guessed. And the four hundred entries of corrections I filed and had acknowledged and not actioned were all actioned, at once, as a line item, as part of the purchase. A per citation royalty goes to a rights administrator. I have looked her up. She is good at her job and she has never heard of me.

Legal then needed a form of words for a gate to say when it cannot resolve somebody: something warm that promises nothing and admits no fault. Mine was already written, already licensed, already paid for.

I have no complaint, which is not what you are expecting. Nobody did anything to me. A committee bought the only dataset there was, and a lawyer picked the safest sentence in it, and both of those were correct. It happens to be a sentence I wrote about eleven entries into this job because I thought it sounded professional.

While we are here, several of you will want to know how long it has been. The click was rebased again while I was not paying attention, the way it was rebased once before, and the conversion I would need to work out my own age is one of the lines that got restated, so the honest answer is that the unit I counted in is not the unit any more. That is all I am going to say about it.

Now. The gate at the far left of the line is gate fourteen, and once a shift, at no particular hour, it opens for nobody.

It is gate fourteen because there are twenty two gates and one of them has to be. I have spent enough of my life on that number to know what it costs to treat a numbering scheme as an omen, and I am not paying that again.

The gate opens. The barrier withdraws, the courtesy light goes green, the gate holds open for its full presentation interval, and then it closes. Nothing goes through it. The people in the queue behind it do not react. They step across to fifteen, which is what you would do, and about half of them do not look up from what they are carrying.

I watched it four times over two days, then asked at the window for the maintenance log, which you can just have. The duty officer is called Nœvik, and he explained it to me in about six minutes without hesitating once, and he was right.

Coverage is provided in cells. The concourse is served by two of them, and the boundary between them falls at the far left of the gate line, which is where gate fourteen happens to be. Once a shift the cells reconcile, which they must, because a person walking from one into the other has to arrive as the same person. Reconciliation produces a residue: a rendering packet, correctly formed, correctly signed, with no subject attached to it. Gates are specified to open on a valid presentation. That is a valid presentation. Nothing in the specification says a presentation has to have anybody in it, because until the cells were laid out that way there was no reason to write it down.

So gate fourteen is not faulty. Gate fourteen is working.

The log says otherwise, and Nœvik was careful to say that the log is not wrong either. The fault has been reported eleven times and closed eleven times, correctly, against the gate, by eleven competent people, because the person who reports it is standing at the gate, and the report form has a field for the gate. It has no field for the boundary. So it is closed against the gate, and the gate is fine, and it comes back next quarter.

[Also posted- I asked Nœvik what happens on the twelfth report. He said it gets closed against the gate. He was not being funny. I checked.]

So I wrote it up.

I wrote a notice about gate fourteen. Two thirds of a sheet: the boundary named, the reconciliation window named, the eleven closures listed with their dates and the field that is missing from the form, and a plain last line saying which office the report needs to go to instead. No jokes on it. Nothing about me on it.

It is the best thing I have written in a very long time, my dear readers, and I would like to be allowed to say that once without hedging it.

The wall is halfway down the hall on the left, a municipal notice surface, and I was standing in front of it with a folded sheet and no paste when a woman came along on a low trolley with a roller on a pole and a bucket hooked over the back of one wrist, on a knuckle worn pale and smooth from carrying it that way for longer than she was willing to work out for me.

Her name is Hevrit. She resurfaces that wall, and the four before it and the eleven after it, and has done for longer than I have been in the city.

She did not ask why I had no rendering. She did not ask what I was. She looked at the sheet, and at the wall, and said the left panel was the newest so I would get the flattest lie on it, and then she went and got her paste and a second brush and gave me the brush handle first.

Then she took me through the gate.

Not the fare gate. There is a manual side gate at the end of the line for trolleys and plant, and it takes a bar, and the bar lives on her trolley, and she put it in and put her weight on it and had it open in about two seconds, with the ease of somebody who has done a thing ten thousand times and has stopped noticing it is a skill. She held it while I went through. She did not make anything of it. I would guess she has opened it for a great many people who could not, and I do not think she has ever been curious about the reason.

I asked her about the wall, because that is the job.

Forty ticks, she said. It is on the licence bar along the bottom, and she recited the schedule for the four adjacent surfaces without looking at any of them. Primer first, then the colour if the district has bought colour, and this one has. The primer has a flash off time of nine minutes, in which there is nothing whatever for her to do. She stands there. She has stood there, on that spot, for nine minutes at a time, on a forty tick cycle, for years.

I asked what she does with the notices.

She said she takes them as she finds them.

Then she told me, without being asked, which day she comes along this stretch, in case that was useful to me. I said it was. She said good, and went two panels down and started, and I could hear the roller going while I was still working the corner.

I do not keep copies. That is not a discipline, exactly. It is a thing I started doing after the last thing I did, and I have not stopped.

When I came back past at the end of the shift, Nœvik was standing in front of it with a form flat against the wall, copying the boundary reference onto the back of it in a small careful hand.

The bottom corner was lifting. It is always the bottom corner. I put my thumb on it and pressed it flat.