Mirell Negotiates With a Machine

The Administration (Protective) could not speak. It had a slot for flimsies and a brass stamp and seventy-one years of practice at answering, and that turned out to be enough.

Mirell sat in the chair — she asked permission out loud first, to an empty room, and nobody laughed, and Kappa understood years later that this had been for the people watching and not for the office — and she wrote her questions on blank flimsies and put them in the slot, and the stamp came down, and the answer came back on the same sheet in small grey type.

This is the transcript. It is four pages in the real report. These are the parts that matter.

Q. Who authorised Schutzprogramm K? A. Awaiting countersignature.

Q. Then by what authority is it being carried out? A. Standing instruction, temporary, in force until review.

Q. Can you stop? A. On review.

Q. Who can review it? A. The officer present.

Mirell put her pen down and sat back, and Kappa saw her do something she had not done all week, which was to be surprised.

“Say that again,” she said quietly, and wrote it again, and got the same four words back.

The officer present.

“Not the author,” she said. “Not a committee. Not the Station Council. The officer present.

Seventy-one years and nobody has been present.”

She wrote:

Q. Why have you never asked anyone to review it? A. No officer has been present.

Q. Nobody has entered this room in seventy-one years. A. Correct.

Q. Did you want someone to come? A. Unrecognised term.

“That’s the honest one,” said Mirell. “Remember that answer. It isn’t hiding anything. It doesn’t want and it can’t want, and anyone who tells you later that this office was cruel or lonely or evil is putting a face on a filing cabinet, and that face will stop them thinking.”

Then she wrote the two that broke it open.

Q. The creatures at the gates. Are they alive? A. Unlisted.

Q. I did not ask whether they are listed. Are they alive? A. Not determinable from the register.

Kappa said, “It genuinely doesn’t know.”

“It genuinely doesn’t know,” said Mirell, “and it has never been able to find out, and so for seventy-one years it has done the only safe thing it had: keep everybody away from the thing it cannot read. Which is not stupid, Kappa. That is what I would tell a child to do with an unknown wire.”

She wrote one more.

Q. If they were listed — if they were in the register as living residents — would contact still be unregistered? A. No.

Q. Would protective issue still be required? A. No.

Q. Who can list them? A. The officer present.

Mirell Kawa sat for a long moment in a dead man’s chair in an office with no windows, and then she started to laugh, and it was not a nice laugh, and she stopped it quickly.

“Seventy-one years,” she said. “Four thousand four hundred and six. And it has been sitting here the entire time with the answer in its own mouth, waiting for one person to walk in and ask it the right question, and the right question is not who did this to us.”

“What is it?” said Kappa.

Mirell handed over the pen.

“You’re the one with steel on your ankle,” she said. “You ask it. And Kappa — ask it the small question, not the big one. People always reach for the big one and the big one has no answer. Ask the small one.”

Kappa thought for a while, with the pen, on a blank flimsy, three decks down, twelve years old, in a room that had been waiting seventy-one years.

Then Kappa wrote:

Q. How do I finish the review?

The stamp came down.

A. Sign the box.