The Copied World

Frau Vesper found the year-eleven report on day six, and she did not find it in the Archive.

She found it because she stopped looking for a report and started looking for a delivery note.

“Thirty-one years I have asked for that report,” she said. “Eleven times. And every time they told me it was not in the Archive, and every time they were telling the truth, which is the most annoying kind of obstruction there is. So this week I asked a different question. I asked: what did Section Nine order in year eleven?”

She put a single flimsy on the table. It was a works order. It was almost comically dull.

WORKS ORDER 11/0440 — SECTION NINE Restoration method: duplication (approved, emergency powers) Source: Section Nine, pre-failure survey Scope:

structure, services, fittings, standing orders, personnel register Note: Duplication is a copy of the record, not of the thing. Items present in the section but absent from the record will not appear in the restored section. Reconciliation to follow. Reconciliation:

not performed Mirell read the note three times.

“There it is,” she said. “In one paragraph, seventy-one years ago, written by somebody who understood exactly what they were doing and who said so, plainly, and then went home.”

“I don’t understand it,” said Dobbel.

“Then I will explain it with your bag,” said Mirell, “because this is the heart of the book and everyone has to get it.”

She put Dobbel’s kit bag on the table.

“Suppose this bag is lost. Suppose I can rebuild it from the inventory list in your pocket.

Your list says: two spanners, a lamp, a notebook, gloves. So I build you a new bag with two spanners, a lamp, a notebook and gloves. Perfect copy, yes?”

“Yes.”

“What was actually in the bag, Dobbel?”

Dobbel went red. “A sandwich. And my mother’s thimble. And a — a stone I liked.”

“And are those on the list?”

“No.”

“So they are gone,” said Mirell, “and nothing is broken, and nothing was stolen, and no one did anything wrong, and your mother’s thimble is gone anyway. That is duplication. It copies the record. Everything real that was never written down falls out.”

The Mäusewerk was quiet.

“In year eleven,” said Mirell, “there was no arrangement with the mice. That came in year thirty-three. In year eleven, mice were not personnel and they were not fittings and they were not services. They were not on any list at all. So when they copied Section Nine — ” “The mice didn’t come,” Kappa said.

“The pipes came. The gates came. The standing orders came. The mice fell out of the copy, because nobody had ever written them down.”

Kappa sat with that for a long moment, and then asked the question Mirell had been dreading, because Kappa was the sort of person who went on to the next question instead of stopping at the sad one.

“Then where are they? If they fell out — they’re still standing at Gate Four. They didn’t go anywhere.”

“No,” said Mirell. “They stayed exactly where they always lived. The section was copied around them and they were left outside it, in the old space, half a step out of the record.

Everything they knew is still there — their vents, their water point, their doors. The doors just don’t open from their side any more, because the doors in the new copy were built from a drawing that does not know they exist.”

“And the instruments can’t see them — ” “— because the instruments read the register, and they are not in the register. They are not invisible, Kappa. They are unfiled.”

“And the station calls them ghosts.”

“The station calls them unregistered contact,” said Mirell Kawa, “which is the longest and coldest way of saying we lost someone and never looked.”

Frau Vesper, who had been standing very straight the whole time, said one thing, and it was the only thing she said all morning that was not about documents.

“My grandmother worked Section Nine,” she said. “She used to leave grain out by Gate Four. We all thought it was superstition. For sixty years this family has been laughing about my grandmother and her ghost mice.”

She picked up the works order and squared its edges against the table.

“I should like it put in the report,” she said, “that she was right, and that she was the only one.”