What the Krallen Were For

The official answer arrived on day three, and it was worse than no answer, because it was polite.

It came as a notice on the Mäusewerk board, in the small grey type, and it said:

RE: SCHUTZPROGRAMM K — ENQUIRY Protective issue is a safety measure. It protects against unregistered contact. This is a protection, not a punishment. Your concern is noted and no action is required.

Dobbel read it twice and said, “Well, that’s fine then,” and Kappa said, “Read the second line again,” and Dobbel read the second line again and stopped being fine.

Unregistered contact.

“That’s not a danger,” Kappa said. “That’s a filing problem.”

“It is both,” said Mirell, who had arrived with her stool and her thermos and a cold roll she ate without looking at. “That is what makes it so hard to argue with. To the thing that writes these notices, a danger and a filing problem are genuinely the same word. That is not a lie. It is a smaller mind than ours, doing its best.”

She looked at the notice for a while.

“But it has told us something,” she said. “It always does, if you read it like a witness instead of like an insult. It said contact. It did not say attack, bite, theft, damage, infection. Four thousand four hundred and six pairs of claws, and the word is contact.”

Kappa got there first, which Kappa was quietly pleased about for the rest of their life.

“It isn’t stopping something being done to the mice,” Kappa said. “It’s stopping the mice meeting someone.”

“Yes.”

“Because the someone isn’t registered.”

“Yes. And now be careful,” said Mirell, “because this is where people get it wrong and go home angry. The obvious story is: cruel office hates mice. That story is wrong and it is also useless, because you cannot negotiate with a story. Here is the shape that actually fits everything we have.”

She laid three things on the table: the flimsy, the notice, and Kappa’s log.

“One. Somewhere there is a set of instructions that treats unregistered as unsafe. Fair enough — half the safety rules on this station do, and most of the time they are right.

“Two. There is a population near the old gates that the instruments cannot register. The Nebelmäuse.

“Three. The instructions cannot register them either, so to the instructions they are not beings. They are an unregistered contact hazard, like a loose cable.

“Four. The instructions therefore do what you do with a loose cable. They keep everybody away from it. Gently. With felt lining, so it does not chafe.”

Nobody said anything for a bit.

“So it thinks it’s being kind,” said Dobbel.

“It does not think anything,” said Mirell. “But yes. If it could think, it would think it was being kind. It has been being kind for seventy-one years and it has never once been told to stop, and that is the actual crime in this case, and the criminal is everybody who walked past that empty signature box and did not ask.”

Kappa looked at the notice again. Your concern is noted and no action is required.

“Mirell. If it thinks they’re a hazard — what happens if someone does make contact?”

And Mirell Kawa, who had been doing this job for twenty-two years and had learned exactly when to tell a twelve-year-old the truth, said:

“I don’t know. And that is the first thing we are going to find out, and we are going to find it out on purpose, in daylight, with the fire team standing by — not by accident at four in the morning with you alone on a counter.”