Chapter 8 The Copy

The ombudsman's office occupied a clean room on the second floor of the ward hall, with a window that faced the river and a clerk who smiled at everyone and offered a chair. Mireille had never been inside it. Very few people in the fifth ward had. The office existed to give citizens a path that did not go through the Bureau, and the path was narrow and paved and went almost nowhere, and everyone knew it, and people came anyway because a narrow path was better than a wall. She went on her day off, three days after Solvang. She did not tell Zorah. She told herself she was testing the door before she used it, which was partly true, and partly a way of delaying the thing she was afraid she had already agreed to. The ombudsman was a woman in her sixties with a careful face, and she listened to Mireille's account of the scheduled rebalance without interrupting. Mireille gave her the facts and not the chip. She described the cohort, the flags, the internal sheet, the column that said Three-low. She watched the ombudsman's face while she spoke, the way she watched a monitor, looking for the shape of the noise. When she finished, the ombudsman was quiet for a moment. Then she said the thing Mireille had already known she would say. "This is a serious allegation, and it is one I cannot act on without evidence. A printed sheet is not evidence even if it is real. The Bureau will say it is a draft, or a projection, or a training document, and the Bureau will be believed. What I can do is open a file, which will place your complaint on the record, which will attach a marker to your name for the duration of the review." "How long is the review?" "Six weeks, ordinarily. It could be longer." Mireille looked at the river through the window. Six weeks. Emre's review was in twelve days. "Do you know what happens to my Standing while the file is open?" "Nothing, officially. Unofficially, the office cannot protect you from a cohort that knows you have complained about it. If your cohort learns there is a file, they will report on you harder, because a citizen with a file is a citizen the engine will not defend. I am telling you this because I am required to tell you everything in the first meeting, and because I would rather you walk out of this room with the whole shape of it than come back in a month surprised." "Then I won't open a file." "That is your right." The ombudsman closed her notebook. She looked at Mireille with the first real expression of the afternoon, which was the tired attention of a person who had watched a great many citizens make this exact decision. "Can I tell you one thing that is not part of my job? I have been in this office eleven years. I have opened four hundred files. I have won eleven of them. Every one of the eleven was won by a citizen who had already found evidence the Bureau could not explain away. You do not have that. What you have is a sheet that a Bureau printer spat out, and the Bureau owns every printer. If you want to win, do not bring me a sheet. Bring me the machine that printed it." Mireille left the ward hall and walked to the tram stop and stood there for a while without getting on anything. Walking home, she passed a city poster she had not seen before, fresh paste over an older one, and the new poster showed a family at a table with a single lamp and a plate between them, and over the family in letters the size of a hand it said, THE ROLL IS THE HOUSEHOLD. She read it and kept walking and did not tell the poster that she had moved her brother over a line and lost her home for it, because a poster was not a person and could not be embarrassed. She did not go to Solvang that week. She went to work, and she coded by the book, and she spent her off hours in the ward library reading ordinance, because the library held the only public terminal in the fifth ward that did not log which pages a citizen opened. The ordinance on scarce care ran forty pages. The clause she was hunting for was on the thirty-eighth, a single paragraph saying that household contribution, once posted to a dependent's file, could be reduced by a subsequent civil finding against the household. She read it three times. It did not say cancelled. It said reduced. It left the amount to the discretion of the review clerk. That was how the city worked, not in secrets but in discretion, a word that meant the rule existed and the number did not. The civility review came four days later, without warning, in the form of a letter on her phone that said the fifth ward office had questions about her civic participation and that she was invited to appear on Thursday. She appeared. A clerk read from a tablet and asked her to account for three absences from cohort assemblies and one reported failure of civic warmth toward a neighbor in the north corridor. Mireille answered the questions. She could not name the neighbor. There was no neighbor. The clerk thanked her and closed the tablet and said the office would reach a determination within ten days. The clerk's questions were the questions of a person reading from a script, and Mireille answered them the way she answered a monitor alarm, plainly and without argument. She was asked whether she had attended the assemblies of her cohort. She had, mostly. She was asked whether she had rendered aid to a lapsed citizen in the north corridor. She had, and she said so, and the clerk entered it, and Mireille understood in that moment that the meeting was not a hearing but a formality, because the engine had already folded her file and the review existed only to put a human voice on the record where a number had been. The determination came in six. Her housing allocation was reassigned from Band Three to Band Four, which meant the flat on Sixth Street, her mother's flat, the flat with the good light, was no longer hers, and she was offered a unit in a Gray block on the south side of the ward, one room, shared corridor, water rationed to six hours a day. She had fourteen days to move. Emre's review was in eight. She packed the flat in a single evening because there was not much to pack, and she put the chip from Solvang Row in the bottom of the box with her mother's Standing certificate and the photo of the four of them on the stairs, and she did not tell Emre, because there was nothing to tell him that would not make his numbers worse. On the last night in the flat she stood at the window that faced the good light and watched the board on the clinic wall across the street, and the gray line moving under her name, and she made the decision that Sennett had asked her to make, or that she had already made, four days before, on a tram she never took. ---