Chapter 5 Her Voice on File

The consent form, which Cleo had read three times because she read everything three times, contained one clause that was almost generous. *Participants may request review of recordings made of the participant, in the presence of a member of staff, on twenty-four hours' notice.* She gave the notice on a Monday and was given a room on Tuesday, and Dez Quenby set up the playback because Dez set up everything after nine at night. The room was small and had two chairs and a pair of headphones that had belonged to a language lab in some earlier life. The recordings were stored by night and by check, and Dez pulled up night two, the first hold night, and told her she could listen to any check she wanted. She wanted the 03:00 check, the one she did not remember. The speaker in the berth had logged it as a voice line. On the screen there was a thin blue waveform, and Dez pressed play, and Cleo heard the room she had been sleeping in, the low hiss of the ventilation, and then a voice that was hers, saying the sentence she was required to say. "Here, awake, no carryover." The waveform did not stop. The voice went on, in the same flat register, with the same breath behind it. "The door was open. I did not go in." Dez stopped the playback. He did not look at her. He looked at the timestamp column, and then at a column to the right of it, and then he said that the required sentence was the first six words and the rest was a deviation, and that protocol said deviations were to be noted on the daily sheet, and that no note existed for night two. Cleo asked to listen again. It was her voice. She knew her own voice better than she knew her own face, having spent eleven months dictating nothing into a recorder at her mother's bedside for the nurses to transcribe later, and it was her voice, and the cadence was wrong in a way she could not name, as if the sentence had been assembled from pieces of her and given back whole. She leaned toward the screen and read the file header, because she read everything three times. The file was labelled *C-13*. Her study number was C-14. One digit, and the cohort was the same, and the berth in the header was berth five, which was empty and had a name scraped off its plate with a thumbnail. "Who is C-13?" "Withdrew in the first week," Dez said. "Then what is C-13's voice doing on my second night?" Dez said the files were indexed by berth as well as by number, so that a new participant inheriting a berth inherited its folder until the folder was cleared, and that the clearing was a manual job and manual jobs got missed. It was a good explanation. It was the kind of explanation that was true about procedures and said nothing at all about the waveform, and Cleo noticed that Dez had offered it in exactly the tone of a man who had been told what explanation to give if the question came up. He asked whether she wanted to hear anything else. She said no, and then, because the room was quiet and because he was the only person in the building who looked at the middle distance and not at her, she said yes, she wanted to hear the rehearsal files. Dez's hand paused over the keyboard. He said there were no rehearsal files. She said that on her first hold night the terminal had made her read paragraphs aloud and type them, and that a system that recorded the checks would record the reading, and that she wanted to hear her own reading. He found the folder. He opened it. There were eleven files for night two, and the tenth of them was eighty seconds long, and it began with a paragraph about a house on a hill, read aloud in her voice, and then the same voice said something that was not in the paragraph. "Tell Voskuil the second one did not take." That was all of it. Dez played it twice, at her request, and the second time she watched his face and his face did nothing, which told her more than a face usually tells. Then he closed the folder, and ejected nothing onto the screen, and said that the file was a splice error, an artifact of the terminal reusing audio buffers, a known issue with the older berths, and that he would log it. The review room had a strip of window at the top of the wall and no clock, and the headphones had a cracked headband and the double band of a language laboratory, and when she put them on she could hear the room she had been sleeping in through them, which meant the berth had been recorded close to her head, which meant the microphone and the speaker were the same device and it sat in the wall at the height of her collarbone no matter which way she lay. She made a test of her own before she made it a question for him. She turned the chair so that Dez could watch her mouth and said the required sentence six times in a row, in the flat voice, and listened to the waveform of her own voice move on the screen for the six, and it moved the same way every time, and then she asked Dez to play the 03:00 line and the waveform moved the same way again, and the breath before the h in the first word was in the same place in all seven, and the only difference between the six she had just spoken and the one from night two was that the last four words of the line from night two went on longer than a sentence and were not part of the protocol. She asked whether her study number had ever been used by another participant, and Dez said study numbers were retired at the end of a cohort and never reused, because the whole point of a number was that a file belonged to one body and one body only. Then he told her that berth folders were a different thing from study numbers, and that berth folders were indexed by berth, and that berth three's folder went back six years, and that he could show her the folder and she would see that C-14 appeared in it only on the day she arrived, and she asked him whether C-13 appeared in it, and he did not answer, and his not answering was an answer of a kind that she had learned to read. She thought about the splice explanation for two days and could not make it hold. A splice error would duplicate audio the terminal already had; the terminal did not already have the sentence about the door, because the sentence about the door was not in the paragraph, and it was not in the required phrase, and it was not in anything she had been asked to read. A splice error could not put a sentence into her voice. She said so to Dez in the drying room on the seventh night, in a low voice, and Dez looked at the fan and said that he had worked in this building for eleven months and that in eleven months he had logged nineteen technical faults and that none of them had ever added words to a recording, and that the one thing he had learned about the log was that it was very good at removing things and very bad at making things up, and then he left the drying room and did not come back for the rest of the shift. She went back to berth three and lay down and did the arithmetic she had been refusing to do. If the voice on file was hers and the sentence on file was not hers, then either she had said the sentence and did not remember saying it, which was what the Institute called carryover, or the sentence had been given to her in her own voice during an interval she could not reach, which was what the annex called rehearsal. The two explanations were the same explanation wearing different coats. Both of them required that a part of the night had been taken from her and given back with something added, and she had signed, in a box she did not remember signing, a consent to material that had not been consolidated, and she understood for the first time the exact weight of that phrase, which had been chosen by a lawyer, and which meant, in plain words, a memory that had not yet been assigned to anyone. Dez put the headphones on the desk and said the review was over and the room was booked for nine, and Cleo took them off and found that her hands were steady, which surprised her, and that she was no longer tired, which did not surprise her at all, because the study had, whatever else it had done, fixed her sleep, and she had begun to think that this was the cruellest thing about it, that it was giving her the one thing she had come for and charging her in the one currency she had not known she had. He walked her back to berth three himself instead of letting her walk, and at the door he said one more thing, quietly, without turning around, and it was the first sentence anyone in the Institute had said to her that sounded like it had been written for her alone. "Don't say the extra part out loud on a quiet night," he said. "The log hears everything, but the log only reports what it recognizes." ---