第2章 The Writ

The Bureau annex occupied the old customs house on the river side of Fifth Ward, a stone building with tall windows and a brass plate that had been polished so often the letters had gone soft. Mireille arrived at nine and was given a ticket and told to wait in a room with eleven other citizens and one ceiling fan that turned too slowly to move any air. The room was quiet in the particular way of rooms where everyone is rehearsing a complaint. A woman two seats over held a folder of printouts and read the same page again and again. A man in a delivery uniform watched the counter with the exhausted patience of someone who had taken a day off work to be here and could not afford it. At ten-forty they called Mireille's number. The registrar behind the glass was young and careful and introduced herself as Deputy Registrar Lorimer Crandall, which she said with the small pride of someone who had recently been promoted and still liked the sound of it. She had Mireille's file open on the desk in front of her, and she did not turn the screen away, which Mireille understood as a courtesy and also as a message: there is nothing in here you are not allowed to see. "You requested your full record," Crandall said. "That's your right. Before I print it, I want to explain the change, because it was a scheduled reconciliation and the notice is still queued on the app. The queued notices go out in batches. Yours is in the next batch. You should have had it before you asked." "What was reconciled?" "Your cohort weighting." Crandall turned the screen a little so Mireille could read the column headings. Names. Dates. Flags. "You sit in Cohort Forty-One, Fifth Ward. Forty citizens, weighted against one another, that's standard. Every quarter the engine reweights the cohort by its members' reports on one another. Anonymized. That's the design. There's no malice in it. It's just arithmetic: if enough of your peers flag you for incivility, or non-participation, or hoarding, the weight shifts, and the shift comes out of your Standing." "My Standing dropped a hundred and thirty-eight points between last Monday and this morning." "One hundred and thirty-eight," Crandall agreed. "The largest single contributor was a block of cohort reports filed in one night. That's unusual, I'll grant you. Usually reports trickle." She scrolled. "Here. Nine reports. All from Cohort Forty-One. All logged within four hours." Mireille read the flags. Each report was a single line. *Withheld assistance to a declining neighbor.* *Failure of civic warmth.* *Consumption above band norms.* *Non-attendance at cohort assembly.* The last one she stopped on. She had attended the cohort assembly. She had sat at the back with a cup of tea and left after twenty minutes when the agenda turned to the reading of new regulations. "Can I see who filed them?" "No. That's the design too." Crandall said it gently, as though delivering a diagnosis. "Anonymity protects the reporters. The engine is the only thing that ever knows their names, and the engine does not testify." "Then how do I appeal?" "You file a cohort response. You get fourteen days to submit a rebuttal, and a review clerk weighs it against the flags. If you can show a flag is provably false, it's struck, and the weight goes back into your Standing." Crandall clicked once. "I'll print the response form. There's a fee for the filing, twelve credits, and it comes out of your care allotment, not your Standing." Mireille did the math without meaning to. Twelve credits was the pharmacy copay for Emre's phosphate binders, twice over. "My brother is on the transplant list," she said. "He's twenty-six. He's at six hundred and ninety-four. He needs seven hundred to be activated for a kidney. The review is in twenty-one days. If my Standing stays below the line, does it touch his eligibility?" Crandall's face did the thing that faces did in this building. It became attentive and neutral at the same time, a weather that could turn either way. "Household Standing is separate from individual Standing for dependents after twenty-five," she said. "Your brother carries his own number. He won't inherit your reconciliation. But the review board looks at the household contribution as a secondary factor. Care credits flow through households." "And if my number is in the gray?" "Then the household contribution is weighted down." Crandall said it plainly, because plainly was the local virtue. "He can still be activated on the strength of his own seven hundred. He just won't have the household credit behind him. It makes the activation less certain. The board awards scarce care by margin of Standing when two candidates are otherwise equal." Mireille sat with that. "File the response," Crandall said, and slid a printed form through the slot, and capped a pen and set it beside the form, and waited, patient as a machine, for her to take both. She took both. Outside the annex the river ran flat and brown under a sky the color of a used envelope, and Mireille stood on the steps and read the form once to see whether it was a form she could fill honestly. It was not a trick. It was worse than a trick. It was a genuine offer of appeal, printed on good paper, with a box for her signature and a place to staple her evidence, and the fact that nobody she knew had ever won one of these appeals was not a secret. It was a statistic. The Bureau published it. Three percent of cohort responses resulted in a full reversal. Eleven percent returned partial points. She had never once heard of the three percent. That was the nature of a low number. It happened to people you did not know. On the tram home she read the form twice. It asked her to affirm that she was a citizen in good standing, which she could do, and to list the flags she disputed, which she could do, and to provide corroborating witness, which she could not, because there was no witness to an anonymous report. On the back it asked for a statement of civic contribution, and it gave four lines for it, and Mireille looked out the window at the river and the flat light on the water and tried to think of a way to write her whole life into four lines. She got off at the Fifth Ward stop. The board on the clinic wall was visible from the platform, a pale rectangle in the dark of the building, and she could not read the names from here, which she chose to take as a kindness. Her phone buzzed once. A Bureau notification, the queued batch finally going out. *Standing reconciliation posted. Cohort variance, Fifth Ward Forty-One. New Standing: 612. Review window: fourteen days.* She put the phone away. At the top of the stairwell, a city poster had been freshly pasted over the old one, and the new one showed a nurse holding a clipboard and looking into the middle distance with a clean, untroubled face. Under her, in letters the size of a hand: EVERY NUMBER IS A PROMISE. Below that, smaller: *the Tessera weighs what you do.* Mireille went up the stairs and did not read the poster a second time. ---