Survival

Intake gave him the nine pages at four fifteen and told him they would need them back for the file, which meant he read them at his own desk with his own lamp on after the room had gone.

Twenty-three was the back end of section 15 and it was nothing.

Twenty-four was assignment.

Twenty-five was section 16.

16. SURVIVAL. Sections 9 (Confidentiality), 12 (Audit) and 18 (Disputes) shall survive termination or expiry of this Agreement. All other provisions shall cease to have effect on the date of termination.

Gene read it, and then read 14.2 again off the screen — no further obligations to one another save as expressly provided — and then read 16 again, and then sat with his hands flat on the desk.

Save as expressly provided did not mean provided somewhere in this document.

It meant provided in section 16. That was what the phrase was for. That was the whole architecture of it: 14.2 shuts everything off and 16 is the list of what stays on, and the list has three things on it, and the indemnity is not one of them.

So the indemnity did not survive.

The twelve-month tail in 11.4 was real and it ran for twelve months and it ran only for as long as the agreement was alive, and either party could kill the agreement on ninety days notice for no reason, and on the ninety-first day the tail was gone with it.

The machine had said the opposite. It had said so in nine lines, and it had reasoned to it, and every step of the reasoning was sound.

It had just never seen page twenty-five.

He wrote it up that night and left it on Vaughn’s chair.

Vaughn came to desk nineteen at ten past nine with it in his hand and pulled a chair over from twenty-one, which nobody sat at, and sat down on it backwards.

“You’re right,” he said.

“I know.”

“No — I mean I checked it. I read it myself this morning. You’re right and it’s a bad one. If they’d terminated and then found a defect in month four they’d have had nothing.”

“Yes.”

Vaughn turned the write-up over in his hands.

“How did you know to look?”

Gene had been ready for a lot of questions and not that one.

“Look where?”

“Past twenty-two. You’d got an answer. It was a good answer, I read it, I’d have signed it. What made you go and get the paper?”

Gene thought about it.

“It stopped,” he said.

“It —”

“The thing it says at the bottom. It always says which pages it had. It didn’t say it. So it stopped, and there wasn’t a mark to say why it stopped, and I wanted to know what was on the other side of the stopping.”

Vaughn looked at him for a second.

“That’s not a procedure,” he said.

“No.”

“I can’t put that in a procedure.”

“No,” Gene said.

They spent the rest of the morning trying to find out how many.

It was a reasonable question and it was the first question anybody would ask, and Vaughn asked it inside four minutes: since when. Since the documents went past twenty-two, how many answers had come out of that thing with the tail cut off it.

Marchetti’s column said April.

It was November.

The technician came down after lunch and was in front of the middle cabinet for about twenty minutes and then straightened up and said it plainly, because he was a technician and it was not his problem.

“We’ve got the answers.”

“Right.”

“Every one. Date, file number, concern line, output. It’s all in there, it’s a good log.”

“Then —”

“We haven’t got what it had,” the technician said. “The window’s not the log. The window’s just what’s in it while it’s working, and then the next job’s in it. There’s nowhere for that to go. It’d be —” He looked at the cabinet, doing arithmetic. “It’d be four hundred times the size of the log. Nobody keeps that. Nobody’s ever kept that.”

Vaughn said, “So we can see what it said.”

“You can see everything it said.”

“And not what it read.”

“No,” the technician said, and picked up his case.

Seven months.

Gene worked it out at desk nineteen on the back of a form, because he could not help himself: about eleven hundred jobs through that cabinet since April, and of those the ones over twenty-two pages, and of those the ones where the answer had been long enough to squeeze the last line and a half out, and there was no way to know that last part at all, so the number went from a figure to a range and from a range to a shrug.

Eleven hundred jobs. Some number of them wrong. No way to say which.

He sat and looked at what he had written.

Then, without particularly deciding to, he put the pencil down at the left-hand side of the space under it and drew a box, and then a second box off to the right with a gap between them, and started an arrow from the first one and took it about a third of the way across and stopped.

He looked at it.

Then he put four hard lines through the whole thing, turned the form over, and wrote it out in sentences.