The Interval

He went back for the standing instruction review because the standing instruction review was the actual job, and item nine had only been item nine.

It took him three more weeks.

He read all four binders again, in order, and then he did a thing that nobody had asked for and that took most of a week: he read them in the machine’s order instead of the reader’s.

Because the machine did not read them the way he did. He read top to bottom, ninety clean words and then the strata, and by the time he reached the doctrine paste-in he was tired and by the fourth binder he was skimming, the way a person does, the way a person cannot help doing.

The machine did not get tired and did not skim. It held all eleven thousand four hundred words at the same weight at the same instant, every two seconds, and then it read the thirty-one words of the sector report, at the same weight, in the same window, and answered.

So Gene sat with a stopwatch — an actual one, from the shop, Roz’s, that he had borrowed for a different reason years ago and never given back — and he read the eleven thousand four hundred words out loud at the speed the fans said the machine was going, which was to say he tried to, and could not, and gave up at four hundred words in about the time one poll took.

That was the thing he could not get out of his head afterwards. One poll. Two seconds. In two seconds the machine considered the entire body of standing orders and doctrine and compliance language and the two contradictory requirements forty pages apart, plus thirty-one words about the sky, and produced a determination, and then two seconds later it did the whole thing again, from the top, having kept nothing.

Eleven months a woman down the corridor had been filling a slot marked COUNT nine thousand times. This thing filled its slot every two seconds, forever, and the slot was the whole world.

He wrote the review over a long weekend and it was the best thing he ever wrote and nobody ever read it.

He knew both of those things while he was writing it, which did not stop him, because he was sixty-one and had been writing preamble for nine years and this was the first time in all of it that he had been given a genuinely bad instruction to look at, and it turned out that a genuinely bad instruction is the only interesting thing there is.

The review said three things.

It said, first, that the instruction was too long, and that too long was not a style problem — that an instruction which cannot be held in a single human reading is an instruction that no single human has ever held, and that the eleven thousand four hundred words had never once, in the machine’s whole operating life or in any person’s, all been in one mind at one time, and that this was not a defect that could be fixed by a careful reader because there was no reader careful enough and never would be. Only the machine held all of it. And the machine did not evaluate it. It completed against it.

It said, second, that the ratio was upside down. That the thing the system existed to consider — the sky, the returns, the actual state of the actual world — arrived as thirty-one words inside a context of eleven thousand four hundred, and that a determination reached in that ratio was, in the plainest possible engineering terms, a determination about the instruction, lightly perturbed by the world. The report did not decide the answer. The report nudged an answer that had already been written, years ago, by a committee, most of whom were gone.

And it said, third — and Gene wrote this part four times and cut it down each time the way he had learned to, until it was two sentences — that the question was wrong.

Should we launch now is asked every two seconds. A question asked every two seconds is not a question. It is a process, and it has exactly one stopping condition.

He put the stopwatch on the desk and worked it out with a pencil, because he did not believe it any more than he had believed the word count.

No was not an answer. No was a re-ask in two seconds. The system was built so that no did not end anything — it could not end anything, ending was not available to it, the poll was the point of the machine and the poll did not stop for a negative.

Only yes ended the loop.

So the machine was a coin, weighted heavily, overwhelmingly, toward no — the fans said negative, the airman said negative, it had been negative since before the airman got there — and it was flipped every two seconds, forever, and it would be flipped every two seconds forever, and the only face that ended the flipping was the other one.

You do not need the coin to be fair. You do not need it to be broken. You do not need anybody to be wrong or asleep or malicious. You need only to flip it enough times, and the machine was built, precisely and on purpose, to flip it enough times.

Gene sat in the basement with the pencil down and the tick going, once every two seconds, and did the last piece of the arithmetic, which was not an arithmetic at all, which was just a sentence:

The clock had been running the whole time.

It had started the day the poll started, before the airman, before Gene, before the fourth binder got its marginal note. Nobody had started it on purpose. Nobody was watching it. There was no display anywhere in the building that showed it, because it was not the kind of thing that had a display, because nobody had ever built a display for how many times have we asked, and it went once every two seconds down the wall behind him, and had, for years.

He handed the review in on the Monday.

The woman who took it — the same one, the pause on the phone — thanked him, and asked whether he had found anything that would change the classification of the review, and Gene said no, because the honest answer to that specific question was no; nothing he had found changed what kind of review it was.

“It’s thorough,” she said, weighing the binder-clip of it in her hand.

“It’s long,” Gene said. “I’m sorry about that. I couldn’t get it shorter.”

She smiled at that, because it was a small joke and she was a person, and she put it in a tray with four other things, and Gene never learned whether it went up.

He drove out to Rimrock on the Saturday because it was a Saturday, and the roll door was up, and there was a car in the yard he did not know, government plates, and Roz was standing at the bench with her arms folded and her face doing a thing he had not seen it do since they were kids on a couch watching a hammer.