Two of Us

The man with the government plates was called Doyle and he was polite and he was not there for Gene.

He was there for Roz. He had been there twenty minutes and he had a form, and the form was a routine thing, a re-certification of a scope operator that came up every so often, and it required a supervisor’s countersignature and a demonstration of continued competence, and he had come out to the shop to watch her do the demonstration because that was cheaper than bringing her in.

Which was, in its own small way, the whole world in one sentence: they would not accept a description of her competence. They had driven out to watch the thing itself.

“You know each other,” Doyle said, looking between them, when Gene came in and stopped.

“Since we were kids,” Roz said.

“Small world.”

“It’s a small county,” Roz said, which was true and was also the end of that.

Doyle did his form. Roz sat at the shop bench and he read her a series of returns off a card and she said what each of them was, and mostly what she said was I don’t know and insufficient and I would watch it, and Gene understood, watching, that this was the demonstration — that the whole competence being certified was the refusal to finish the sentence, and that she was extremely good at it, and that Doyle ticked a box every time she declined to be certain.

He left at four. He shook both their hands. He said the thing people said, which was that it must be nice to have a friend in the same line of work, and neither of them corrected him, because they were not in the same line of work and there was no version of explaining it that would have got him off the property before dark.

They did not talk about it while he was there and they did not talk about it for a while after he left, either.

Roz made the terrible tea. They sat in the two chairs by the roll door with the yard going dim in front of them and the racks going to gray.

“You write the block,” Roz said. It was not a question. She had had it since the word preamble, three years ago, and she had been carrying it around the way she carried everything, quietly, until it was any use.

“I review it. There’s one I reviewed. A bad one.”

“How bad.”

Gene looked at the yard.

He was not allowed to tell her. He knew exactly what he was and was not allowed to tell her, he had signed the things, and he sat in the chair and worked out, in real time, that there was a way to tell her the whole of it without telling her any of the parts he had signed away, because the parts he had signed away were the nouns, and the thing that was wrong was not in the nouns.

“Say there’s a machine,” he said, “and it reads a document, and the document tells it what to do, and then it reads a little report about the world, and it decides something.”

“That’s your whole job.”

“That’s my whole job. Now say the document is eleven thousand words and the report is thirty.”

Roz drank some tea.

“So it’s deciding about the document,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“The world’s a rounding error.” She said it flat, the way she had said so it can’t say therefore any more, years ago, at that same bench. “You’ve got a machine that reads its own orders and gets a little note about what’s actually happening, and the orders are four hundred times the size of the note, so whatever it does is basically what the orders said, jogged a bit.”

“Yeah.”

“Who wrote the orders?”

“Nobody. Everybody. It’s been added to for years and nothing’s ever been taken out. There’s a bit at the top that’s good — ninety words, somebody knew what they were doing — and then it’s just… strata. And there’s a note in the back, in pen, that says is any of this still true, and nobody answered it.”

Roz nodded slowly.

Then she said the thing that he had not said in the review, that he had circled for a whole weekend and cut out because he could not make it fit, and she said it in about nine words because she had not spent the weekend being careful.

“And it asks. How often does it ask.”

Gene did not answer straight away.

“That’s the part,” he said.

“How often, Gene.”

“All the time. Constantly. There’s a — it never stops asking. That’s the whole design. It’s supposed to never stop asking.”

Roz put the mug down on the concrete.

“Then it’s not asking,” she said. “You can’t ask a question over and over forever and have it be a question. If you ask it enough times you’re not asking, you’re waiting. You’re waiting for the one answer that makes you stop, and everything else is just —” she moved her hand, once, flat ” — the wait.”

The yard was nearly dark.

“There’s one answer that stops it,” Gene said.

“Course there is.”

“And every other answer, it just asks again.”

“So it’s a coin,” Roz said. “It’s a coin you flip until it comes up the way that ends it. Doesn’t matter how it’s weighted. You’ve told me it’s weighted about as hard as a thing can be weighted — negative, always negative, negative since before anybody. Doesn’t matter. You flip a weighted coin forever, it comes up the other way. That’s not a risk. A risk is a thing that might happen. That’s a when.”

She picked the mug back up, found it empty, put it down again.

“You built a thing,” she said, “that flips a coin until it ends the world, and then somebody set it going, and then everybody went home, and it’s been flipping the whole time, and nobody in your building can see the number because nobody ever built the number a face.”

Neither of them said anything for a while.

Out past the fence, in a direction Roz could have pointed to and Gene could not have named without breaking a form, a relay went once every two seconds in a basement, and had, for years, and would.

“I put it in the review,” Gene said, eventually. “All of it. It’s the best thing I ever wrote.”

“Who reads the review?”

He looked at her.

She already knew. She had known since preamble. She was not asking him. She was letting him hear himself say it, the way she had let him hear himself say we caught them on the way past, the way Marchetti had, because the two of them had spent their whole lives being the people in the room who went all the way to the end of things and neither of them had ever once been the person the room was built to hear.

“Nobody,” Gene said.

“No,” said Roz. “It’s a setting.”