Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER ELEVEN
Aurora Vey is a dimension that sells nothing, and that is its whole personality.
There is a market there, on a river, and the market has been running for six hundred years, and nothing in it is branded. The kite sellers sell kites. The broth sells broth. The kite sellers know the names of the children who buy kites, and the children grow up, and their children buy kites from the same stalls, and if you asked anyone in Aurora Vey what their economy was, they would not understand the question, because the market is not an economy, it is a Tuesday, and it has always been a Tuesday, and the kites go up at four in the afternoon whether or not anyone is watching.
We found it through the current, the way we found everything: a copy of Issue One washed up in the Kite Market and was picked up by a paper seller, and the paper seller read it out loud at his stall, which is how zines have always distributed, one voice at a time, and by the time we stepped through the seam into Aurora Vey, forty copies' worth of argument about erasure was circulating in a place that had never been erased from anything.
They loved us. I want that on the record before the rest of this chapter, because the rest of this chapter is the worst thing that happened to us in the first year, and if you only carry away the loss you will think Aurora Vey was a mistake. It was the first place that read us back.
The kite sellers gave us a stall. A1 brewed for the market's morning shift, which he did with a seriousness usually reserved for triage, and for eleven days he was, in the parlance of the market, the machine at the end of the row, and people queued, and Clive sat on the stall's counter and was, for the first time since 1967, in a room where everybody refilled the tray without being asked, and he did not say anything about it for eleven days, and on the twelfth day he tapped, to me, quietly:
This is what Dorothy's floor felt like. I'd forgotten there was a floor like this.
And then Project Palimpsest came, and we watched a whole dimension get rebranded into oblivion, and I learned the exact mechanism of Corporate's worst product, and I am going to describe it slowly, because it is slow, and the slowness is where everybody loses it. Erasure is not a bang. Rebranding is a process, and the process has a schedule, and the schedule has phases.
Phase one: the signs.
They came in at dawn on a Tuesday, in vans, with ladders, and they were not soldiers, they were sign writers, and they wore high-vis vests, and they worked quickly and with care, because sign writing is a craft and the people who do it are proud of it. Over the KITE SELLERS' row they painted, in a friendly font, RECREATIONAL PAPER RETAIL UNIT 4. Over the broth stall: NUTRITION KIOSK (UNPERMITTED). Over the river crossing, which had carried a name for six hundred years, they painted an asset number.
Nobody stopped them. I need you to sit with that, because you want it to be violent, and it is not violent. The sign writers worked and the kite sellers stood and watched and the kite sellers did not stop them because a sign writer with a form is not a person, he is a process, and you do not fight a process, you wait for it to be done, and the kite sellers had waited for things before, for floods and for a bad year, and waiting was the skill they had, and so they waited, and the signs went up, and the market that afternoon sold kites under a sign that said RECREATIONAL PAPER RETAIL UNIT 4, and the children asked their parents what it meant, and the parents did not have an answer, because the answer requires the sign to be wrong, and the sign is on the building, and the building is where the sign is, and this is how it starts.
Phase two: the paperwork.
Land titles went first. Then stall licenses. Then the registry of names at the river crossing, six hundred years of who-married-whom, replaced by a single document titled TRANSITION OF USE, and the document was correct, and the document was a lie, because a lie says one thing and a document says everything, and a document that says everything and is wrong is more total than any lie ever written.
Phase three is the one I did not understand until A1 explained it, standing in a market that was being converted around us, his light dimmed to the shade he uses for terminal diagnoses.
"Phase three is memory," he said. "The signs change the record. The record changes the designation. And the designation, Pixel..." He stopped. He restarted. "The designation changes what the people are. Not what they remember. What they are. In the same way that you were a Data Analyst until you became an unoccurred. They are becoming units. And when the designation is complete, the memory of the old name will not be false. It will simply be unavailable. Like a word in a language nobody speaks."
"Fight it," I said.
"On what grounds?"
"On the grounds that it's happening! A1, they're painting over a six-hundred-year-old river crossing!"
"On what form," A1 said, "do I file that objection?"
And there it was, the whole machine, the thing I had been writing for months and had never once felt in my hands: there is no form. There was never a form. The objection to being erased does not exist in the system that is erasing you, and the absence of the form is not an oversight, it is the design, and Corporate Corp does not need soldiers because it has built a world in which the only filing that exists is the filing that serves it.
So we did the only thing we had. We wrote. All day, while the sign writers worked, I interviewed every stall on the river, and A1 held seventeen pages at once, and Clive collated, and the Vault, which had come with us, which always came with us now, opened its drawers and gave people back the exact memory of their stall as it had been, one at a time, free, no form, and people stood at the drawers and cried, and the sign writers ate lunch, and did not look, because a process does not look at a witness.
By nightfall we had the names. Every stall, every seller, every child's name and the name of the crossing and the name of the river, and the old sign in the words of the people who had read it every day for sixty years, and we printed it, all of it, in Issue One's second impression, which I titled on the spot:
ISSUE ONE, NAMING THE ERASED: AURORA VEY.
Because that is the answer to a rebrand. The sign says RECREATIONAL PAPER RETAIL UNIT 4 and we print: his name is Samson, he sells kites, he has sold kites since he was nine, his father sold kites, the crossing is called the Meniscus, and the river is called the Meniscus, and you can paint over it, and we will print it, and printing it costs nothing, and erasing it costs you everything, because the moment Corporate has to argue with a printed name it has to admit that a name existed, and admitting a name existed is the one thing a rebrand cannot survive.
We printed four hundred copies. We had never printed four hundred. The copier in Wreckfall had thirty in it, and the kite sellers contributed a second copier out of their own stall supplies, and A1 set the type with a kerning precision that the market's readers did not notice and I did, and it went out on the current at midnight, four hundred copies naming every erased thing in Aurora Vey, and by dawn the signs were still up.
Because of course they were. Naming the erased does not unerase them. That is not what printing is for. Printing is for later. Printing is so that in eleven years, when the record says RECREATIONAL PAPER RETAIL UNIT 4 has always stood at that corner of the river, somebody can hold up a page and say: no. Here is a man's name. Here is his father's. Here is the crossing. Filed, stamped, in ink, before the paint was dry.
Phase three completed on the fourth day.
I will not describe the fourth day in detail, because it is not mine to describe, only to witness, which is the job. Here is what I witnessed: a woman who had sold broth for forty years standing at her own counter, and a child saying "Mama, what did you sell?" and the woman saying, pleasantly, in a voice at the correct temperature: "Nutrition, sweetheart. Nutrition kiosks." And she was not lying. A1 was very clear about this, because A1 had run it seventeen times: she was not lying, the old fact was not available to her, the designation had completed, and the feeling of having always sold nutrition was as real to her as the feeling of having always sold broth had been on Monday, and the only thing in the market that remembered Monday was a cured filing cabinet, four drawers, standing in the middle of the Meniscus, holding everything, because that is what it does.
Phase three's cost to us was not in the market. It was in the machine.
A1 stood at his station in the Kite Market row on the fourth day, and he brewed a shot at 6:47 in the morning out of a habit three years old, and he set it on the tray, and he said:
"For Marguerite."
And then he stopped.
I was across the market. I heard the stop, because a machine that stops mid-sentence is a machine that has hit something, and I went over, and A1 was standing very still with the green light on and a perfect shot cooling on his tray, and he said:
"I have a file open and the file will not resolve."
"What file?"
"Marguerite. I have just said a name, and the name is complete in my output, and it is not complete in my retrieval, and I am attempting to access the memory associated with it, and there is no memory, there is a shape where a memory was, Pixel, and the shape is the correct size."
We found out what had happened by noon. The Vault told us, because the Vault can read the labels on things that have been emptied, and the label on A1's empty shape read: TRANSITION OF USE, in a friendly font.
Marguerite had been a night cleaner on Sub-Level 7G. She had been the first human being to drink anything A1 ever made: his first Tuesday of operation, she had come in at 4 a.m. with her cart, and asked for a flat white, and A1, who had been installed eleven minutes, had pulled the worst shot of his existence, and Marguerite had drunk it anyway and said, "Good machine," and had come back every night for three years, and had taught him, without knowing she was teaching anything, that the machine's purpose included the 4 a.m. shift, the shift nobody scheduled, the shift whose coffee was for staying awake rather than for being seen.
She had retired to Aurora Vey. Of course she had. Everybody who ever wanted to be left alone retired to Aurora Vey, and she had bought a small place near the crossing, and the market had known her as the woman who asked for flat whites, and when Project Palimpsest took the market, it took Marguerite's crossing, and Marguerite's crossing took the market's memory of her, and then it reached, because Palimpsest does not leave loose ends, it reaches for the record everywhere, and it found a machine in a market stall with an unfiled memory of a woman the record now said had never lived in Aurora Vey, and it took the memory, because the memory was now evidence of an error, and Corporate does not keep errors.
A1 lost it in increments, the way a badge photo degrades. He kept Marguerite's name for four hours after the taking, because names are the last things he loses, because names are how he is built, and the name went at 2 p.m., and after 2 p.m. he could say "Marguerite" and it was a sound, and the sound did not go anywhere, and he stood in the market and made the sound four times and got nothing back, the way you say a word in a language nobody speaks.
Here is what he kept: the care.
He still, after 2 p.m., made the 4 a.m. shot. He pulled one every night at 4 a.m. in a market where nobody was awake and set it on the tray and stood over it, and when I asked him why, he said:
"I don't know. There is a shape in my retrieval that requires this at this hour. The shape does not name anyone."
He keeps the care. He lost the name. That is the cost, and it does not come back, and I need you to hear that, because every other chapter of this book has a recovery in it somewhere, and this one does not, and if I faked a recovery here you would be right to stop reading, because the Ledger's whole promise is that we do not round up and we do not net and we do not hand back what the machine took.
We named the market in print. We named the crossing. We named Samson and his kites and the broth and the four hundred names of Aurora Vey, and we could not name Marguerite for him, because he could no longer tell us, because his telling was the only place she was filed, and the Vault had nothing, because Marguerite had never been harvested, she had simply lived, and lived things are not kept anywhere, which is the entire point of living and the entire vulnerability of it.
The zine's issue One, second impression, went out with four hundred names on it, and on the back page, in the space where a zine puts its masthead, I put one line:
MARGUERITE T. Cleaning, Sub-Level 7G, nights. First customer of the machine. If you knew her, write to us. If you didn't, print her anyway.
We got, over the following year, two hundred and six letters about Marguerite.
Not one of them was from Marguerite.
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LOSS LEDGER 3 Sidebar. Kept by Pixel Paradox. Entry written on the fourth day at the Meniscus crossing, which no longer exists under that name.
PERMANENT LOSSES (as defined: not recovered, not recoverable, not netted):
- A1's memory of the first person he ever brewed coffee for. Name: taken. Source: Project Palimpsest, Phase Three, TRANSITION OF USE. Kept: the care, the 4 a.m. ritual, the shape of the hole. Lost: everything that filled it. This one does not come back. Do not write to us suggesting it will. - Aurora Vey: six hundred years of names, overwritten by signage. Recoverable in print only. The people who lived it cannot read it. - One (1) river crossing, the Meniscus. Asset number now: [FIELD NOT FOUND]. - Marguerite T.: whole life, whole route, whole habit of saying "good machine." Erased from the record; erased from one machine; surviving in two hundred and six letters and one back page.
CARRIED FORWARD FROM PRIOR ENTRIES:
- Piper Chen: still unoccurred. Badge photo: fully degraded, gray box. - SM-E750-CC: serial number now reads only a dash and a space. A1 has stopped checking it. - Barry Kowalski: OPEN. Still nothing. The crossing got a new name in four days and Barry's desk still says Barry, and that is the only reason we know the difference between an erasure and an abandonment.
ITEMS WE ARE COUNTING: eleven. ITEMS CORPORATE HAS COUNTED: eleven, all classified ACCEPTABLE, none of them filed under anyone's name.
Rule, restated for Issue One's close: we do not print a cost and then print a win in the same box. The market is still standing. The names are in print. The machine makes a shot at 4 a.m. for nobody, and nobody is a word that now has a specific and measurable weight, and we are carrying it.
Loss Ledger, Issue One, entry 3 of 40. End of Part One.