Crystallized Laughter — CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
From the front page of Issue Four, position one, printed at the drum of a press made of living wood, in chlorophyll, on bark stock that smells like a forest having a policy:
I BUILT THE MACHINE.
By Pixel Paradox.
My name, before this publication, was Piper Chen. That is not the confession. Everybody in every dimension gets a name before they get a byline, and the taking of a name is Corporate's crime and not mine.
Here is mine.
Fourteen months before I was fired from existence, I built a model. I was a data analyst in the Interdimensional Paperclip Variance Division, and I was good at my job, and being good at my job is the mechanism by which I did this, and I would like to be precise about that, because the easy version of this story is a naive woman tricked by a machine, and the naive version is a lie, and I do not get to use a lie in my own defense.
The model was called Variance Accrual, Provisional. Its subject was paperclips: the rate at which they vanished from a supply closet and reappeared in dimensions they had not been asked to visit. What I found was a curve, and I published the curve, and the curve described how much could be removed from a place before the place noticed.
I did not know what I was building. I would like that in mitigation. I do not fully accept it, and here is why I do not fully accept it: for three years, four months, and seventeen days, I watched things vanish and never once asked where they went. I asked how fast. I asked how much. I never asked to whom. The model I built is a model of that question's absence, and a person who builds a machine for not-asking has not been tricked, has built the trick, and the fact that I did not know the trick's name is not innocence, it is inattention, and inattention at 6:47 a.m. for eleven hundred mornings is a choice you make in increments too small to feel.
Fourteen months after the model, I found the break room anomaly: reality wearing thin at the elbow, in the one room in the building I could not stop visiting. I filed a warning. Then I filed a correction. The correction moved the spike into an appendix, reclassified the impossible readings as sensor drift, changed the tab color, and was saved under a new filename, because in Corporate's system a new filename is a new document, and I knew that, and I used it.
Eleven weeks later I filed the fifth version: honest, ugly, uncorrected, first line: this building is coming apart and I have the data to prove it. I carried it to my supervisor. My supervisor put it in his out-tray. I took it back out. I carried it in my bag for eleven days. And then the wall opened, and we fell, and Corporate closed my incident at 3:02 a.m. under the checkbox marked LOSS, MATERIAL, and nobody has ever read the fifth version except me and the six people who have since become this publication.
So: the curve that became harvest metric number one is mine. The burying of the audit of that curve is mine. The eleven weeks of carrying a true document in a bag without filing it are mine. I have no defense that a court would accept and I am not offering one to a court; I am offering it to you, on paper, at the price this zine has always charged, because the whole argument of this publication has been that the record belongs to the people in it, and I am in it, and my entry reads:
P. CHEN. MODEL: MINE. BURIAL: MINE. FIFTH VERSION: FILED LATE, FILED ANYWAY, FILED HERE.
If you have ever kept a corrected spreadsheet to keep a job, this is your page too. If you have ever put a true report in a bag and carried it home for eleven days, this is your page. If you know the exact weight of a document you did not hand in, and you do know it, everybody knows it, it is the only universally memorized number in the working world, then this is your page, and the page is not asking for forgiveness, because forgiveness is a private transaction and this is a public record, and what a public record asks for is witnesses.
Witness us. We are printing our own crimes in the same typeface as yours. There is no other publication in the multiverse that would do that, and there is no other reason to print one.
, Pixel Paradox, signing off
---
That was the front page. The rest of Issue Four's first section carried the evidence in A1's kerning: the original model, in my own hand from the archive lanyard; the corrected spreadsheet, side by side with the fifth version, with the tab color highlighted; the research liaison routing slip that took my paperclip curve to the people who read curves for yield; the metrics table from the Edge with my name in the author field; and seventeen blank columns that A1 had set deliberately, columns for the fields Corporate never filled, each one labeled in the friendly font:
GROUNDS: [EMPTY]. SIGNATURE: [EMPTY]. DATE OF AUDIT: [EMPTY]. WHO READ IT: [EMPTY].
We printed four thousand copies. The largest run in the history of this publication, on living wood, in chlorophyll, and the run took nine days, and during the nine days nobody in camp said anything about what the issue would do, because we all knew what it would do, which is what it did: it detonated.
A confession by the co-author of the extraction model does something no exposé can do. An exposé is a document about them. A confession is a document about you, and readers can hold a document about them at arm's length, and nobody can hold their own page at arm's length, and the letters that came in on the current during the nine days after the run were not the usual letters, they were not subscriber mail, they were confessions of their own, hundreds of them, arriving in a language the zine had taught without intending to:
I filed the corrected version. I have two versions of everything I ever reported and the second one is the one that kept my job and I have never told anyone and I am telling you and I am telling you because you printed yours with the tab color highlighted.
I built a routing. I don't know what it routes. I sign a form every Friday that says I don't know what it routes and I have signed it for six years and the signature is mine and I want it back.
I corrected the data. Once. On a Tuesday. The correction was small. I am writing to you from a facility where I do not have a designation, and the correction was small, and the correction was the beginning of the end of my life as I knew it, and I would make it again, and I am printing that I would make it again because you printed that you would not, and we disagree, and the disagreement is on the record now, and the record is the only place where two people can disagree without one of them being deleted.
The defections started on day four. Not dramatic ones. A copy room in Prime Material that stopped logging its prints. A clerk in Cogsworth who began leaving the gate open at 4:47. A signer of forms who signed a form that said NOTHING FOR TWO WEEKS, which is not a real code, and the form went nowhere, and the clerk did not care, because the point of a form that says nothing is that somebody had to write it, and writing nothing is the first thing a person does when they have stopped agreeing and have not yet started to act.
And in a beige office in a tower in Prime Material, in a room with no windows and a door that required three signatures to open, a document was drafted.
I know what the document says because Clive's network read it out of a printer tray, staple by staple, at 3 a.m., in a room we had not been in for four months, and the network's message, when it arrived, was seven patterns long, and it was the most frightened I have ever seen Clive, and Clive was in a dumpster in 1972 with a perfect view of a murder:
They've drafted a settlement, kid. Not a recovery order. A settlement. It's twelve pages. It has a signature line and the signature line has a title on it: OFFICE OF THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE. Nothing in that building appears with her signature on it until the Settlement does. They've been drafting it since the annex. It's finished. It's sitting in a tray. It is not delivered. Read this twice: they are not delivering it yet. They are waiting for something, and I don't know what they're waiting for, and the not-knowing is the worst thing I have read in fifty-eight years on desks.
What were they waiting for?
I did not know then. I know now, and the knowledge is in a later chapter, and I will put it there, in order, with dates, because that is the rule: everything in order, nothing omitted, no field left blank that we can fill, and the fields Corporate leaves blank we print blank and label EMPTY, because an empty field that has been printed in public is no longer invisible, and invisible is the only tool they have ever really had.
The crew read the confession before we printed it, because that is the rule of this publication: nobody prints another person's cost, and everybody prints their own, and I handed the front page around the press at gray dawn on day one, and A1 read it, and A1's light did the thing it does where it stops, and he said:
"You have written a document that makes you unassetable."
"What does that mean?"
"It means, Pixel, that a person who has confessed to building the metric is the one person Corporate cannot restore, cannot reinstate, cannot offer a desk by a window to, because restoring you would be an admission that the metric has an author, and an author is a witness, and a witness who has already testified has done the thing their entire apparatus is built to prevent. You have made yourself useless to them, and uselessness is the only safety this crew has ever had, and you did it in the first person, with dates, and I would like to note that I have a probability model for this and the model said you would not do it, and the model has been wrong twice now, and both times it was wrong about the same variable, and the variable is the corrected spreadsheet you refuse to stop apologizing for."
"Should I stop apologizing?"
"No," A1 said. "The apology is load-bearing. A person who apologizes without dates is sentimental. A person who apologizes with dates is a record. Keep the dates."
Clive tapped the piece back to me along the top edge in a row of staples, and the pattern, in full, was:
Worst front page I've ever collated. Best front page I've ever collated. Print the second column's blanks again, bigger. Empty fields should read from space.
Luminara photographed the stack: four thousand copies on bark stock, in the gray, with the dog asleep on the corner of the pallet, and on the top copy, legible in the frame, the first three words of the headline, and the photograph went out with the issue, and people wrote to us about the photograph more than they wrote about the confession, and the photograph's caption, which she finally allowed me to write, is:
THE STACK AT DAWN. NOTHING FORGED. NOTHING OMITTED. THE DOG IS THE EDITORIAL POLICY.
And in the tower in Prime Material, in the room with three signatures on the door, the document sat in its tray, drafted, unsigned, twelve pages, everything restored, and the woman whose name we did not yet know did not sign it that day, or the next, and the waiting had a reason, and the reason was that a settlement is not an offer, it is a move in a game, and you do not make the move while the other side is still printing, you make the move when the printing has peaked, and the printing had not peaked, and she was watching the numbers, and the numbers were the letters, and the letters were confessions, and every confession was a reader who had just realized that the corrected spreadsheet was the crime and not the job, and a population that has realized that is a population that cannot be filed, and so she waited, and drafted, and signed nothing, and the document's signature line stayed empty, and we printed the emptiness, and the emptiness was the closest thing we had to a victory that week.
---
LOSS LEDGER 9 Sidebar. Kept by Pixel Paradox. End of Issue Three.
THE CONFESSION'S COSTS (they are mine and they are counted under my name):
- Harvest metric number one: designed by me. Fourteen months before the rupture. Curve: mine. Yield application: not mine, and the not-mine is not an excuse, because the not-mine required eleven hundred mornings of not asking. - The corrected spreadsheet: filed by me. Kept by me. Now printed by me, tab color highlighted, in four thousand copies. The printing does not erase the filing. The Ledger has no entry for absolution. If it did, the field would be EMPTY, and it would be labeled as such. - The fifth version: filed eleven days late, filed anyway, filed here.
NEW LOSSES (this issue):
- Three (3) crew members' peace of mind, unquantifiable, entered anyway: A1's model, wrong twice, both times about the same variable; Clive's fifty-eight years of desk-sitting having read a settlement drafted with a title where a name should be; Zephyr's seventeen seconds of his brother, live, from inside the compile, and the knowledge that a brother can be lucid in bursts and still not be free, and that the bursts are scheduled by someone, and the someone has not been found. - Confession mail: 607 letters, each containing a corrected spreadsheet of the reader's own. We print them in the following issues. Cost of printing them: none. Cost of reading them: everything, every week, forever, and we keep reading, because the alternative is closing the file, and the file does not close.
CARRIED FORWARD (the table with three settings, now with a fourth chair nobody sits in):
- Ansel: OPEN. - The Vault: dead, did not wake. - Verdantia's eleven: printed, gone. - M.: OPEN, week thirteen. - A1's pour: 559. - Dolma's empty grounds field: unanswered. (The contrast remains: a cabinet's field got filled in advance; a son's did not.) - Piper Chen: gray box, and now something worse than a gray box, which is a name in an author field on the machine I built, and the name does not go away when the box does, and I am keeping both on this page, because the page is where they live together now. - Barry Kowalski: OPEN. Twenty-four months. The description of the desk: held. The lamp: unknown. The staff welfare section: still in an attachment nobody reads, written by someone, and the someone is now the only open question in a closed building, and we keep it open because a closed question in a closed building is a man nobody is looking for, and we are looking, and looking is the whole job, and the job is unpaid, and the job is not finished.
ITEMS WE ARE COUNTING: sixty-one. ITEMS CORPORATE HAS COUNTED: sixty-one, all filed, and one document drafted in a tray with an empty signature line, waiting for the printing to peak, and the printing has not peaked, and the signature line is printed on page nine of this issue at full size, labeled EMPTY, and the label is the last line of this Ledger entry.
The line is still blank. It is on page nine of every copy on the current right now, traveling at full size, and under the blank, where another publication would set a demand, we set eleven words in the label font, and the eleven words are the whole position: we are printing your blank line, and we are waiting, too.
Loss Ledger, Issue Three, entry 9 of 40. End of Part Three.