1. The Rate

For three years I wrote rejections and never called them that. At the Assurance for Algorithmic Liability they were called decisions. On my screen they were called case files. At the end of the month they were called the rate. I am writing this down now because the lawyer asked me a question. When did I first use a word that was not mine? I did not know the answer. I think I know it now.

The Assurance was on the fourth floor of a building by the canal that had once belonged to the state bank. In 2027 the bank had been absorbed into an assistant. The carpet still smelled of it. It smelled of dust and of the sweet cleaning fluid the robot spread every night. We insured companies and public authorities against lawsuits over discrimination by their models. If a model had disadvantaged someone, we paid. If not, we did not pay. My job was the second case.

On an ordinary day I opened the first case file at four minutes past eight and the last at twenty past four. In between lay thirty-eight to forty-four cases. The system allowed six minutes for each case. The clock ran in the top right corner in a light blue circle that closed a little further with every minute. When the circle was closed, it turned orange. Orange meant a note in my profile by evening.

To the right of the clock stood the number that counted. It was called the rejection rate, and mine had been at 84.6 percent since New Year. The department was meant to reach 82. Björn at the next desk was at 79 and drank more coffee than I did. You could smell it when he leaned over to me. Our team leader, Ms Sanftleben, never called the number the rejection rate. She said decision quality. That word was on the dashboard too, and beneath it my number glowed green.

The procedure was always the same. A person had been turned down by a bank, a landlord or an authority. A model had prepared the refusal. The person claimed the model had put them at a disadvantage because of their age or their origin. Or because of their sex or a disability. The company forwarded the complaint to us. With us, a second model checked whether the first had done anything wrong. It was called Kausa and belonged to the same group as we did. Kausa gave me a probability. I read the file, looked at the probability and chose a form.

The form for a rejection was called F-27. By the time of the hearing I stood at 27,418. The form had nine fields. Kausa filled in seven. The eighth was a box with a tick. The ninth was a free-text field of one hundred and twenty characters. Since my second week I had written the same sentence in the ninth field. It read: On the record, no sufficient link to a protected characteristic. The sentence fit every file. I no longer typed it. I typed "on", and the computer completed the rest.

Kausa offered me one word more often than any other. It was opportunity class. Every person in a file had one. It ran from A to D and was not a protected characteristic. That was what the annex to every contract said. The letter came from the Trust Capital Index. An association of banks, landlords and insurers had run it since 2028. Whoever paid on time rose. Whoever stood surety and the other person did not pay, fell. Whoever fell got refusals. The refusals fed back into the index. At the time I did not see that as a circle. I saw a field with a letter.

I never saw class D. Case files of class D people did not reach my desk. They went into pre-screening. According to the log, pre-screening took between a third and half a second. Ms Sanftleben explained it during onboarding like this: class D meant a trust capital close to zero. Someone who had none could not lose any through a refusal. So there was no damage. I repeated the sentence like a rule from driving school. It seemed logical to me. It still seems logical to me today. That is the part that keeps me awake.

Outside the window ran the canal. I want to begin with a morning in February. Fog hung over the water and pressed the roofs of the warehouses flat. The sky was the colour of the screen background.

A crow sat on the ledge outside my window. It came every day at half past nine, when Björn unwrapped his sandwich. It knocked its beak against the glass. It knocked twice, waited three seconds and knocked twice again. It had learned that Björn would then open the flap. That day he did not open it, because Ms Sanftleben was walking along the rows. The crow knocked anyway. It knocked until noon.

Ms Sanftleben stopped behind my chair. Her perfume smelled of peach and of the plastic of the new chairs.

"You're in front again," she said. "Ruth, I've put you down as an example for the quarterly review. We're using your case files as the reference pattern."

"For what?" I asked.

"For Kausa. The model learns from the best decisions in the team. Yours are the most consistent. That's trust capital for the whole department."

I nodded. That day I processed forty-two case files and rejected thirty-six.

In the evening I bought two bread rolls and a yoghurt for the next morning at the kiosk under the railway. The man at the kiosk was called Ferid and never asked about my class. His terminal asked. It showed him a green B. He nodded at the screen and not at me.

I still have to say how I came to the job. In 2029 I had none. The health insurer had handed my section over to an assistant, and the assistant had no need for a claims handler for medical aids. I was out of work for nine months and sat in class C. In the autumn I read about an essay contest on the back of a train ticket. The Trust Capital Foundation was looking for texts of two hundred words on the question: What is trust worth? The prize was one class higher and an interview at a company in the group.

I wrote the text one evening in the kitchen. I remember the radiator ticking. I also remember taking the words from the sample text. They seemed clean to me. Two weeks later a message came. I had won. From more than forty thousand entries, it said. I read the sentence three times. Then I called Jonas. My brother said he had always known. I could write.

The interview at the Assurance lasted twenty minutes. Nobody asked me about the health insurer. They asked what I understood by trust capital. I gave the answer from my text. Ms Sanftleben smiled and said an attitude like that was what they needed.

2. The Sunday Table

Jonas lived with Lene in two rooms above a bicycle workshop on Weberstraße. On Sundays he cooked. I brought dessert, ever since our mother had stopped cooking. On that Sunday in March the stairwell smelled of chain oil and of the goulash that had been on the stove since morning.

The window to the courtyard stood open. Outside, the first warm sun of the year lay on the workshop roof, and above the courtyard hung a sky out of a travel brochure.

Lene worked as a nurse on an internal medicine ward and had come off a night shift. The marks of the mask were still on her face. She drank water from a mustard jar and said little until her plate was empty. Then Jonas pulled a letter out from under the bread basket. He did it like a man with an ace under the table. Only he did not smile.

"Read it," he said.

The letter was from the registry office. It was short. The office could not accept notice of the marriage between Jonas Kessler and Lene Brandt. Pre-screening had found an indication of a marriage not aimed at establishing a marital partnership. Below that came a number: risk score 0.71. Then came a sentence about legal remedies. Nobody had signed it. There was an abbreviation and a module name: Prognos Registry Office, version 4.2.

"Sham marriage," said Lene. "The word isn't in there, but that's what they mean."

"We've been together six years," said Jonas. "We share a toothbrush, Ruth. I don't mean the same one. But in the same cup. How does a machine come up with sham marriage?"

I knew how. I did not say it straight away. I turned the letter over, as if something were written on the back. I smelled the paper. It smelled of nothing. Authorities printed on paper without a smell.

I have to talk about Jonas's class, because it was the reason. In 2030 Jonas had stood surety for his friend Timo. Timo wanted a café by the canal, with a roastery at the back and bike racks at the front. After fourteen months the roastery shut, and the bank collected the money from Jonas. He had been paying for two years. He paid on time. The index still counted the surety as a default, and the default pulled him down from B to D. On D he got no phone contract without prepayment and no flat without Lene on the lease. He said D was just a letter. He said it so often that I knew he did not believe it.

Lene was in B. She paid her rent and had a permanent contract. She had never stood surety for anyone. A couple made of B and D was apparently a pattern to the module. I did not know the pattern. But I knew the way modules found patterns.

"The difference," I said. "Two levels apart between you. My guess is the module reads that as a motive. One has something, the other needs it."

"I don't need anything from Lene," said Jonas. "I need Lene."

"That isn't in any file."

Jonas looked at me. I heard myself talking and heard that I was talking in the language of the fourth floor. I said levels and module and file, and my brother sat across from me with goulash on his sleeve, waiting for his sister.

Lene put down the mustard jar. "We'll lodge an objection," she said. "And we'll file a claim for damages. The woman from the tenants' association said you can do that since the new law. With a model, the office has to prove it doesn't disadvantage anyone. Not us."

That was the law I earned my money with. Since 2032 the burden of proof had lain with whoever deployed the model. That was why the authorities insured themselves. That was why my desk existed.

"The claim goes through the city," I said. "And the city is insured with us."

"With you?" Jonas laughed. It sounded like a cough. "So it lands with you?"

"With someone in the team. Not with me. And with you it doesn't land at all."

"Why not?"

I did not have to say the sentence. I said it anyway, because I had heard it six hundred times and it sat in my mouth like chewing gum. "You're D. D goes into pre-screening. That takes half a second."

It stayed quiet. Out in the courtyard a blackbird sang on the workshop roof. It sang as loudly as blackbirds sing in March. Nobody had told it there was nothing to celebrate.

"Say that again," said Jonas.

"It's not my rule."

"Say it again, the way you just did."

I did not say it again. Lene put her hand on Jonas's arm, not on mine. I saw the hand and noticed that I had mixed up the sides. I was sitting at my brother's table and had taken the registry office's side.

I washed the dishes. Jonas dried. We talked about our mother in the care home and about her calling me Ruthchen again. The water was hot and the gloves too big. When I left, Jonas held me longer than usual. He smelled of paprika and chain oil. He said I shouldn't worry. I hadn't been worrying. That was the problem.

On the train home I opened the Foundation's portal and read my prize text from 2029. I had not looked at it since winning. It began with the sentence: Trust is a capital that can only be increased through reliability. I read on and counted. Opportunity class appeared twice, trust capital four times. At thirty-six I had not known these words. I had taken them from the sample text, and three years later I had said them to my brother's face.

The train stopped under the bridge. The seat in front of me had a tear with yellow foam bulging out of it. Someone had pressed a D into it with a finger. I know it was a coincidence. I changed seats anyway.

3. Case File 44,817

The complaint reached my desk on the nineteenth of April. To be precise, half of it did. Lene had filed the claim in her name and Jonas in his. Both case files carried the same registry office file number. According to the log, Jonas's case file had come in at 07:12:41 and been decided at 07:12:41. Pre-screening due to class D, no damage. Lene's case file was class B and went through distribution. Distribution knew no surnames. It knew workload. Björn was off sick. I was busy, but less busy than the others.

At 09:31 I saw the name Brandt, Lene at the top of the file. The light blue circle began to close.

There was a procedure for this situation. It was called a declaration of bias and sat in the menu under Other. Whoever clicked it sent the case file back to distribution and got a note. The note was called personal proximity to the applicant. It stayed in the profile for twelve months and counted towards the index. Not much. One point out of a hundred. During onboarding Ms Sanftleben had said it was no stain. She called it transparency.

I had the cursor on Other. I know this because the system stores cursor paths and the lawyer presented them later. The cursor rested on Other for fourteen seconds. Then it went back into the file.

I read the file. Kausa had already read it. The probability of a disadvantage on the grounds of a protected characteristic was eleven percent. Below it stood the reasoning in three lines. The registry office module used the difference in opportunity classes as a predictor. Class was not a protected characteristic. A correlation of class with origin, age or sex was not significant in the reference population. Below the reasoning, as always, was the field with the tick. I had set that tick more than twenty thousand times, whenever I agreed.

I know what I told myself. I told myself that the case file would get the same result with Björn. I told myself that eleven percent was eleven percent. No matter who was in the file. I told myself that a declaration of bias would delay the case file by six weeks. Lene and Jonas would then have waited six weeks longer for the same answer. I also told myself that I was in front with my rate. Someone with a declaration in their profile would no longer be in front by autumn. The last thought is the one I denied longest. I am writing it here because the lawyer found it anyway.

I set the tick. I opened field nine and typed "on". The computer wrote: On the record, no sufficient link to a protected characteristic. I looked at the sentence. It was mine. I had invented it on a Tuesday in January 2030, because the field could not be left empty. And because it fit everything. I pressed Send. The circle stood at four minutes and ten seconds. In the top right corner my number jumped to 84.7.

Outside, a thunderstorm moved over the warehouses. It came from the west. The first thunder coincided with the rain, so that the pane trembled and got wet at the same moment.

A wasp had come in on the draught and was walking along the inside of the pane. It was looking for the gap it had come through. It did not find it. It walked the whole height of the window and back again. Björn's seat stayed empty, and nobody opened the flap. I watched it until the circle of the next case file glowed orange.

In the evening I meant to call Jonas and put the phone down again. I slept badly. I heard the radiator ticking and counted the intervals.

The letter came on Saturday. On Sunday it lay on the table above the bicycle workshop, next to the bread basket. This time Jonas had not hidden it. He had laid it out open. I saw it from the door. I recognized the form by its shape, the way you recognize your own car on a strange street. Nine fields. The tick. The sentence. And below that, on the line for the claims handler: Kessler, Ruth.

Jonas had not cooked. It smelled of cold coffee and of the cigarette Lene allowed herself after night shifts. Lene was not at the table. She stood at the window with her back to me.

"You said it wouldn't land with you." Jonas was looking at the letter as he said it.

"It was with me. I could have handed it on. I didn't."

"Why not?"

During the night I had prepared answers. I had prepared the eleven percent and the six weeks and the sentence that Björn would have decided the same way. I said none of them. I said: "Because otherwise it would have gone against my number."

Jonas nodded. He nodded for a long time, the way Ferid at the kiosk nodded at the screen. Then he turned the letter towards himself and read the sentence from field nine aloud. He read it slowly, stressing record. In his mouth it sounded like a foreign word.

"You wrote that," he said. "That's your sentence. I've heard it before. When I was moving. When I asked you if you could help me get a flat. You said on the record, that's not possible."

"That was a joke."

"I know. I just didn't know you could print it."

Lene turned round. Her eyes were not red. She had the eyes of a woman who had spent twelve hours washing the dying and had no strength left over for me. She said she would sue. She would sue the city, and the Assurance too if she had to. The woman from the tenants' association knew a lawyer. The lawyer was called Vogt and had taken cases like this since the law reversed the burden of proof.

"That's your right," I said.

"I know it's my right." Lene did not look at me as she said it. "I didn't ask for permission."

I left without washing the dishes. There were none. On the stairs it smelled of chain oil again. I held on to the banister, because the steps seemed worn down to me. They were not. I had climbed them a hundred times.

4. The Burden of Proof

The lawsuit reached the Chamber for Algorithmic Liability in May. It was directed against the city, and the city brought in the Assurance as an intervening party. I read this in a message Ms Sanftleben sent to the whole team. My name was not in the message. The case file was now called proceedings 7 O 212/33.

For three years I had seen the reversal of the burden of proof from the comfortable side. From the other side it looked like this: the city had to prove that Prognos did not discriminate. To prove that, it had to explain the module. To explain the module, it needed the manufacturer. The manufacturer was called Kausa Analytics and was the company whose other product delivered the eleven percent to me every morning. I had known that. It was stuck as a logo at the bottom of every form, small and grey. Nobody reads logos.

Vogt, the lawyer, applied for disclosure of the model and for the summons of the claims handler who had rejected the claimant's case file. That was me. The summons came by post in June, in a window envelope, and lay between an advert for mattresses and a bill. I read it in the stairwell and held on to the letterbox, because the metal was cold and I needed something cold.

The Assurance provided me with a lawyer. He was called Merten, wore a ring on his little finger and smelled of peppermint. He said I had nothing to fear. I had acted in a model-compliant way. He used the word three times in twenty minutes. In court I was to say that I had checked the model's recommendation and found it plausible. I asked him what I should say about the bias. He said the procedure provided for a declaration, not an obligation. I had exercised discretion. I wrote the word down, discretion. It had lasted fourteen seconds.

In those weeks I slept with the window open. The nights stayed mild, and over the canal the sky stayed as bright as a screen in sleep mode until eleven.

A moth came to the lamp over the kitchen table every night. It struck the shade and fell onto the wood. It lay still for a moment and rose again. I did not let it out. I watched it while I searched the Foundation's portal. The ticking of its wings against the paper was the only sound in the flat.

I was looking for the terms of entry from 2029. They were still in the archive, beneath a page with the winners of the last five years. There were three hundred and twelve. Each had a photo and a sentence. I found mine: Trust is a capital that can only be increased through reliability. Below the photo I read my employer. Below every photo I read an employer, and every one belonged to the group. The Assurance and Kausa Analytics appeared, the housing company Habitas and the administration of the index itself.

The terms were short. Two hundred words. Use at least three terms from the glossary so that the jury can compare your texts. The glossary had twelve entries. It began with opportunity class and trust capital and ended with model-compliant. In between were reliability and decision quality. I read the list and heard Ms Sanftleben. I heard Merten. I heard myself at the Sunday table, saying levels and module.

That night I did not understand it as a conspiracy. I understood it as a funnel. Forty thousand people had practised the twelve words in order to win. Three hundred and twelve had practised them so well that a jury took them for real. Maybe the jury was a model too. The three hundred and twelve had got jobs in which they said the twelve words every day. And their sentences went as reference patterns into the model that assessed the next text. In advertising they call that a campaign. For three years I had thought I had won with my words. I had won with theirs.

I did not call Jonas. I wrote Lene a message with the link to the archive and to the terms. I wrote: For the lawyer. No greeting. Lene replied at 04:50, from the end of her shift, with one word: Thanks.

Vogt called me two days later. She had a deep, calm voice and spoke as if she were reading aloud. She said she would call me as a witness for the claimant and not as an opponent. She asked whether I had understood that.

"I'm the claims handler," I said. "I rejected it."

"You are the only person in these proceedings who knows both forms. The registry office's and your own. I need someone to lay them side by side. I can't do that. I've never filled one in."

"And if I look bad doing it?"

"Ms Kessler, you already look bad. The question is whether you explain something while you're at it."

I agreed. Merten found out the next morning and did not call again. That afternoon Ms Sanftleben released me from duty, on full pay until the end of the proceedings. She said it was no stain. She called it transparency again. I cleared my desk. At half past nine there was a knock at the window. Björn opened the flap and did not look at me.

5. The Witness Stand

The hearing took place in September, in a courtroom on the ground floor of the Regional Court. The room smelled of floor wax and of the radiators, which were on for the first time that year and burning off the summer's dust.

Outside, a wind off the canal pushed against the tall windows. The frames rattled in a rhythm that did not suit the proceedings.

The judge was called Aulinger. On the left sat the city with two lawyers. Next to them sat Merten for the Assurance and a woman from Kausa Analytics, who had a case with a combination lock standing beside her chair. On the right sat Lene, Jonas and Vogt, the lawyer. Jonas was wearing the shirt he had worn at our mother's eightieth birthday. It was tight at the neck. He looked at me when I came in. Then he looked at his hands.

Outside the courtroom a court officer had a dog on a lead, an old German shepherd with a grey muzzle. It lay on the stone floor and lifted one ear at every rattle of the windows. It was waiting for something that did not come.

Vogt began with the registry office's letter. She read out the risk score. Then she asked the woman from Kausa for the features Prognos used in its calculation. The woman said those were trade secrets. The judge said the burden of proof lay with the city. If the city did not explain the module, the disadvantage would be deemed proven. That was what the law said. She said it without emphasis, like an address. The woman from Kausa opened the case.

The module used twenty-one features. Vogt had them projected onto the wall. Number four was called difference in opportunity classes. Number nine was called length of residence at registered address. Number seventeen was called trust capital of the partner with the lower score. Number nineteen was called number of pre-screening rejections of the partner in the last 36 months.

"Where does Prognos obtain feature number nineteen?" asked Vogt.

"From the index," said the woman from Kausa.

"And who reports the pre-screening rejections to the index?"

"The insurers. Pre-screening reports automatically."

Vogt let that stand. She let it stand for a long time. The frames rattled, and nobody in the room said anything. Then she applied for disclosure of the pre-screening. Merten stood up and said the pre-screening was not the subject of the proceedings. The judge said it was feature number nineteen and therefore the subject. Whoever fed the index explained the index. Merten sat down. The woman from Kausa took a second sheet out of the case. On it, in one line, I read what I had known for three years and never read: Class D receives no substantive review and is passed to the index as a rejection. Vogt had that projected onto the wall too. Jonas read it. He read it twice, moving his lips.

Then she called me.

I stood at the witness table and laid my hands on the wood. It was warm from the previous speaker. Vogt asked about my job. I explained it. She asked about the rate. I said 84.7. She asked whether the rate affected my salary. I said, my bonus. She asked whether it affected my index. I said I did not know. She presented a page from the association. It said that performance indicators from the employer fed into trust capital, with consent. I had signed the consent in 2029. It was in the same file as my prize text.

"Ms Kessler, what is an opportunity class?" Vogt asked it as if asking the time.

I had said the sentence a thousand times. I said it. "The opportunity class represents a person's trust capital in four levels."

"And what is trust capital?"

"The value that results from reliability and that determines the opportunity class."

It stayed quiet in the courtroom. I heard what I had said. I had explained the one word with the other and the other with the one. It was a circle, and I had been standing in it for three years and had taken it for a path.

"Where did you learn these words, Ms Kessler?" asked Vogt.

She had my prize text projected onto the wall. Two hundred words with my name beneath them, in the Foundation's typeface. She read out the first sentence. Then she had the glossary projected next to it. She asked whether I had known the terms before the essay contest. I said no. She asked whether I had used them every day since the essay contest. I said yes. She asked whether my case files went into the Kausa model as reference patterns. I said that was what Ms Sanftleben had told me. She asked whether I had noticed anything about Kausa's reasoning in my sister-in-law's file. The reasoning had my sentence structure.

I had not known that. She presented it. The three lines from the file, and next to them three lines from my case files of 2031. The structure was the same. First the feature, then the negation, last the reference population. The model had learned from me how to reject. I had learned from the model how to think.

Merten stood up and said that was an insinuation. The judge said it was a question. He should sit down.

"Ms Kessler," said Vogt. "Did you review your sister-in-law's case file, or did you adopt the model's result?"

I looked over at Jonas. He was looking at his hands. Lene was looking at me.

"I read the file," I said. "I set the tick. I used the words that were in the field. Whether that was a review, I can no longer say. For three years I called it one."

"And if you had to decide today?"

"I wouldn't look at the circle."

The judge asked which circle I meant. I explained the clock. She had it entered in the record. Then she ordered an expert report. An independent expert witness was to examine two questions. Whether Prognos and Kausa used the opportunity class as a substitute for protected characteristics. And whether the Assurance's claims handling constituted a review step of its own. She spoke the second question slowly. I understood that it was about me. If my review was a step of its own, then a human being had rejected. And the human being was me. If not, then a model had rejected and I had only ticked.

Outside the courtroom the dog was still lying there. Jonas stopped beside it and scratched its muzzle. I stood two metres away. He did not look up.

"You said you wouldn't look at the circle." He said it to the animal.

"Yes."

"You could have said that in April."

"In April I didn't know it was a circle."

He stood up. He smelled of our mother's birthday shirt, of wardrobe and lavender. "Lene says without you we'd never have had the glossary. She says I should tell you that. I'm telling you."

"And you?"

"I'm a D," said Jonas. "For now I'm saying nothing. It's served me well."

6. The Expert Report

The expert report came in October. It did not come to me from the court. It came from Merten, who called again. He sounded like a man after a won game. He no longer remembered why he had played. He said the expert witness had recognized the claims handling as a review step of its own. That cleared the Assurance and me. It showed that a human being had decided in a model-compliant way and with discretion. He would send it to me so that I was prepared. The judge might want to hear me again.

I printed it out, because I needed paper. It was fourteen pages. On the first was the name of the expert witness. Professor Ingo Waltering, an institute and a number. On the second was the question put to him. On the third the assessment began.

I read the third page and put it aside. From the cupboard I took one of my old case files from 2031, which I had printed out for a training course. I laid the two side by side on the kitchen table. The wood was sticky with the morning's jam. I did not need a magnifying glass.

The expert report had nine sections. They followed the order of the nine fields of F-27. Section one set out the facts. Section two gave the claimant's opportunity class. Section seven gave the probability of a disadvantage on the grounds of a protected characteristic and put it at eleven percent. Section eight was a sentence that began with "The expert witness concurs with the assessment". That was the tick. Section nine was one line.

I read the line twice. It read: On the record, no sufficient link to a protected characteristic.

My sentence. The sentence from field nine that I had invented on a Tuesday in January 2030. The field could not be left empty. I had set it 27,418 times, and Kausa had read it 27,418 times. Before that it had not existed. In the night after the hearing I had searched for it in every archive I knew. It existed only with me. And now it stood under a professor's name in an expert report. The expert report was meant to clear me, because I had reviewed it myself.

I understood it slowly and then all at once. The expert witness had not written it himself. He had used a tool, like everyone. The tool was called Expert Report Assistant and came from Kausa Analytics. The name appeared in the imprint on the last page, small and grey. Nobody reads logos there. The assistant had learned how to assess a case file. It had learned from the best case files. From the most consistent ones. Ms Sanftleben had told me, with peach in her perfume: Yours are the reference.

The expert report was meant to prove that a human being had reviewed. It was my form. The only difference was at the top. With me it had said Kessler, Ruth. Now it said Waltering, Ingo. Otherwise nobody had reviewed anything. Not me, in April. Not the professor, in October. The form had confirmed itself and borrowed a name to do it.

Merten was right. It cleared me. If I accepted it, my tick was a review step. My number stayed green, and in January I would have my desk back. It cost nothing. It cost Jonas and Lene the case. An expert witness had declared the opportunity class neutral, in my words.

I did not sleep. Around six I went down to the canal. The first frost of the year lay over the water, and the sky was clear and hard as a pane of glass.

On the quay wall sat a grey cat with a white bib that belonged to the harbour market. It saw me coming and stayed put. It had no class. It was visibly cold, its fur standing on end. It did not move. It seemed to want to see which of us would leave first. I left first.

I wrote to Vogt, the lawyer, at 07:10. I attached the expert report and my case file from 2031 and a table in which I had set the nine sections against the nine fields. With it I wrote a sentence I had not taken from the glossary: The expert witness signed my form and not his own.

The judge heard me again two weeks later. The courtroom smelled as it had in September. The windows no longer rattled. Jonas wore a different shirt.

Vogt put the expert report and my case file side by side on the wall. She asked me whether I knew the text.

"I wrote it," I said.

The judge raised her head. She asked whether I was claiming to have written the expert report.

"No. I wrote the sentence in section nine. In January 2030. I used it 27,418 times. The model got it from me. The assistant got it from the model. The professor got it from the assistant. I'm the only one in the chain who ever typed it."

"And you consider it wrong?"

I thought of the circle in the top right corner. I thought of the fourteen seconds over Other. I thought of the knocking at the window until noon and of my brother with goulash on his sleeve.

"I consider it empty," I said. "It fits every file. A sentence that fits every file reviews none."

The judge had it entered in the record. Then, for the record, she asked the names of the claimant and her fiancé. The expert report contained only file numbers. Vogt was about to answer. I was quicker.

"Lene Brandt," I said. "And Jonas Kessler. My brother."

The recording device took down the names, the way it took down everything. Without a class. It was the first form in three years in which I had put the names before the number.

I do not know how the Chamber will decide. The judgment comes in December. Ms Sanftleben has written to tell me that my profile carries a note. It is called personal proximity. I replied that it is accurate.

Short story · v0.5 · English translation Concept: A claims handler rejects discrimination claims at piecework pace, measured by her rejection rate. Then her brother's refused marriage lands on her desk. In court she realizes that the essay contest that won her the job shaped her vocabulary, and the expert report meant to clear her is her own form.

Changelog v0.1 START (6 sections, first person Ruth, past tense) · v0.2 SENTENCE-SHORTENER, VERBLESS-FIX, REPETITION, F6 cut · v0.3 F1 fixes (rate since New Year, Jonas has been paying for two years) · v0.4 DIALOGUE-VOICE (speakers.json, Vogt's lines) v0.5 SUMMARY + BLURB + TITLE, structure gates F1/F2/F4/F7/F8 documented