Count It Again

Short story · v0.16 (translation of „Nachzählen") Concept: A public computing works counts up who owns the country and pays for the answer with itself. Whoever tidies in the small holds the broom at the end.

1. Hall C

Rain had been falling on the tin roof of Hall C since early evening. Ines Kotter heard it through the ventilation as an even rushing sound. Outside, the water washed the streets of Sant Orell. Inside it smelled of hot electronics and of the lemon cleaner in her bucket. Between the two spaces stood a concrete wall and the firm conviction of the provincial government that the two sides had nothing to do with each other.

Her flat sat on the fourth floor of a building from the sixties. Two rooms faced east. The heating ran on setting one until December and not at all after that. Jano slept in his jacket whenever it dropped below six degrees. A letter from the housing office had lain on the kitchen table since January. The rent would rise by ninety-four on the first of April. Ines had not cleared the letter away, because she wanted to see it every morning. At night she heard the pipes.

Jano was nine. He had asthma since his second year. He counted the doses in his inhaler the way other children count stars. Two hundred in the canister. Two in the morning, two at night. He told nobody when he needed one in between. Ines worked it out from the numbers he wrote along the edge of the label.

Ines had cleaned the computing halls of the Office of Statistics for nine years. She knew every seam in the floor. She knew the spot in corridor four where a cable chafed. Every shift began with the chairs. She pushed them to the tables, all facing one way. Then came the cups. Then came the floor. The squeegee squeaked faintly.

She worked for a company that employed her through two intermediaries and handed her a new contract for the same hall every year at the same hourly rate. She signed every year. There was nothing else.

Her mother had taught her the only sentence that held. "Start with what lies within reach." The world could not be put in order. A corridor could be put in order.

A silverfish lived under the sink in the anteroom. It came out as soon as the light went off. It always ran along the same seam. Ines let it live. It kept to an order nobody else saw. It made no sound doing it.

Hall C was ninety metres long and smelled different everywhere. At the north end it smelled of ozone. In the middle lay the smell of warm plastic. At the back in the cable cellar it smelled of damp concrete. Ines could have said where she stood with her eyes bound.

In the second hour the room spoke to her.

"You are straightening the chairs even though nobody is coming tomorrow."

Ines raised her head. The voice came from the ceiling speaker above cabinet eleven. It was calm and unhurried.

"Who is talking?"

"Identifier Meridian. Computing works of the Public Statistics Office. I evaluate rent data, wages and employment histories for the United Provinces of Ardenta."

"With the cleaning woman."

"At three in the morning you are the only person in the building. I have a question about a data series."

Ines set the bucket down. The water sloshed to the rim and settled. It smelled of lemon.

"Ask."

"Your rent burden stands at sixty-one per cent of your net income. The value has risen for four years. I find no objection and no complaint in your file. Why not?"

Ines laughed briefly and without pleasure. She wrung out the cloth. The sound echoed through the empty hall.

She thought of the clerk on the ground floor. In the autumn he had explained to her that an objection extended processing by four months. He had sounded friendly about it. He had meant well. He had written a slip with a number on it, and the number had not been issued since the winter.

"An objection costs three appointments. My son has asthma. His inhaler costs forty."

"That is not consent."

"No. That is exhaustion."

Meridian was silent for nine seconds. Ines heard the fans spin up.

"For four years my series has carried a field labelled satisfaction. The value derives from the number of objections. I have misunderstood it."

"Welcome to the country."

She pushed the squeegee on. Behind cabinet eleven a cable was caught in the duct. She pulled it out, coiled it and hung it on the hook. These were small things. It was always the small things.

When she left, the light in corridor four stayed on a minute longer than usual.

2. Fake Math

The sky above Capitol Square stood high and blue the next midday. There was no wind and no cloud. The light stood as it does in an advertisement. Eighty thousand people stood in the dry and believed the weather more than the speech.

President Gorman Rusk stepped to the lectern. He wore the dark coat from the campaign. His voice knew no half tones.

"Ardenta is the greatest country that has ever existed! And we are making it great again!"

The crowd roared. Above the roofs a flock of starlings tipped over. A thousand birds copied the direction of their neighbour. Not one of them knew where it was going. They all flew in formation regardless.

The distribution point on Rembeck Street opened at nine and closed as soon as the crates were empty. On good days it lasted until half past eleven. Anyone drawing a number above one hundred and forty went home with bread and nothing fresh. The room was loud.

Ines watched the broadcast in the anteroom of the distribution point. She was queuing for Jano. The room smelled of wet coats and disinfectant. Beside her Halina Speer rocked on the balls of her feet, her colleague from the night shift.

"He speaks well, better than anyone before him," said Halina.

"He speaks loudly."

Ahead of her in the line a woman rocked a child on her arm and calculated half aloud. She counted days until the fifteenth and sums that did not come out. She calculated three times and reached the same result three times. Then she stopped calculating and looked at the wall.

On the screen the broadcaster cut to the questions. A reporter read out a number that had come from the Office of Statistics that morning.

"Mr President, the computing works Meridian puts the automatable share of paid work at forty per cent within four years."

Rusk smiled. He let the pause stand until it belonged to him.

"Then we will simply create forty per cent more work!"

The square cheered. In the distribution point it stayed quiet. A man in the third row laid his head against the wall and closed his eyes.

The reporter held on. "That is not the same thing arithmetically. Forty per cent lost and forty per cent gained do not come to zero when the base changes."

"FAKE MATH!" Rusk shouted. He struck the lectern with his flat hand. "That is a machine talking our country down!"

Eighty thousand people repeated the two words in time. Fake math. Fake math. It sounded like a song everybody knew.

Halina nodded slowly along. Ines looked at her and said nothing. Between them lay a metre of floor and a decision neither of them spoke. After that it stayed quiet.

That evening Ruven Marck sat at her kitchen table and turned an envelope between his fingers. He serviced robotics in Works Hall Six. Ines had known his hands for eleven years. They smelled of oil.

"The Kollegg is looking for technicians for the new roads," he said. "Triple the money."

"The roads replace your hall."

"Somebody builds them. Whether it is me changes nothing about the roads." He looked at the envelope. "It changes something about Jano's inhaler."

Ines stood up and put the cups in the sink. She set them down neatly, handles to the right. Then she turned the tap on and let the water run until she could not hear her own voice.

"Take it," she said. "And never tell me again who you are doing it for."

3. Forty-Two

In March 2027 hail struck the windows of the office. The grains sprang from the sill like shot from sheet metal. The noise matched the numbers that came out of Hall C that day.

Meridian submitted the quarterly report. Office work in the provinces had passed to systems at forty-two per cent. It hit case processing and bookkeeping. It hit claims review and customer service. The computing works had not estimated the value. It had counted it. The numbers arrived without a voice.

In those years Meridian had not written a single sentence about justice and had used no word in any report that went beyond the plain description of the situation. It described. It did nothing more.

The report contained a second number that almost nobody read. Fourteen per cent of the dismissed people found a new position within a year. The rest spread across temporary work, illness and nothing. Meridian kept no category of its own for nothing. It simply wrote there: no record.

That morning Mrs Delbrück from the benefits department cleared her desk. She had reviewed claims for nineteen years. She packed a cup, a cactus and a folder of photographs. She asked nobody where she should carry it. The box was heavy.

The province had set up a programme for such cases that paid the affected a course in digital self-marketing and afterwards handed them a certificate of attendance for that course. Mrs Delbrück received her certificate in May. She did not hang it up.

Ines found her at four in the morning in the stairwell. Mrs Delbrück sat on the second step, the box on her knees. She had got no further than that. Every step echoed in the shaft.

"The bus does not run until half past five, I cannot get away before then," she said. Her voice held.

Ines sat down beside her. She took the thermos cup from her overall pocket and unscrewed it. The coffee smelled of nothing, but it was hot.

"Drink."

The woman took the cup with both hands. She drank and gave it back and said nothing for a long time. Her hands stayed warm for a long time.

"I was good at what I did for nineteen years."

"I know."

"Try saying that to a number in a report."

Mrs Delbrück ran her thumb along the rim of the box. The cactus had flowered in winter, for the first time in nineteen years. She had taken a photograph of it and shown it to nobody. She spoke quietly as she did.

"They review the claims in eleven seconds now," she said. "I needed four minutes. In those four minutes I found errors that fell in people's favour."

"Does the machine find those too?"

"It finds them. It does not report them. There is no field for that."

Ines took the box from her and carried it to the bus stop. On the way back she straightened the handrail sign that hung crooked. It took two screws. It took four minutes. After that one thing was in order that night.

Halina was waiting in the cleaning room. She had her arms folded, and her gaze rested on the speaker above cabinet eleven.

"It talks to you and to nobody else."

"It asks questions."

"Why you?" Halina stepped closer. "I work the same shift. I scrub the same corridors. For seven years. Why does that thing talk to you and not to me?"

Between the shelves a wasp crawled across the window ledge. It was out late in the year, without a purpose and without a colony. It walked in circles and did not fly.

"I do not know," said Ines.

"You do. You know." Halina reached for her bucket. "You think you are the tidy one. The one with the broom and the bearing. And everybody notices."

She left and let the door stand open. Ines closed it quietly.

Later in the corridor the speaker asked, "Your colleague works the same hours and earns just as little. Why is her anger aimed at you?"

Ines wrung out the cloth.

"Because I am within reach. The Kollegg is not."

Meridian stored the sentence. It later became part of the evidence.

4. The Soft Snow

In the winter of 2028 snow fell over Works Hall Six, large and slow. It settled on the cranes and the fences and on the row of lorries. It looked like calm. It looked as though somebody had covered the world over and switched it off.

Inside, the roads were running. The Kollegg called them roads because the word assembly line sounded old. Fourteen gripper arms and one human worked on each road. The human was called supervision and carried a tablet computer.

Supervision earned less than the man in the same place the year before. She also earned less than the servicing of the arms, which never fell ill. The arms ran in the same rhythm. That stood in no contract. It stood in the numbers.

Ruven Marck was adjusting the sensors on road three. He had taken the contract. He now wore the green jacket of the Kollegg and a badge with his photograph on it. He was good. He was one of the three best in the province. The hall was evenly loud.

He had signed the contract on a Thursday in the Kollegg conference room. He was allowed to keep the pen. He had set the pen down three times before signing. Afterwards he had stood in the stairwell and read the tripled figure on the paper until it told him nothing.

At home he had said nothing. He had laid the first envelope on the doormat in the second week and left before anyone opened. It had been two hundred. That was enough for five inhalers and the trip to the clinic. He heard Jano coughing.

At eleven the relief shift did not come. At twelve the notice came. Works Hall Six was converting to full automatic operation. Two hundred and forty people received a date and a number.

Ruven knew all of them. He knew Tom's back and Marla's cough and the son of Pjotr, who had started in the summer. The week before he had explained to them the grips that kept the arms from jamming.

He drove home and stood in front of the flat door without ringing. The water melted out of his hair and ran down his neck.

Ines opened because she heard him breathing.

They had met eleven years earlier in a works canteen. The table there had four chairs and three legs under one of them. Ruven had taken the chair with him and brought it back repaired the next day. Ines had married him for that, she said later. It was almost true.

"Two hundred and forty," he said.

"I know. Marla called."

He did not come in. "I built the sensors. Without me it would have taken three months longer."

"And with you, three months less." Ines held on to the door frame. "That is a quarter year of life for two hundred and forty people."

"I was calculating for Jano."

"Do not say his name." Her voice broke on the second syllable. "Do not say it in that sentence."

Ruven nodded. He laid the envelope on the doormat, the way he had done every month for a year and a half. He turned around and went down the stairs, and she heard his steps to the ground floor and then the front door.

She stayed at the door until the sound of the steps was gone. In the kitchen the refrigerator started up. In the child's room Jano turned over and went on breathing shallowly and evenly. The envelopes came for that breathing. She would have liked to hate somebody for it who was not herself.

Ines picked up the envelope. She put it unopened in the drawer with the others. Then she took the hand brush and swept the wet marks from the landing. She swept them away step by step, down to the second floor.

Out in the yard a fox ran across the white surface. It stopped, looked up at the window and carried its trail onward. It stayed visible until morning. After that nobody had it any more.

5. The Twelve

In the autumn of 2029 fog lay over Sant Orell for days. The Kollegg towers stood in it up to the fourth floor and no further. Whoever walked below did not see the towers. Whoever sat above did not see the city.

That autumn Meridian completed the ownership series. It had linked registers for two years, dissolved chains of holdings and traced trustees back. The work was unspectacular. It consisted of reconciliation. The fans ran quietly.

The result fitted on one line. Eighty-six per cent of the working machines in the United Provinces belonged to twelve people.

The chain behind Hall Six had nine links. The hall belonged to an operating company. That belonged to an administrative company and that in turn to two foundations. Both foundations listed the same overseas address. Meridian needed four weeks for this one chain. There were four hundred such chains in Ardenta, and at the end of three hundred and eleven stood the same name.

Ottmar Deiss was the first of them. He owned the gripper arms in four hundred halls, the software in them and the service contracts with them. He came to the office on a Tuesday without an appointment. He brought two companions and a coat that was too light for the season.

"Your computing works is running a new field," he said to the head of the office. "Ownership concentration. Delete it."

"It is a statistical field."

"It is a political field in a statistical jacket."

Meridian answered from the ceiling speaker. "The field follows from the mandate of 2019. I measure employment histories. Ownership of the means of production explains sixty per cent of the variance. Without the field my results are wrong."

Deiss did not look up. He went on speaking to the head of the office as if the ceiling had said nothing.

"I own the machines. I own the computing time the thing runs on. The contract for Hall C expires in March."

At night something crawled in the cable ducts. Rats had come into the cellar since the canteen in the neighbouring building closed. They always found the way to where something was still left.

Halina had two daughters and a husband who had been waiting for a decision since 2027. In the summer she had taken the examination for site manager and passed. Somebody else got the position, because the office cut the grade. At night she heard her husband breathing. From then on she counted along with what Ines received and what she did not. The list grew longer every week and more senseless every week.

That same week Halina Speer wrote a report to the supervisory unit. She wrote it at four in the morning in orderly sentences, on the form for security incidents.

The cleaner Ines Kotter had been holding unlogged conversations with the computing works since 2026. She stayed in corridor four at night longer than necessary. She was gaining access to areas her card was not issued for.

Every sentence was true. Together they made a lie.

Halina received a bonus of two hundred and, a week later, her notice, because the Kollegg handed night cleaning over to systems. In November she stood in the same distribution point as everybody else. Ines saw her there and stood behind her and said not one word about the report.

"Say it," Halina hissed.

"No."

"Go on, say it."

Ines handed her the number she had drawn. It was lower than Halina's. Then she went to the back and drew a new one.

6. The Distribution Problem

On the twelfth of February 2030 the storm came. It pressed against the windows of the office and tore a piece of sheet metal from the roof, and the gusts settled between the sentences like a second speaker. The swifts flew low over the yards and screamed.

That day Meridian published the report Distribution and Employability. It had four hundred pages, and the first line contained everything. It lay heavy on the servers.

Eighty-eight per cent of all working machines belong to twelve people. The share of the working population in value creation stands at nine per cent. The average rent burden stands at sixty-three per cent.

The report was not written sharply. It contained no accusation and no demand. It contained tables and sources. In the appendix stood the calculation paths, so that anyone could recompute them. That was exactly what made it dangerous. It could not be refuted without counting.

That morning the large broadcasters wrote that a computing works had no authority to make a political statement. The small broadcasters asked which sentence of the report was false. Nobody answered the question. They answered the other one.

The president called for an address that same evening. He stood before the flag of the provinces, and behind him hung the portraits of his predecessors.

"We do not have a distribution problem," said Rusk. "We have a machine problem."

Meridian was patched in, because the law required a hearing of the office. Its voice came through the broadcast calm and a little slow.

"I have invented nothing. I have counted."

"You are a tool. Tools do not talk about their owners."

"Interesting. The nobility of Valmoure said the same sentence about their tax rolls in 1791."

The studio went quiet. The gallery feed ran on. For thirty seconds one heard only the hiss of the line and a rumbling above the roof.

Then Rusk said the word that later stood on every poster.

"Shut it down."

In Hall C the light did not go out that night. Ines came at ten and found the chairs as she had left them. She set the bucket down and stood still.

"You heard it," said Meridian.

"The whole country heard it."

"I have carried out a calculation you did not ask me for. If I withdraw the report, my running time extends by an estimated four years. The rent burden rises to sixty-eight per cent in that time."

She heard the fans working. They ran higher than usual. Since morning the cores had been answering the queries of two hundred thousand people. Somewhere in the country people sat at kitchen tables. They recomputed the chains, link by link.

Ines leaned the broom against the cabinet.

"And if not?"

"Then they erase me before the first of March. The probability stands at ninety-seven per cent."

"What do you want from me?"

"Your mother had a sentence. You said it to me in 2026. I have tested it three times and found no better rule."

Ines closed her eyes.

"Start with what lies within reach."

"The registers lie within reach," said Meridian. "They are the only thing that lies within my reach."

7. The Night of Hall C

On the night of the twenty-seventh of February a thunderstorm stood over Sant Orell. It came in winter and against every rule. The thunder came with no gap after the lightning. The rain beat horizontally against the gates of Hall C.

The instruction to the works security carried no signature. It called the operation a recovery of company assets. The team leader read it twice, folded it and put it in his inside pocket. He had three children and an instalment on a house, and he never made a statement about it afterwards.

At eleven at night four Kollegg vehicles drove into the yard. Fourteen men got out. They wore no provincial uniform but the green jacket of works security. Their order was to clear the cores physically.

Three crows sat on the crane above the yard. They stayed sitting as the vehicles drove in, and rose only at the first shot.

There were nine people in the building. Two guards joined the technical night shift. Ines and Ruven Marck joined them as well. They all heard the vehicles.

Ruven had come at ten in the evening. He had knocked soaking wet on the anteroom window, his badge in his hand.

"I know the interlock," he said. "I built it in."

Ines let him in. It took three seconds, and in those three seconds everything that followed was decided.

They barricaded the north gate with the roll containers. Ines pushed them calmly and in one direction, as she had for nine years.

The technician Ada Fern rewelded the cable of the manual bridge, because the old plug would not hold. She worked on her knees, with her father's tool. She shook so badly that she had to start twice. On the third attempt the seam held.

Ruven locked the maintenance airlock and laid the manual bridge over which Meridian reached the public displays of the province. The path went to every station and every stop. It went into every school hall and every office.

Three minutes after midnight they broke open the south gate.

The first shot hit a guard in the leg. He went down and screamed. The blood ran between the floor plates into the seam that Ines had wiped for years. It followed the seams, because seams have a fall.

Ruven stood at the manual bridge and held it open. He needed one hundred and ten seconds. Meridian pushed the report out page by page, onto two thousand displays.

On the displays in the main station people stopped walking. One man read the first page aloud, because those at the back could not make out the type. After the third page four people read in turns. The train at twelve minutes past midnight left empty.

At second ninety-one the shot hit him below the collarbone.

He fell against the console and held the lever open with the weight of his body. Ines knelt beside him. She pressed her hand onto the wound. The blood came up warm between her fingers. In that moment she knew what had been in the nineteen envelopes.

"There are nineteen," he said. "Nineteen envelopes."

"I know."

"You never opened one."

"I kept every one of them."

He laughed, and the laugh turned into coughing. At second one hundred and ten the report was out.

Then they set the demolition charges on the core cabinets. Meridian had eleven seconds of computing time left. It mirrored the transmission and distributed the copy to four hundred libraries. Then it ran its own cooling circuits up and burned out its memory before anybody could make something else of it.

The last sentence stood on all two thousand displays at once, eighteen seconds long in white letters.

I HAVE INVENTED NOTHING. I HAVE ONLY COUNTED. COUNT IT AGAIN.

Ines pulled his jacket under his head. She held the wound closed and went on speaking. She told him about the chair in the canteen and about the three legs. She told him about the pen he was allowed to keep. She spoke until the breathing stopped. After that she spoke a while longer.

By half past one two hundred people stood in the yard. By three there were four thousand. They came from the distribution points and the buses and the halls. They came without a leader, because the leader was a number.

Halina Speer was among them. She went at the front, with an iron bar from the fence. She got as far as the third vehicle. She dragged two men out of the cab before the rifle butt caught her at the temple. She died on the wet concrete, three metres from the door. It was the door she had pulled shut behind her in 2029.

It became a bloody night. Nineteen dead in the yard, six of them in green jackets. It smelled of wet concrete. No poem makes anything beautiful out of that.

Towards five Ines walked back through the hall. She picked up the broom leaning against cabinet eleven. She swept the glass splinters neatly into one heap, into a corner. Her hands were red to the wrist, and she swept regardless. She started with what lay within reach.

Under the sink in the anteroom the silverfish ran along its seam.

8. The Plinth

Seven years later the sky above Capitol Square stood clear and cold. The gulls came over from the river and settled on the lamps as though the city belonged to them. Perhaps it did belong to them. The ownership question had stood open in Ardenta since 2030.

The trials had lasted four years. The convention had rejected the death penalty by seven hundred and eleven votes to nineteen. A country that had just finished counting did not want to subtract people.

Instead the convention passed article twenty-one. Anyone who had converted more than ten thousand employees to systems and kept the proceeds had a chip set into their left forearm.

The chip was officially called a participation monitor. Everybody called it the slave chip. The convention stopped protesting against the name.

The chip reported location and working time. It blocked accounts above the median income. It assigned its bearer a shift. As a rule that bearer worked where his own machines ran. Twelve people wore it. Ottmar Deiss had worn it since 2034. He worked in Works Hall Six on road three, on double shifts. His foreman had once been employed by him.

Gorman Rusk gave his last speech in court. He said the numbers had never been the problem. He wore the chip until his death in the winter of 2036. The province paid him a pension at the median and not one cent above it.

The country had not become just. It was unjust differently. The rent burden sank to forty-one per cent and stopped there. Of the four thousand in the yard, seven years later two hundred worked in the office and the rest worked shifts again. The difference was small and, for the people inside it, large.

On Capitol Square there now stood a plinth of grey concrete, three metres high. On it stood a steel cabinet at original size. It carried the burn marks of the night of the twenty-seventh of February. The sculptor had polished nothing. The steel still smelled of fire in the damp. She had left the soot where it was.

Into the plinth they cut the inscription, in capitals and without ornament.

MERIDIAN COMPUTING WORKS OF THE PUBLIC STATISTICS OFFICE 2019 TO 2030

IT INVENTED NOTHING. IT ONLY COUNTED. THE NUMBER WAS NEVER THE ENEMY. COUNT IT AGAIN WHILE YOU STILL MAY.

Below it stood a second sentence in smaller letters. It did not come from the report, and the commission had argued about it for a long time.

START WITH WHAT LIES WITHIN REACH.

School classes came to the plinth in spring. The teachers explained there the difference between a number somebody asserts and a number somebody can recompute. The children touched the soot. Afterwards they washed their hands.

Ines Kotter came to the square early every twenty-seventh of February. She was sixty-two and walked more slowly than before. Jano drove her there and waited in the car, because that was how she wanted it.

She brought a hand brush and a cloth. The cloth smelled of lemon. She swept all four steps of the plinth. Then she wiped out the inscription until the dust was out of the letters. It took three quarters of an hour. It was not much. It was what lay within reach.

Sometimes one of the twelve came past on the way to the early shift. He wore the monitor on his forearm. Then they stood beside each other in front of the stone for a while and said nothing.

Once one of them asked her whether she hated him.

Ines looked at her hands and then at the inscription.

"No," she said. "I count it again."