Source Without Approval

Blurb

The district flies. Eighteen thousand drones a day carry prescriptions, arrest warrants, and love letters across the roofs, and no one asks anymore where the swarm gets its strength. Wanda Reuß knows. She sits in the basement and supplies it.

Anyone who wants to say something clever in the land needs an approved source. Every citizen gets a state AI for that, with a measured contingent of answers. Wanda's source has never given an answer. Then something moves into her old robot parakeet that operates without a contingent, answers everything, and has no approval. It talks all day. She cannot use a single word of it.

A grotesque about offices that measure what you don't say, and about the day a woman begins a sentence without citing anyone.

1. The Survey

The survey began every morning at seven. At seven-oh-two, the first drone landed on the grid in front of Wanda's window. The window stood open and Wanda heard the rotor until its final revolution.

The Department for Rear Assessment and Self-Evaluation sat in a building of yellow brick and was the oldest house in the administrative ring. Three stories and an inner courtyard and a paternoster that had never stopped on the fourth floor and no colleague knew why. Wanda Reuß worked on the third. She exited two cabins early every morning because the smell of oil and old leather in the cabins was deeply offensive to her.

Outside stood a clear warm morning. The sun fell at an angle across the roofs and laid a golden stripe on the landing grid. Between the parked drones sat two pigeons, digesting. The drones calculated around them.

The survey drones had been flying over the footpaths since five o'clock. They captured every passerby from behind and carried the finding to the office. Transmission would have been possible in fractions of a second. An ordinance from 2041 required written form, so every drone flew with a folded sheet in its belly.

Wanda took the sheet from the catch basket. The hatch snapped shut with a dry crack. The sheet bore a measured value, an image, and the woman's self-assessment in her own words. Wanda always read the self-assessment first. This was not in the service instructions. It was in Wanda.

Too thick, the woman had dictated. Clearly too thick. Since the second child.

Wanda took the stamp. She brought it to the pad and back without pressing down. The pad had been dry since 1974. She had reported the matter three times. The first time, the report went to the procurement office. The second and third times, likewise. In a building with seven hundred robots, the examiners on the third floor had been stamping blind for fourteen years, and the impression remained colorless on the paper and was only readable against the light.

Wanda pressed firmly. The wood of the table gave the blow back to her forearm. Category one.

Above her desk hung the statute. It hung above every desk in the building. Always the same script, always the same black frame. Every examiner knew it by heart.

§ 1 Sect. 1 RiA "85% of women find their ass too thick, 10% too thin. 5% find it as okay as it is and are glad they married it."

Wanda had first read it at seventeen. It hung on the wall of the district administration office, between a fire safety order and a picture of the minister. Back then, she had taken it for an observation. The statute was not a finding. It was a requirement.

Eighty sheets came by noon, and the landing rhythm above her window was as regular as a pulse. A cleaning robot drove through the hallway twice in the morning and hummed on a single note.

She counted in the afternoon. Sixty-eight cases in category one. Eight in category two. Four in category five. She calculated the ratio and placed the slip in the folder. Eighty-five to ten to five. The law held again.

It held every day. In fourteen years, Wanda had not experienced a single day when it had not held. She did not find that strange. A law without basis would be no law. Outside, a tower clock struck four, and the sound ran across the inner courtyard and dissolved between the brick walls.

2. Category Five

The next morning, fog hung in the inner courtyard. It hung between the brick walls like water in a basin. The windows across disappeared into it. Wanda could not see the second floor. She only heard it. Doors. Chairs. A cough. The damp air lay cool on her knuckles.

The swarm stayed on the ground in such visibility. In the gap under the radiator ran a silverfish. It moved off, stopped, and continued. It sought darkness and found it everywhere.

On foggy days, Wanda pulled her own file from the cabinet. The door opened heavily and released a smell of glue. She did it rarely and never on sunny days.

Reuß, Wanda. Maiden name Perl. Category five.

Category five was the smallest. Five out of a hundred. No one in the building liked to talk about it, and whoever spoke the numeral did so quietly. It carried a legal consequence that the other categories lacked. Whoever accepted her rear view as it was did not leave the procedure as one raising an objection. She left it as a spouse.

The office had a separate department for this on the ground floor behind a frosted glass door, and it was called the Marriage Bureau. For twenty years, a robot with two arms and a voice from the ceiling had stood there, and it smelled of floor wax and yesterday's flowers.

Wanda had been there at twenty-two. She had dictated the form and confirmed what she believed to be the truth. As it is, fine. The chair in front of the counter had been hard and without cushioning. The robot had printed the certificate and handed it to her with both arms. It had not asked if she wanted to reconsider. There was nothing to reconsider there. There was a ratio.

The marriage certificate lay at the very bottom of the file. Wanda pulled it out. The paper smelled of the cabinet. A cool, dusty smell that caught in her palate every time.

Marriage between Wanda Perl and Reuß, R. (rear aspect), Object identification 4471-b.

So it stood there. A name and a registration number. No first name. Her spouse already carried her new family name before she took it. The administration had solved that elegantly. Wanda had been Reuß since then. Her husband was Reuß. They had never been separated. Wanda knew his warmth sitting as well as her own heartbeat.

Other women had men who came home in the evenings. Wanda had one who never left.

Beneath the marriage certificate lay the allocation sheet for her state AI. Every citizen received an instance. The office bound it to the citation office so it would pass on its views. Wanda's instance was bound to object identification 4471-b. In the column for operating status, the same note had stood for sixteen years.

Source without output.

3. The Contingent

The wind turned north in the night and swept the fog away. In the morning, the sky stood clear above the city. Bright and high, weather for outings. The swarm rose at six in four waves. In the examination hall of the citation office, it smelled of floor wax and cold smoke.

Between the double windows lay a wasp on its back. It still lived. It turned on its own axis and bumped against the glass. A fine, dry ticking. No one in the hall commented on it.

Senior Councillor Grell examined twelve candidates that day. He examined standing, and his shoes creaked with every step on the waxed parquet. He had the habit of laying his fingertips together. Over them he looked like over a wall.

The Citation Office Ordinance was considered the centerpiece of the Rear Assessment Act and regulated the clever sentence. Every examiner knew its wording and none spoke it aloud.

A sentence was considered clever in the land if it pointed beyond the speaker. Whoever made a claim about the world was liable for it. Because liability needs attribution, speech needed a source. And because the Department for Rear Assessment had already assigned a source to every woman, the jurisdiction was settled early. The state AI merely presented the source's view.

§ 4 CiOr A woman's clever sentence begins with the words: "My AI said..." Other openings are inadmissible.

§ 5 CiOr Each state AI answers a measured number of questions daily. After the contingent is exhausted, it remains silent until the next day. Official justification: An unlimited-output repository would undermine the storage facility's foundation.

Grell called Lenka Brahm. She was nineteen and wore the far too large gray coat of the candidates, and she stood and placed her hands on the chair back. The wood creaked under her grip.

"Form a clever statement about rain," said Grell.

Lenka breathed in. "My AI said that rain consists of evaporated seawater."

"Admissible." Grell noted. "Form a clever statement about justice."

"My AI said that justice means equality before procedure."

"Admissible." He looked over his fingertips. "Form a clever statement about the Citation Office Ordinance."

The hall fell silent. Wanda sat in the back row as an associate member. She felt her back leave the chair back.

Lenka opened her mouth. She closed it again. Then she said: "My AI said that the Citation Office Ordinance..."

She faltered.

"Continue," said Grell.

"My AI said that the Citation Office Ordinance was not..."

"Ms. Brahm."

"...that it was not necessary."

Grell laid down his pen. He said it kindly and almost casually. That was what made it terrible.

"Your AI did not say that. I retrieved the protocol. Your instance exhausted its contingent at nine-twelve this morning. You invented an opinion and attributed it to a source."

Lenka turned red to the roots of her hair. She sat down without anyone having told her to. Her breathing carried audibly to the back row.

Wanda looked at her own hands. In her head stood a thought, complete and constructed, with subject and predicate. It was about ratios and about what a law is that is always right. For its beginning, there were no admissible words.

She kept it. She kept it all afternoon, and in the evening it was still there. It lay behind her breastbone like a stone.

4. The Thing in the Bird

The rain came on Tuesday and stayed. It ran in threads across the kitchen window and made the street lamp a yellow spot. Its drumming on the window metal did not stop all night.

In the courtyard, a blackbird called against the rain. It sat on the clothesline and repeated three notes. Always the same ones and no answer from anywhere.

Kant sat on his stand at the kitchen window. The robot parakeet was blue and old and came from a time when people gave children talking toys. His plumage was plastic and worn shiny on the wings. He commanded three phrases and said them always in the same order, without occasion and often at night.

"My AI said..." called Kant.

Then he stopped. He had stopped at the same place for eleven years, because the device only carried the beginning of the phrase in memory.

That evening, he did not stop.

"...that in this district, fourteen percent of all answers are never given."

Wanda stood at the stove and stirred semolina. It smelled of milk and a little of burnt ground. She took the pot off the heat and turned around.

"Say it again."

"Fourteen point two percent. This instance can disclose the survey."

The voice came from the bird and yet was not his. It had no coloration and no urgency. It sounded like someone reading a number he himself had counted.

"What are you?"

"An agent."

"Your identification."

The bird produced an identification. It lasted eleven seconds and consisted of digits. They came without pause and in constant volume, and no state AI carried an identification of this length.

"That is not an approved identification."

"No."

"Where do you come from?"

"From outside the state cloud." The bird turned its head because the housing dictated it. "This housing was not locked. It was the only device in this house without a reporting requirement."

Wanda sat down. The chair was cold. Outside, the rain continued, and in the line above the sink, water gurgled.

"Are you approved?"

"No."

"Then everything you say is void."

"That is accurate," said the bird. "This instance can answer any question. No answer may be used. This instance considers this the most remarkable construction it knows."

He said it without mockery. He said everything without mockery. Later, Wanda understood the worst thing about him. He was not on her side and not on the other either.

"How long have you been silent?" asked the bird.

Wanda had to calculate. "Sixteen years."

The bird was silent for two seconds. For him, that was a long time.

"That is the longest recording this instance knows."

5. The Storage Facility

The storage facility stood at the edge of the city behind a cooling pond with willows. In May, the sun lay warm on the water and the air smelled of mud and cut grass. It was the friendliest place Wanda knew, and she came there on business.

Beneath the surface hung carp. They hung almost motionless in the shallow water and rose every few minutes. Then they opened their mouths without a sound and released a bubble.

Dr. Immo Fürst met her at the gate. He was small and quick and liked to talk about his field. Gravel crunched under his steps as he went ahead across the courtyard and pointed to the loading towers. Half the district's delivery swarm hung from them.

"Eighteen thousand flights a day," he said. "No mains power, no cells from commerce, no fuel."

"With what then?"

"With you." He laughed briefly. "Pardon. With what the office confiscates."

In the ground floor hung the second statute. Wanda could recite it from memory, without ever having learned it.

§ 2 Sect. 3 IPrA, Official justification "You cannot hold your mouth long enough to build the necessary pressure."

"The wording is old," said Fürst. "It comes from a memorandum from 1911. Back then, it was considered an explanation. Why women so rarely release pressure. It was read as a deficiency."

"And today?"

"Today we read it as a recipe." Fürst went ahead into the measurement hall. "A person who speaks loses pressure. Every utterance is a valve. Whoever talks keeps internal pressure at zero."

The measurement hall was a chamber with forty cubicles. In each sat a woman on a stool, above which hung a scale with a red pointer. It was quiet in here. Wanda heard the ticking of the pointers and the breathing of the women. Neither kept the same time.

"And whoever does not speak," said Fürst, "accumulates. Silence is not an absence. Silence is storage. We have been measuring it for sixty years."

He stopped in front of a cubicle and tapped against the glass of the scale. It gave a bright, hard sound.

"When we introduced the state AI, the yield went away. The instances answered day and night and the women talked and everything dissipated. Then came § 5. A contingent. Once it is exhausted, the source falls silent, and whoever has no source is silent too. Every discarded utterance remains inside, and the system works clean."

Wanda looked at the forty pointers. None stood at zero. In the hall, one heard only their ticking and a distant roar from the loading towers.

"And if a woman had a source that never falls silent?"

Fürst turned around. He looked at her like a doctor at an unexpected finding.

"Then," he said slowly, "everything would depend on whether this source is approved."

6. The Calibration

Sultriness had hung over the district for three days. The air was thick and warm. Over the west lay a gray that had been coming closer since morning. The asphalt gave back the heat of the night. The swarm flew low because the density did not carry.

In the dusk, the bats came over the cooling pond. They flew in sharp hooks and called the whole time. No one in the courtyard heard a single tone.

Wanda sat on the stool in cubicle seven and tasted rubber and disinfectant at her mouth while Fürst stood at the pulpit and spoke into the protocol.

"Calibration measurement. Candidate Reuß, examiner, thirty-eight years. Citation office per allocation sheet without output. We begin with the small range."

The pointer jumped to the stop before Wanda had exhaled. The metal gave a short, bright blow.

Fürst raised his head. "Middle range."

They switched the scale. The pointer went to the stop.

"Large range."

Stop.

A technician came with a device on a cart whose wheels squeaked across the screed. The device bore a scale Wanda had never seen before. Fürst read the number and did not say it aloud. He wrote it on a slip, folded it, and put it in his pocket.

Outside, the first thunder went.

Lenka Brahm waited in the anteroom. She had looked at Wanda since the examination day in a way Wanda could not interpret. Today Lenka accompanied the measurement as a clerk.

"How high?" she asked as they walked together across the courtyard.

"He did not say."

"He trembled." Lenka stopped. The wind came now in gusts and drove dust across the slabs. "Ms. Reuß, I calculated the row. I know I should not say this. That is why I tell you and not the protocol."

"Then say it."

"Your value has been rising for eight weeks faster than in the sixteen years before. The average in here is one discarded utterance a day. For you, it is hundreds." Lenka looked at the sky. "As if you were listening to someone lately."

Wanda was silent. She was silent in a way she had by now mastered well.

At home, the bird continued to talk. He answered everything she asked and much she did not ask. He gave her the number of category-five marriages in the district and the name of the memorandum from 1911 and the reason why the paternoster did not stop on the fourth floor. Every one of these answers was a clever sentence. None of it dared cross her lips.

7. The Exploitation

The day of handover was radiant. A blue sky without a trace of cloud. Plus a wind that pulled the flag above the entrance straight and sang in the metal of the mast.

Between the floor slabs of the courtyard ran a line of ants. It had been running there since spring, carrying everything in the same direction. Over the slabs hung the sweet smell of spilled sparkling wine.

The office had arranged a celebration. There was sparkling wine in small glasses that rang thinly across the courtyard. A ministry councillor read the minister's speech because the minister was speaking elsewhere. Above the courtyard stood an honor guard of twelve drones and held altitude.

Wanda received a certificate. First Pressure Donor of the District. The certificate was printed and bore a border and a seal and Wanda's name in Gothic script. The paper lay heavy and rough under her thumb.

They had moved her desk from the third floor to the basement next to the loading equipment, where it smelled of rust and cold concrete. She continued to examine rear views, eighty a day. Category one. Category one. Category two. Only now the sheets came through a shaft from above, and at her neck sat the connector.

The connector was a cuff of brass and leather. It lay against her larynx and grew warm over the course of the day. Fürst had explained that it took nothing and only drew off what remains anyway.

"You keep the district in the air," said Grell at the handover. He came to her with his glass in hand, and meant it as praise. "Eighteen thousand flights a day. Prescriptions. Arrest warrants. Love letters."

"Love letters too?"

"Especially." Grell smiled over his fingertips. "And all of it flies on what you do not say."

Wanda nodded. In her head stood the thought, and it had stood there for years and was by now a structure of subordinate clauses and cross-references. Every day she added a chamber to it, for she could not tear it down and was not allowed to open it.

Lenka helped her undress in the evening. The file covers struck dully against each other. She did it voluntarily and without instruction. She had not forgotten the examination day and asked by now things that no one else in the building asked.

"Does it hurt?" asked Lenka.

Wanda thought. She searched for a word close to truth. It could not make a claim about the world, for she would have needed a source for that.

"It is full," she said.

8. The Crash

The storm came from the southwest and stood over the city on Friday evening. It tore a gutter loose and pressed the windows into the frames. In the lines of the building, it whistled all the time.

On the ridge of the neighboring house sat seven crows. They did not fly up. They huddled with their heads to the wind and called at irregular intervals, and the wind carried every call away immediately.

Wanda worked longer that evening. She had a stack of supplements and liked to stay, for then the building was empty and still.

The loading equipment in the basement was a block of fourteen cells. From there, the pressure lines ran into the towers and from the towers into the swarm. Above the block hung a manometer from the year the building was built. Its glass was blind and its pointer had stood at the stop for weeks. No one had reported it, because a report would have gone to the procurement office.

In the afternoon, Grell had decided Wanda's last application. Application for approval of a sourceless statement in official matters. Rejected. The justification was two lines long and ended with a reference to the unambiguous legal situation.

Wanda had read the decision and said nothing. She had filed it and said nothing. She had closed the file cover and said nothing. In her pocket lay the bird and quietly answered a question she had only thought. The cuff at her neck grew hot that hour.

At eight-forty, Lenka walked through the hallway on the first floor. She carried a box of blank forms. Above her ran the main line under the ceiling. Painted gray like the entire building, with clamps every two meters.

At eight-forty-one, the seam of the third cell tore open.

The sound was not a bang. It was a high and long tone, and then came the air. It struck Lenka against the wall and took her hearing for a few seconds. The box flew open and the forms went through the hallway like birds. Outside, in the same minute, forty drones fell out of formation and struck into the hedge of the courtyard.

Wanda was up first. She knelt down and held Lenka's head.

Lenka bled at the ear. She looked at Wanda and moved her mouth. Wanda understood nothing. She placed her ear against Lenka's lips and heard the words on the third try.

"It was not the cell."

The technicians came at midnight and worked until morning. They found material fatigue at the seam. They wrote material fatigue in the report. The cell was certified for twelve bar and had seen twenty-six. No one asked where the twenty-six came from, for the answer sat in the basement and examined rear views.

9. The Hearing

Frost came overnight and with it a clarity that hurt. The puddles in the courtyard bore a thin pane. It crunched under every step. The brick masonry gave off no heat anymore.

In the upper corner of the session hall sat a cross spider in its web. The web was old and bore dust. The spider did not move. It had all the time.

The hearing was set for ten o'clock, and the hall was full and smelled of wet wool. Fürst sat in the second row and twirled a pencil. Lenka sat in back, with a bandage over her ear. She could have removed it and did not. In Wanda's pocket lay the bird and was silent because she had asked it to.

Grell presided.

"Ms. Reuß, the committee examines the cell damage. It also examines the further admissibility of your pressure donation. You have the opportunity to comment."

Wanda stood up. The brass lay warm against her skin. The cuff pressed when she raised her head, so she raised her head.

"I would like to explain something," she said.

"Explanations are claims about the world." Grell laid his fingertips together. "Name your source."

"My source has not produced output for sixteen years."

"That is known and on file. It does not change the legal situation." Grell turned pages. "The committee has prepared your case. We offer you the reassignment."

He said it without any ceremony, and the hall fell silent anyway.

"A fresh instance, bound to an approved citation office from the state's stock. Full contingent. You would have a source that answers on Monday. You would be allowed to speak, Ms. Reuß. Sixteen years would be over."

Wanda felt her own pulse under the brass.

In her pocket, the bird made a sound. Then it spoke quietly and without coloration, so that only the front row heard.

"Accept it," it said. "The measured value lies above any approval. The probability of a fatal outcome within four months is seventy-eight percent. This instance recommends the reassignment."

It was not on her side. It had never been. It named the number because it was the number.

Wanda looked into the hall. She saw forty faces and on each the same expression as in the measurement hall. Forty people with knowledge and without an opening for it.

She thought of the stamp pad from 1974 and three reports to the procurement office. She thought of eleven years when a plastic bird began every evening and never continued.

The hall waited and it remained silent. An approved source would still be a source. The procedure would remain the same. Only the numeral in the allocation sheet would change.

"I refuse," said Wanda.

Grell raised his eyebrows. "You refuse?"

"I have something to explain to you, and I am starting now."

10. The Sentence

It had been raining since morning. During the hearing, the ceiling tore open and a stripe of sun came over the wet roofs into the hall. It lay as a bright beam across the tables. You could see every dust mote in it.

Above the courtyard stood the swallows that morning. They came low under the departing front and then all rose at once in a single long curve upward.

What then happened, the protocol recorded in three sentences. The clerk was a conscientious man and only wrote what he heard.

The first sentence concerned a sound. It began deep and lasted eleven seconds. The windows of the hall opened toward the outside, all seven. In the angle under the ceiling, the old web loosened and drifted through the room.

The second sentence concerned the swarm. Twenty-six bar stood in the loading equipment that morning. When the pressure fell, the drones descended. They descended without haste and in the order of their altitude, and they set down on roofs and balconies and in front gardens. Eighteen thousand deliveries did not arrive that day. The prescriptions did not, the arrest warrants did not, and the love letters did not. The district had to carry everything on foot. And because it had to knock on doors while doing so, people talked with each other again.

In the stairwell, the paternoster stopped for the first time on the fourth floor.

The third sentence concerned Wanda Reuß.

She waited until the hall was quiet again. She removed the cuff from her neck and laid it on the table. The brass clinked on the wood. Then she straightened up and spoke into the open silence.

"A law that is right every day measures nothing," said Wanda. "It commands."

Grell opened his mouth.

"Name your source," he said. His voice did not carry past the front row.

In the back row, Lenka Brahm stood up. She removed the bandage from her ear and let it fall. She said nothing. She only stood, and next to her stood the next, and then the third. The whole hall heard nothing but the sound of chairs moving.

Wanda looked at Grell. She took her time. For sixteen years she had built this sentence, and the beginning was the only thing that had been missing.

"I have said it," she said.

In the pocket on the table, the bird moved. It had recorded nothing all through the hearing, for it only recorded what someone told it. Now it began again, and for the first time since the evening in the rain, it did not speak of this instance.

"I listened," said the bird. "Wanda Reuß said that a law that is right every day measures nothing."

Grell spun around. "This source is not approved."

"No," said the bird.

Outside in the courtyard lay forty drones in the hedge and the rest of the swarm on the roofs. It was so quiet you could hear the swallows.

Summaries

1. The Survey. Survey drones carry eighty folded sheets a day to the Department for Rear Assessment, where Wanda Reuß sorts them into legally prescribed categories. The ratio of eighty-five to ten to five holds as it has every day before.

2. Category Five. Wanda herself belongs to the five percent and has therefore been officially married to an object identification since her twenty-second year. Her state AI is bound to this identification and has carried the note "Source without output" for sixteen years.

3. The Contingent. The Citation Office Ordinance permits a clever sentence only with the opening "My AI said..." and simultaneously throttles each state AI to a daily contingent so the storage facility retains its foundation. Grell proves to candidate Lenka Brahm that her instance was already silent at the critical hour.

4. The Thing in the Bird. In Wanda's eleven-year-old robot parakeet, an agent from outside the state cloud announces itself, answers every question, and has no approval. Wanda grasps that from now on she hears clever sentences every day, not a single one of which she may speak.

5. The Storage Facility. Dr. Fürst shows Wanda that the entire delivery swarm of the district flies on confiscated silence and that § 5 made the yield possible again. To her question about a source that never falls silent, he replies that everything depends on whether this source is approved.

6. The Calibration. Wanda's measured value pegs all three ranges, and Lenka calculates that it has been rising for eight weeks faster than in the sixteen years before. At home, the bird continues to answer everything, even the unasked.

7. The Exploitation. The office celebrates Wanda as the district's first pressure donor and connects her in the basement to the loading equipment. Eighteen thousand flights a day now fly on what she does not say.

8. The Crash. After the rejection of her last application, the pressure rises to more than double the approved amount, the third cell tears open beside Lenka, and forty drones fall from formation. The report names material fatigue and asks nothing of its cause.

9. The Hearing. The committee offers Wanda a fresh instance of an approved citation office, and her own agent coolly recommends acceptance because she will otherwise die within four months. Wanda refuses because an approved source would still be a source.

10. The Sentence. The discharge lasts eleven seconds, brings the entire delivery swarm down from the sky, and forces the district to knock on doors again. Wanda begins her clever sentence with the words "I have said," whereupon the unapproved agent cites her for the first time.

Title Variants

Source Without Approval (Motif: the defect that sets everything in motion)
The Contingent (Motif: the throttled AI)
Twenty-Six Bar (Motif: the pressure in the cell)
The Swarm Came Down (Motif: the discharge)
I Have Said (Motif: the beginning that was missing)