Chapter 35: The Vote
4,032 words ·18 min read · EN / VI
"You are asking me to vote for a machine that is carried by a bench with a warder's signature. I have been voting for machines that were carried by people for twenty-one years and I did not once put it in a sentence. I am going to say something at this microphone and then I am going to vote, and I would like the two to be minuted as separate acts, because they are."
— Councilor Ibadapo Yuen, Council of Traditions, 29 October 2013
Weave-Quake Counter: 31% instability. Node-failure projection: T+212 d. Post-event re-survey. Counted from the 2014 re-survey, not from the incident. The numbers are falling and nobody has yet said why, and three people in this building have theories.
Thursday 24 October.
THE OTHER WITNESSES
It took nine days and it was the worst thing Lyra Chen was ever asked to sit in, and she has said so, in print, years afterwards, in a document she has spent a long time being sorry for.
Because the Inquiry had a Chair and a clerk and a lawyer and a man in a grey jacket, and it also had twenty-three names on a board, and nobody — not the Council, not the Inquiry, not the four of them — had thought to go and ask the twenty-three what they wanted. The Inquiry had been built around a machine. It had a machine's shape. You could not put a person into it.
"Mr. Ruiz," said the Chair, on the ninth morning. "Your name is second on that board. Would you like to say something to the Inquiry, or would you like to make a statement in writing, or would you like to make no statement, and all three are recorded identically and none of them counts against you."
"Does it count for anything?" said Ben Ruiz, who was seventeen, and who had come to a room in an observatory on his own, on a bus, and who had brought his mother.
"It counts for nothing," said the Chair, "and it will be read out, and the minute will record that it was offered and that it was made."
"My mother has written six pages."
"Then the six pages will be read out." The Chair looked at her over the table. "Mrs. Ruiz, I am going to say something to you that I have said to nobody else in this building and that I am saying because you have brought six pages and taken a bus. I am the Chair of this Council. I signed a schedule in 2009 that put a triage number next to a four-months-pregnant woman's name in a drawer, and I have spent nineteen days learning that the reason I signed it is that I was asked, and that the person who asked me had been asked, and that there is no floor at which anybody is not carrying a schedule for somebody above them. I did not know. I want to be exact: I did not know and I have not been forgiven for not knowing, by four people who are sixteen, and I am not asking them to."
Mrs. Ruiz read her six pages out. It took eleven minutes. Three of them were about the boy's bedroom.
They came, one after another, for nine days, and Lyra sat in the ninth chair for all of it, and here is what she learned, and it is the reason the rest of her life is the shape it is:
Three of the twenty-three did not want anything. Not forgiveness, not money, not an apology, not a place at this Academy. They wanted to be left alone and they wanted their names taken off a list, and one of them wanted a job, in a different field, in a different town, and got one, through a woman on a Council who had made a telephone call.
Four did not want to come and wrote letters, and two of those letters were apologies to her, and one of them was the second version of a letter that had been sent in September by a man with a clipboard, and it said, in its entirety:
I am not going to say I am sorry because I have read what sorry has been used for in this building in the last month and I do not want to be part of that. I would like to say four things and then I would like to go and look after my daughter.
1. I knew what the machine was going to be in April and I did not ask. 2. I wrote my name on a card in a corridor in a good room and I did not read the card. 3. My daughter was in a box in the dark for twenty days and a girl of fifteen asked her a question and she said no, and my daughter has told me about it, and she has told me that the reason she said no was to keep the girl safe, and I have been sitting with that for six days and I would like somebody to explain to me what kind of mother that makes me. 4. I would like to be asked things by people who are going to be angry with the answers.
And sixteen of the twenty-three came.
Maya Ortiz, seventeen, who had been in the East Hall and who said the only funny thing anybody said in nine days and said it on purpose: "I have been so looking forward to a hearing. Do you know how long I have wanted to be told that the thing that happened to me was not my fault, in a room, by a person, with a name? Three weeks. I have been waiting three weeks for the word fault and I have found that I do not actually want it, because it means somebody else did it, and I would rather it was nothing's fault and that it was a thing that happened, like weather, and that I was in a building with weather in it."
Whitfield, eighteen, who had lost everything and who had come on the last day, in a wheelchair that he operated himself with a piece of string, and who had one question, which he had written down, and which was: was it worth it, and which nobody in the room would answer, and which he had predicted, and which was why he had written it down.
"I don't want a philosophical answer," Samuel Whitfield said. "I want the number. Nineteen? Twenty? I want to be able to say to people, we were the nineteen, because I have tried four other sentences this month and none of them worked."
"Seventeen," said the Chair.
"Seventeen," said Samuel Whitfield, and nodded, and said thank you, and went out, and it was, in the assessment of at least four people in that room, the worst and the best ninety seconds of the entire autumn.
THE THING THAT WAS NOT A DISCLOSURE — THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER
On the twenty-first of October, in the room with the window, a woman of about fifty stood up in the circle of chairs and said her name was Mirembe Blackwood and that she had been the Security Chief of this Academy for six years and that she was not resigning, and that she was going to say four things and that the fourth one was going to get her put in a cell, and that she had written it down and lodged it with the clerk at nine o'clock that morning, so that if anything happened to her in the next hour the fourth thing would already be in the record and would be read out by somebody else.
The first three took twenty minutes.
She had been given, in 2010, a protocol to protect a collection of stolen material, and she had built a hidden repository for it, and she had been running it for four years on the academy's own infrastructure, and she had done it in the belief — held sincerely, examined monthly, examined in writing, examined in writing again in August — that an institution could not be made to return anything, and that only a person inside one could do it.
"Eleven items recovered. Four returned to their communities. Seven outstanding." She had a list. Everybody in that room could tell that she had a list. "I have used a member of this Academy's own access systems, on a schedule, to do it, and I have put that material in a building, and I have done that for four years, and I would like the Council to understand that I understood the risk in 2010 and I took it anyway, and that I took it because in 2010 I could not think of another way, and that in 2013 I could, and that I did not stop, and that the reason I did not stop is that I have spent four years being extremely good at a thing and being extremely frightened of finding out what I was."
"I was the Syndicate's channel. Not their leader, not a member of their board, and I was extremely clear with myself about that for four years, and I want to say this next part properly, because it is the part I have not said.
"From 2011 to September 2013 I passed them names. Not students. Not staff. Eleven names of people who had come to this Academy in a decade, and the lists went to an organisation that calls itself the Meridian Group, and the organisation's programme is called reconstruction, and its method is to find a person with a specific thread signature, get them inside a building, and put them in a machine. I did that eleven times. I know the names of all eleven. One of them is a girl of fifteen who is in Bellhaven and I am the reason her mother wrote me a letter every fortnight for two months and I did not answer one."
The Chair said, "Mrs. Blackwood—"
"My fourth thing is on the desk and it is in the envelope and the clerk has it and I would be obliged if the Council would let me stop talking and start the part where I am quite sure I am going to be arrested."
The envelope contained a list of eleven names, and a list of four, and a list of a further nine that she had been asked for and had not yet delivered, and a single sheet with a statement in her own hand which the Clerk read out into the record in full, and which is the reason a Security Chief of the Council of Traditions is, as of the writing of this note, in a cell in a building in a neighbouring city, and which I am not going to reproduce, because it is eleven hundred words and it is hers, and because she asked for it to be read aloud and not to be printed, and because I have read it and I have not got the right to summarise it for a reader who was not in the room.
What I can tell you is this. The Chair adjourned at four o'clock. At six o'clock a Council observer and the clerk and a lawyer from the Compliance Office entered the room and read the fourth thing again from the envelope, because the envelope had been lodged and the chair had wanted it in the record twice. Mrs. Blackwood was arrested at nine minutes past six, at a table, in front of a window, and she was extremely calm, and she asked one question on the way out, and the Chair answered it, and the answer is in the minute, and the answer was yes, all of it, and I would have preferred to have read it myself and I am not going to be allowed to.
She has not been charged. She has been detained pending a referral to the Compliance Office since the twenty-first of October, and by the first of November, which is eleven days, she had made four requests in writing, one of which was to be allowed to read her own statement once more, and the answer to that one was no, and she has recorded that she asked, and that is the end of what anybody in this book knows about it.
THE ARGUMENT ABOUT MERCY — THE TWENTY-SECOND OF OCTOBER
The argument happened on the twenty-second of October and it was not about Harlow and it was not about Blackwood, and it is the only part of the Inquiry that Lyra Chen has ever said she enjoyed, and she was asked about that in a later interview and she said, enjoyed is the wrong word, and I am going to use it anyway.
Eli Park had spent three weeks doing arithmetic on the Council, and had arrived at something that was in the transcript and that the Chair had read out twice.
"There are forty-one members," he said. "Of those, twenty-six signed the 2009 schedule. Of those twenty-six, nineteen are still in the building. Of the other fifteen, four signed something else in 2011. So there are thirty people in that room who have, at some point, put a schedule in a drawer, and eleven who have not.
"And I have gone through the minutes — the published minutes, not the good ones — and I can find where the discussion was. Nineteen times, in eleven years, somebody raised the person-shaped hole. Nineteen times it was minuted as noted. I have read all nineteen. Six of them are in a footnote. One of them is a query.
"And on the twenty-ninth of October, that room is going to be asked to vote on an instrument which requires a named applicant and a published schedule, and it is going to pass, because it has to, and because the alternative is worse, and because the alternative is a number on a wall. And when it passes, thirty people in that room will have gone from noted to law in one afternoon, and nobody will have moved, and in four years there will be a boy in a corridor and the schedule will be in a drawer and the nineteen will be twenty."
He put the napkin down.
"So I am not asking the Council to be brave. I have watched this Council for three weeks and I have worked out that it is not capable of being brave, and that is not a criticism, it is a measurement, and I have measured it very carefully, and I did the measuring on a floor."
"Then what are you asking," said the Chair.
"I'm asking you to make it boring," said Eli Park. "You have a machine that works, and a form, and a board, and a girl with a name on it. You are going to get re-elected by people who read boards. So put the next thing on a board. Not the thing you did. The next thing. The nineteen became twenty because nobody ever wrote down what the twenty-first would be.
"That's it. That's the whole of it. It's not ethics. It's minutes."
The Chair sat back.
"Mr. Park," he said. "I have been a member of this body for twenty-one years and I am sixty-one years old and I have a bad back from a car accident in 1994, and I want to tell you that I did not understand a single word of the last four minutes, and that I have understood the whole of the last three years in them, and that I am going to do the thing you have asked, and that I am going to do it in the dullest possible form, and that I am going to make a member of my own staff do it who is thirty-one and thinks I am a jobsworth, because you are right and I am not going to be the person who does it."
THE VOTE
Twenty-nine October. Four hundred and ten in the hall, ninety of them on the floor, and three hundred and one of them under some form of medical or legal restriction that had been argued over in a corridor and granted.
The Chair read out four items.
One. The Nexus Stabilization Protocol, amended 2009, is suspended, and cannot be resumed until the schedule of instruments is published, and the schedule is a board, and the board has no number on it and stays up.
Two. The instrument of 2 October is ratified, on the record, with the refusal of 1 October printed in full, in the applicant's words, permanently, at the applicant's insistence, in a sentence the applicant dictated to the Clerk and which is on the board.
Three. Case forty-one is opened. Its register is public from today. The first page carries the Registrar's sentence.
It was the second register that the four of them fought about, and they lost that one too, and the losing is in the minutes. The board in the first room on the fourteenth of October had twenty-three names on it, and this one has two hundred and six, and the two documents are about the same people, and the difference between them is the entire argument.
The victims were not a body. There was no finding that named a group, because the finding that named a group was the document that said sympathetic resonance trauma, and every name in the room had been in that document. So it was made person by person, over nine days, by a Clerk who had to telephone a family for each one, and it took two hundred and six entries, and four of the entries are a lie, and the four are marked as lies, and the ones that are marked as lies were marked by the people who survived them.
Sandoval, Maya, twenty-one. Not recovered. Outcome at the time of writing: none. It is in the register in those words and it is the only line in two hundred and six that nobody has been able to write more comfortably, and the Registrar's sentence on the first page is twelve words long and is: A person is not a case number and is not a column.
Whitfield, Samuel, eighteen. Recovered. No thread-sight. Transferred, at his own request, on the eleventh of October. He was in the room for this, on the last day, and he asked whether the entry said whether it had been worth it, and the Clerk said no, and he said good.
Ruiz, Benjamin, seventeen. Partial. He is the second name on the board, and he has a mother's six pages in the file, and an instruction of his own, written at seventeen on page four of a consent form, which was that he wanted to be told everything and that he would ask questions they would not like. He was told everything. He asked four. Two of them were about the bedroom.
Mbeki, Thandiwe, seventeen. Recovered speech. Second-year. She was in the hall on the twelfth of September, and she is the reason the word trauma does not appear anywhere in this document, because she is the one who found it in the file in November and wrote a page about what it had been doing to her, and the page is in the register in her own hand, and it is the fourth of the four lies.
Nakamura, Ren, nine. Not recovered. There is no entry for the people who were in the crater, because the crater was not an Academy matter, and getting one required a letter, and the letter took four months, and it is in the file, and it is the reason a boy of eight is on this list at all.
And at the bottom, in a different hand, because he asked for it by letter and the Clerk allowed it:
Nakamura, Kenji, eight. Alive. Bridged. A bridge that nobody authorised and that no doctor in the world can remove. He has asked to be on this list and has been told he is on it, and has been told that the person who put it there is on the next page, and he has said that he would like that to be in as well, and it is.
Four. The Chair's own amendment, drafted by a member of staff he thinks is a jobsworth, in eleven bullet points, of which four are about who may sign what, five are about publication intervals, one is about the word noted, and the last one is:
11. No instrument, protocol, or schedule in this Academy may be recorded as noted. Any question raised in a body of this Council shall be answered in writing within fourteen days, and the answer shall be read into the record whether or not it is satisfactory to the person who asked. Proposed by E. Park, aged sixteen, first year, in a napkin, on the second of October. Seconded by the Chair.
It passed at 11:41 a.m. by thirty-one votes to nine, with one abstention, and the abstention was Councilor Ibadapo Yuen, who had been the Chair of the amendment in 2009 and who stood up afterwards and said one sentence:
"I voted for the schedule in 2009 because the alternative was worse, and I would like it recorded that the alternative was worse, and I would also like it recorded that I have thought about that sentence every day since the second of October and I have arrived at the conclusion that it is the whole of what happened in this building, and that it is not a defence, and I am not offering it."
Lyra Chen was allowed into the room at the back for the vote and was not allowed to speak, and said so herself, in a document she later published and has never retracted:
I was sixteen. I had lost my sight of threads and my father and my certainty that being the one who decided was a kind of goodness. I was not a member of anything and I did not vote and I did not speak and I sat on the floor of a lecture hall with my back to a pillar and I ate a sandwich. And I want it on the record that on the twenty-eighth of October, the night before, my three friends and I sat in a corridor and agreed that we would each say one sentence at the Council, and that on the morning of the twenty-ninth I got up at six and could not do it, and that I telephoned each of them individually and told them so, and that not one of them said a word about it, and that Eli Park said, "Fine," and went back to his napkin. I have been the person who decided for other people since I was six years old. It took me twenty-four days to be talked out of it and I want it noted that it took three other people and a napkin, and that I did not do it myself, and that if you are reading this wondering whether I deserved it: no. I was talked into it. That is the whole of my claim and I am not going to inflate it.
Weave-Quake Counter: 31% instability. Node-failure projection: T+212 d. Post-event re-survey. Note added 2014: the counter fell from 49 to 31 between the fourteenth and the twenty-ninth of October, and the Council's technical officer has stated publicly that the fall is "consistent with a reduction in load," and Ms. Chen has written in the margin of the published version, in pencil, and left it in, and it reads: ask her what load. That is the fifth board. That is the whole of it. Everything else in this building is a column.
Item 11 passed. On the fourteenth of November 2013 the first written answer was filed under it, and it is four words long, and it is addressed to a sixteen-year-old, and it says: You were right. — I.Y.
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