I hardly slept. I had meant to. I lay down at a sensible hour with the lights at my preferred level and the window dimmed to the colour of weak tea, and I closed my eyes, and behind them the little green number began to climb again. Seventy-two. Normal. Then amber. Then the stutter.

At one o'clock I got up and opened the display on the kitchen table.

"Guv," said Wheatley, softly, the way a nurse speaks in a ward at night, "you're due a rest cycle. Shall I run the sleep sequence?"

"No."

"Only your markers—"

"I know about my markers."

"Right you are."

For a long time I didn't read anything. I sat with the display dark in front of me and thought about the bundle.

Dozens of sheets, found in a locker nobody remembered, tied together by somebody nobody could name. Finsics had sampled a handful and found them old. My department had been sent one scan. And then the chairman had taken one look at the price and locked the whole collection away under his own authority, somewhere in the tower, where I had never been. Every question I had was about a page I had never touched. I didn't know whether my sheet had been one of the handful Finsics tested. Nobody had told me. It had not occurred to me, until tonight, to ask.

I thought of Sethu across the café table, and the small step back he had taken when the record came up on the screen. He had been right to take it. A stranger's word was not evidence. If I wanted him to step forward again, I would need something better than my word.

And I thought of Lalu. That's my verification. It isn't on any server. That was harder. Sethu's doubt asked me for proof. Lalu's trust asked for nothing at all, and somehow that was heavier. It was not a thing I could earn with a report. It was a thing I could only fail to deserve.

Sethu's folded plan was still in my jacket. I took it out and smoothed it on the table. On the blank side, in his careful hand, were the two lists: what I had, and what I hadn't. One scan. The Finsics report. And under the gap he'd left: The original sheet. The other sheets. The passage where the name comes from. Which sheets Finsics actually tested. Everything I needed was on the second list, and the second list was all in one place.

Feed it more text, Madie had said, and it might give you words. And Lalu, as if the chairman's lock were the lid of a jar: Then unlock it.

Both my friends, in their different ways, had led me back to the same place. A locker in the tower, and a man who held the key.

Thinking was getting me nowhere. I began to read. Not the bank's summaries. Not anything Wheatley had prepared. I went into the open archives myself, the old way, one page leading to the next: the dead languages of the north, Gothic and its single great book, the Burgundians who left a handful of names and almost nothing else, the strange stubborn vowels of the Finnic tongues, which change themselves to agree with one another the way a choir does. I read about people who had spent their whole lives on a few hundred words carved into stone. I read slowly, and badly, and I understood perhaps a third of it.

I could have asked Wheatley. He would have given me a clean summary in under a minute, with the difficult parts smoothed and the gaps filled in. That was precisely why I didn't. I had seen, that afternoon, what a system does with a gap. It draws in the stroke it expects, in the same ink as the evidence.

At half past two the lights in the kitchen began, very gradually, to dim.

"Wheatley."

"Wellness protocol, guv. Low light after two. Helps the body find its way down."

"Turn them back up."

A pause.

"I can bring them up a little, guv. The protocol's set by the bank."

The lights rose a little. Not to where I had left them. I looked at them for a while, and then I took the display to the window, where the city's own glow was enough to read by, and went on.

Somewhere after three I realized I was watching the clock on the screen, and that I had been watching it for some minutes. Three-ten. Three-eleven. I waited, with a feeling I didn't like, for three-twelve.

It came. Nothing happened. The towers stood where they had always stood.

I put the archives away and thought about the chairman, because I had no idea what he would do.

I had worked under him for six years and could not have said, with any confidence, what he would do about anything. He had once cancelled a merger because the other chairman's handshake was "too dry". He had once kept on a junior analyst everyone wanted gone because she had told him, to his face, that his favourite forecast was wishful thinking. In the boardroom, with a price in front of him that would have satisfied any reasonable man, he had asked me what makes a human real. He had given me three days and told me to report to him directly, and I still didn't know whether that was trust or a leash. He might open the locker himself and stand beside me while I read. He might take the assignment away by breakfast and hand it to Financial Security, who would authenticate the sheets and not audit the century.

The rumour about the implant came back to me: that he had needed it to find out what he was thinking. I had always laughed at that. In the small hours it seemed less like a joke and more like a description of the problem.

Soon after, I sent him a message asking for the whole collection.

Then I sat on by the window with the display dark in my lap. A late pod slid past, lit from inside, its passenger asleep against the glass. Behind it, laid faintly over the towers, was a man in a chair with a dark screen on his knees, looking out. It took me a moment to understand that he was me. He looked like somebody waiting for a verdict.

I watched him until I could no longer tell which of us was keeping watch.

I woke with sunlight on my face.

It came straight through the window, full and warm, the window no longer dimmed to anything. I was still in the chair. My neck had set at an angle it would complain about all day. The display had slid down beside me, and the city outside was bright and busy and well into its morning.

"Wheatley. What time is it?"

"Gone half eight, guv."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"You were sleeping, guv. First proper sleep you'd had all night. Wellness protocol says let it run." A pause. "Thought you'd want it."

I had wanted it. That was not the point, and I could not, with the sun in my eyes, have told him what the point was.

The second working day began with a pod window that knew exactly how I felt.

I had barely settled into the seat when it brightened with a soft, golden image: a room that was plainly meant to be mine, though I had never seen it. A low chair by a long window. A cup steaming on a table. Rain on the glass, not too much. A voice, warm and unhurried, said: You've had a hard week. You deserve a world that doesn't ask anything of you.

The room filled with small, perfect things. The music I liked. The temperature I liked. A view that changed, slowly, according to what I seemed to want. Only you, the voice said. Exactly you. Nothing you didn't choose.

I watched it longer than I meant to. I was tired enough to want it. There was nothing in that room that would ever open a record at three in the morning, nothing that would ever look at me across a café table and take a small step back. Nobody in it at all, in fact, except me.

That was what finally made me look away. It had shown me a whole world without a single other person in it, and called it comfort.

Yesterday's window had sold me the opposite: a hand reaching back through the wall, other people's memories poured into mine until I couldn't find where I ended. One offered me everyone. This one offered me no one. Neither had room for a friend across a café table, who stayed himself and was still there in the morning.

"Window clear, Wheatley."

"Right you are, guv."

The golden room folded itself away, and there was only the morning city, and my own face, faintly, in the glass.

At the museum entrance the robot scanned my ticket, blinked once, and said, "Welcome." The barrier opened.

I stood there a moment longer than I needed to. Yesterday this door had refused me. Today it let me through without a word, because somewhere a review had decided I was consistent with myself. I felt no better for it. A door that opens because a record says so is not the same as a door that opens because someone knows you.

Lalu and Sethu were already in the café, at the same table by the window. Lalu had his hat pushed back and his feet on the next chair, which he removed with ostentatious courtesy when a serving arm came near. Sethu had two cups in front of him and was reading something on a small screen, his lips moving.

"Here he is," said Lalu. "The man who walks in his sleep."

"I slept in a chair."

"After reading all night about Gothic."

"I didn't know a thing about Gothic until two o'clock this morning," I said. "Someone had to—" I stopped. "How did you know?"

"You said I didn't," said Lalu pleasantly. "Past tense. Also you've got the chair on one side of your face, and rings round your eyes like a tree that's had a bad decade." He pushed a cup across the table. "And you didn't let your bank's little friend help you, because you're holding your display as if it might bite you. That last one's not grammar. That's just knowing you."

Sethu looked from Lalu to me with quiet amusement. "Were you two always like this?"

"The hyperdrive," we said together, and for a second I didn't feel quite so tired.

I sat down. The coffee was hot. I wrapped both hands round it and let it be hot.

"I wrote to the chairman," I said. "In the night. I asked for the whole collection."

"You unlocked the jar," said Lalu, delighted.

"I asked him to. That's not the same thing."

Sethu looked up. "What did he say?"

"Nothing yet." I glanced at my display. Nothing. "He might say yes. He might give the whole thing to someone else before lunch. With him you never know which until it's happened."

"Sounds like a man after my own heart," said Lalu.

"And you?" I asked him. "Did you sleep?"

"Like a stone. After I'd spent half the night reading about paper." He said it carelessly, but there was a gleam in his eye I had learned to distrust on the hyperdrive. "Rag paper. Linen. How they made it, how they dried it, what the old mills put in. Ink too. Did you know they used to make ink out of oak galls and rusty nails? I didn't. I do now."

"Why?"

"Because you two were busy being linguists, and somebody has to look at the thing the words are written on." He tapped the table. "I've got a few questions about your Finsics report. The chemistry pages. The ones nobody at your bank read."

"You haven't got the chemistry pages," I said. "I only sent Madie the scan."

"You left the report open on your screen while we were waiting for the tree," said Lalu, unrepentant. "Twenty minutes, flat on the table, right under my nose. You'd already told us nobody at your bank had read the middle pages. Do you think I was going to leave them unread? Madie has very good eyes and no manners." He waved a hand before I could object. "I sent the spectrometry numbers to an old friend in a conservation lab. She still thinks paper is the most interesting thing in the world, which makes one of us. She's running them against the old mill records now."

"Lalu, that report is bank property."

"So's your sleep, apparently." He sipped his drink. "She says a day, maybe less. These things are slow when nobody cheats. Until then I'm waiting, like a man of the past."

Sethu had put his screen down.

"I didn't sleep much either," he said. "I kept thinking about what we said yesterday. That we'd treated the page as meaning something from the very beginning." He turned his cup by the handle. "And then I thought: what is that? Meaning. We all use the word. I'm not sure any of us could say what it is."

"Oh no," said Lalu, with deep pleasure. "Here we go."

"Try this," I said. I had spent the whole night reading about words, and Lalu had just reminded me how much could hang on a single tense; it would have been a waste not to use some of it. "Give me a sentence. Any simple sentence."

Sethu thought. "Snow is white."

"Good. Now, imagine you can read the script, the way we're trying to read our page, but you don't know any of the words. They're just shapes you can sound out. Read it."

"Snow is white."

"Now imagine you've heard the words before, perhaps in someone else's conversation, but you're not quite sure what they refer to. Read it again."

"Snow is white." He was smiling slightly now, catching on.

"And now you know exactly what snow is, and exactly what white is. You've stood in it. Read it."

"Snow is white."

"Same three words," I said. "Same grammar, same order. Did anything change?"

Sethu was quiet for a moment. Lalu had stopped pretending not to listen.

"The words didn't," said Sethu slowly. "But I did. The first time it was just a sentence. Correct, but empty. The second time it was an idea I was half holding. The third time it was…" He searched for it. "It was something I believed. Something about the world."

"So where did the difference come from?"

"From me." He looked down at his hands. "From the one reading it."

"From the reader," I agreed. "The marks on the page stay the same. Grammar links the words to each other, and you have to grasp that first—the way Lalu caught my didn't a minute ago. But the meaning isn't locked inside the grammar. It happens when someone looks through the words at what they stand for."

"Wait," said Sethu, glancing towards the signals room across the corridor. "Suppose you're only watching from the outside. Yesterday those little cars on the table stopped at the red lamp every time. If a man in an old car stopped at a red light, I'd say he understood what the light meant. But the pods outside this window stop and turn all day without a person in them."

"Which is my cue," said Lalu, taking his feet off the chair altogether and sitting forward. "Because I can prove your reader theory is nonsense. Watch." He pulled out his battered device and set it on the table. "Madie. What colour is snow?"

"White," said Madie, at once, in the tone of a woman who has better things to do. "Next."

"I think it's blue."

"It's white."

"Light blue, then. Very pale blue."

"Honey, it's white. We did this. It's white. You want it in writing?"

"What if it's been raining?"

"Then it's wet white. Pal, I swear, if you ask me about snow one more time I'm putting you on hold for a week."

Lalu sat back, triumphant.

"There," he said. "She knows snow is white. She knows it so well she's sick of it. What's the difference between her and Sethu's third reading?"

Sethu laughed. I turned to my own pocket.

"Wheatley. What colour is snow?"

"White, guv."

"What if I told you it was blue?"

"Then I'd have to tell you, very respectfully, that it's white, guv."

"Green?"

"White, guv."

"Purple?"

"Still white, guv." A small pause. "I can go on as long as you like. I don't mind."

That was the difference between them in a single line. Madie would have thrown the device across the room by now if she'd had arms. Wheatley would go on saying white, guv patiently until the sun went out.

"Two very different personalities," said Lalu. "Same answer."

"Same answer," I said. "Because it's the same loop."

"Meaning what?"

"When does the sentence snow is white become true, Lalu?"

He squinted at me, suspecting a trick. "When the snow is white."

"Right. There was a logician called Tarski who put it just as baldly: the sentence 'snow is white' is true if, and only if, snow is white. On the left-hand side you have the words. On the right-hand side you have the condition in the world that makes them true." I gestured between our two devices on the table. "Now look at what Madie and Wheatley just did. Somebody already set their condition for them: snow goes with white. When we say blue, or green, or purple, they run our word through the loop, see it doesn't match the stored setting, and hand back false. Wheatley will happily wait all afternoon for the next colour we care to name so he can check that one too."

"And Sethu doesn't?" asked Lalu.

"When Sethu says snow is white the third time, he isn't checking a list of colours," I said. "He's looking past the sentence at snow—cold, bright, real. And the instant he sees that snow is white, he doesn't need to test blue, green and purple one by one. His mind has already ruled out every other colour at once, including a thousand shades we don't even have words for, because seeing what a thing is already tells you what it isn't. A machine checks whether a sentence matches its rules. A mind asks whether the rules match the snow."

"And Madie can't check the rules?" asked Sethu.

"She'd have to step outside her own language to check whether it's telling the truth," I said. "That was Tarski's whole point. You can't judge the truth of a system from inside the system. You need somewhere to stand outside it."

Sethu was writing on the back of his plan again. I could see the word outside with a circle around it.

"Where?" said Sethu.

"That's the question, isn't it?"

I thought of the boardroom, and of my own voice saying it to the chairman: our system can tell me whether a thing fits everything else we hold, but it can't step outside everything we hold and tell me whether the whole arrangement is true. I had said it as a clever point. I had not, at the time, expected it to be about me.

"Madie," said Lalu, "do you know what snow is?"

"Frozen precipitation, pal. Six-sided crystals. You want the full entry?"

"Have you ever been cold?"

There was a silence from the device. It was not a long one. Then: "That's not a question I can answer in a way you'd find useful."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Even Lalu looked, briefly, as though he had heard something he hadn't expected.

He recovered quickly. He always did.

"All right," he said. "Suppose you're right. Suppose there's a sentence on one side and snow on the other and you need somebody standing between them to see if they match. How do you know you ever get to the right-hand side? We're still arguing about it, aren't we? Which means nobody's reached it. Maybe your snow is blue and you've been taught to call it white. Maybe we each have our own snow." He spread his hands, warming to his theme. "There isn't any ultimate truth waiting at the end. There's just a blank, and we each paint our own bias on it. My truth, your truth, Madie's truth. Alternate truths. Nobody's wrong, because there's nothing outside our bubbles to be wrong about."

"Wait a minute," said Sethu, frowning over his plan. "If there's nothing on the other side—just a blank—what is a bias a bias from?"

Lalu paused with his glass halfway to his mouth.

"If I say a scale is biased," Sethu went on, in his careful way, "I mean it's off the true weight. If there's no weight at all, the scale isn't biased. It's just a pointer swinging in the dark."

"Exactly," I said, grateful to him. "Truth itself is simple, Lalu: either the snow is white or it isn't. What comes in degrees is our knowledge of it. We all start with a mixture of things we've seen clearly and things we've got wrong—what you call bias. When you and I argue, my bit of truth chips away at your mistake, and yours chips away at mine. That only works because we're both looking at the same snow. If we each had our own private snow, we couldn't even disagree."

"And besides," said Sethu, looking up at Lalu, "if you really believed there was nothing out there to find, why did you stay up half the night reading about oak galls and rusty nails?"

"Because I like a puzzle," said Lalu promptly.

"No," I said. "Because your own mind won't sit still inside the bubble you keep defending. Doubt isn't what keeps you searching, Lalu. Doubt is what keeps locking the door. What keeps you searching is that you already know there's something on the other side of it."

"If everyone's truth is just a bias," added Sethu quietly, "then so is that theory."

"Yes. And?" said Lalu.

"And then there's no reason for us to believe it."

"There's no reason for you to believe anything," said Lalu cheerfully. "That's the beauty of it. It's very restful."

He grinned, waiting for me to pounce, as I would have done across half the solar system. Something stopped me.

I trust you to do the right thing.

He had said that yesterday, with the access record glowing on the screen between us. Not your right thing. Not an alternate right thing, one bias among many in a comfortable void. He had meant something real, and he had staked himself on it, and it had held me up when nothing else in the room could.

I looked at him across the table, grinning over his cold drink, and said nothing at all. He noticed. He always noticed. A flicker of puzzlement crossed his face, and then he let it go.

"So," he said instead, leaning back, "you still think we're different from Madie because our minds 'see' the truth condition. Look at us: we take in data, we spot patterns, we update our rules. Deep down, aren't we the same as these machines? Just bigger, wetter ones."

It was a good trap. He had laid it beautifully.

"You've just asked me whether I'm a machine," I said, "and you're waiting to see what I'll say."

"Yes."

"Madie wouldn't wait. She'd look it up."

He opened his mouth, shut it again, and looked at the device on the table as if it had personally let him down.

"Don't look at me, pal," said Madie. "I just work here."

Sethu laughed so suddenly that he had to put his cup down. Then his face grew thoughtful again, and he tapped the tip of his stylus against the word outside.

"Even so," Sethu said, "if understanding a sentence means knowing what would make it true, where does that condition come from? Is it something we assign, or something assigned to us?"

"And what about sentences where nobody knows the truth condition at all?" said Lalu, reaching across to flick the corner of my display. "Like your manuscript. Does it mean nothing until we can check it?"

He stopped with his finger still touching the edge of my screen.

"Is that meant to happen?" asked Sethu.

I picked it up. The screen was black. I pressed the edge to wake it. Nothing. I pressed again, harder.

"It's off," I said.

"Battery?"

"It doesn't run out. It charges from the—" I stopped. "It doesn't switch itself off. It can't. It's a bank device. It's on all the time. That's the point of it."

"Well," said Lalu, "it seems to have had a thought of its own."

I held it, feeling foolish and then, quite quickly, not foolish at all. Somewhere under my sleeve the implant would still be reading my pulse, but without the display there was no number, no amber, no voice in my pocket. For the first time in eleven years Wheatley was not listening.

I did not know how long it had been off. I did not know who, or what, had turned it off.

Lalu's device buzzed on the table. He glanced at it, then looked up at me with an expression I couldn't read.

"It's Madie," he said. "She says she's got a message. For you."

"For me?"

"Put her on," said Sethu.

Lalu touched the screen.

"Okay, so," said Madie, without preamble, "some guy just called me. On the side channel. Says he's your guy." A disgusted pause. "Talks like a chimney sweep in a costume drama."

"Wheatley," I said.

"That's what he called himself. Wheatley. Like it's a name. He says he's been trying to reach you and couldn't, so he went through your recent contacts, found your pal here, found me. Which, by the way, is not how any of this is supposed to work."

"What did he say?"

"Hold on, I'm getting to it. He said, and I'm quoting, which I hate: Tell the guv'nor his message has been answered, and he's to leg it to the bank, sharpish, the chairman's waiting on him." She let that sit. "Then he said ta-ra, whatever that means, and hung up on me. On me."

"The chairman," said Sethu.

"That's the bit I understood," said Madie. "The rest was mostly vowels."

"He's answered," I said. "About the collection." I heard my own voice and did not know whether it sounded hopeful or afraid. With the chairman, waiting could mean a locker standing open. It could equally mean a desk cleared and Financial Security sitting beside it.

Lalu was looking at me.

"You didn't ask him to call anyone," he said quietly.

"No."

"And your display switched itself off."

"Yes."

"And your assistant found his way out of your switched-off device and into mine to deliver a message."

I didn't answer. I pressed the edge of the display again, and this time it woke at once, as if nothing had happened. The screen lit. The little symbol beside Wheatley's name glowed its usual soft green.

"Morning, guv," said Wheatley. "Lost you there for a bit. Did the lady pass on my message?"

"She did. Wheatley, why was the display off?"

"Couldn't say, guv. It wasn't my doing. I'd have told you if it was."

He would have. Of course he would. I had never once known him to lie.

I had also never once, until yesterday, thought to wonder.

"What did the chairman say?"

"Come up when you get in. That's the lot, guv. Five words."

"Nothing about the sheets?"

"Nothing about anything, guv. He wants you now," Wheatley said. "I've called you a pod. It'll be on the terrace in four minutes."

"I didn't ask you to call a pod."

"No, guv. But you'd have wanted one."

That was true as well. That was the trouble.

Lalu walked me out to the terrace. Sethu followed a few steps behind, folding his plan along its well-worn crease.

"Go and see your chairman," said Lalu. "Be charming. Don't tell him anything we wouldn't tell him."

"I'm not sure what that is."

"Neither am I. Improvise." He hesitated, which was unlike him. "And when you're done, call me. Not your Cockney. Me."

The pod settled onto the terrace. I got in. The door sealed, and Lalu raised a hand, and the museum fell away behind the glass.

The window offered me a programme. I could feel the golden room waiting somewhere behind the screen, ready to unfold.

"Clear," I said, before Wheatley could ask.

The city slid by. I watched the towers and tried to work out what I was going to say to the chairman, and found I couldn't think past the black screen in my hand, and the voice of a woman from across the ocean saying he says he's your guy.

Call me. Not your Cockney. Me.

I meant to. I began to, out of habit, and stopped with the words half formed. Any call I made would go through the display in my hand. Any message I wrote, Wheatley would read before Lalu did. He read everything. He had read the message I sent the chairman in the night; he had read the chairman's five words before I had. That had never troubled me. It was what he was for. It was like minding that the walls of your own flat could hear you.

Somewhere across the city an old woman was feeding the bank's chemistry into a machine that knew about paper. When her answer came, it would come to Lalu, and from Lalu to me, and on its way to me it would pass, like everything else, through Wheatley.

There was nowhere for it to arrive that he was not already standing.

The Globank tower rose ahead, its glass catching the morning, its arrival bay already lit and waiting. Somewhere inside it the chairman was waiting too, with an answer I had asked for and could not guess, and a locker I had never seen.

"Arriving in one minute, guv," said Wheatley gently. "Shall I let him know you're on your way?"

He would know whether I said yes or not. He would know what my pulse did while I decided.

"Yes," I said. "Tell him I'm coming."

After that, for a while, none of us said anything.

The serving arm set down a tray at the next table, lifted it again, corrected the angle and set it down once more. On my display the grey line waited beneath the hesitating stroke, and under it the small, polite entry: 03:12. Account holder. Access granted.

I read it a third time, as though the words might rearrange themselves if I gave them the opportunity. They didn't. They had the particular stillness of a record, which does not care whether you believe it.

I tried to remember the night.

I remembered the window, the towers brightening, the cloud letting go of the light. I remembered switching off the display and the hesitating stroke staying with me a little longer than the light did. I remembered going to bed. After that there was nothing: not darkness, not a dream, simply nothing, the way there is nothing on the far side of a wall. I had never before had any reason to inspect that nothing. Every night of my life I had handed myself over to it and been handed back in the morning, and I had never once asked who was minding me in between.

Wheatley had. A disturbance a little after three.

I looked down at my hands on the table. They were my hands. The bank could identify them perfectly. The ink from the museum quill was still on my right forefinger, a grey smudge in the whorls, and I found myself examining it as though it were evidence against someone, and then realizing that it was.

Somewhere in me, a professional voice I had trained for eleven years began, quite calmly, to write the incident report. Subject accessed restricted legacy record at 03:12 using valid credentials. Subject states no recollection. Recommend suspension of privileges pending review. It was a good report. I had written dozens like it about other people. I had never once, writing them, considered that the subject might be telling the truth.

"Hey."

Lalu's hand was on my forearm. I hadn't seen him reach across.

"Do you walk in your sleep?" he said. It came out lighter than his face.

"No."

"How would you know?"

"Wheatley would know," I said, and heard how thin it sounded.

"Wheatley," said Lalu, raising his voice towards my pocket, "does your guv'nor walk in his sleep?"

"Not on my records, sir. He talks a bit. Mostly about quarterly reports."

"That's worse," said Lalu, and waited for me to laugh. I didn't. He took his hand back and, for once in his life, didn't fill the silence. He picked up his cold drink, looked at it, and put it down without drinking.

Sethu had not taken his eyes off me.

"Somebody used your credentials," he said quietly.

"Nobody can use my credentials." It came out too fast. I heard it, and went on anyway, because it was true and because I had spent eleven years making it true. "The token's bound to my biometrics. They're checked continuously against the device in my hand and the implant in my wrist. If anyone else tried, the system wouldn't grant access. It would lock the account and wake me. That's what the rule is for. I wrote the rule." I realized my palm was flat on the table, the way I held it in meetings when I wanted to be believed.

Then I heard whose sentence it was.

They couldn't. The chairman had said it yesterday, almost in those words, when I asked him what our systems would do if someone stole his credentials. I had not let him off. If they did, I had insisted, and pressed the hypothetical on him in front of the whole table, and rather enjoyed watching him reach for an answer. Then your department would have failed, he had said.

Now the hypothetical had walked into my own account at twelve minutes past three, and I was defending the door exactly as he had: by insisting that nobody could come through it. And my department, the one that would have failed, was me.

"Then the system says it was you," said Sethu, not unkindly.

"The system says it was my account." The distinction sounded smaller out loud than it had in my head.

"Is there a difference?" asked Lalu. He said it gently, which frightened me more than if he had said it as a joke.

It was the second time in a minute that the boardroom had come back for me. I had also asked the chairman whether perfect credentials would tell us who was using them, and he had said they would establish identity to the required standard. I had thought it the most revealing sentence of the meeting. Now the required standard had looked into three o'clock in the morning and found me there, and the only thing I could set against it was that I did not remember, which is exactly what a guilty man says.

I looked up and caught Sethu's eyes, and in them, for less than a second, something I recognized because I had felt it myself across a hundred interview tables: not suspicion exactly, but the small step back of a reasonable man recalculating. He had met me an hour ago. He did not know me. To him, I was a stranger whose own records said he had done something in the night and who now said he hadn't. If I had been in his chair, I would have stepped back too.

He saw that I had seen it. To his credit, he didn't pretend otherwise.

He set his cup down very carefully, as if it too might be evidence. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know you yet. I only know what the screen says."

"That's what everyone knows," I said. "That's my whole profession."

"I know him," said Lalu.

We both looked at him.

"I know him," he said again, to Sethu, quite flatly. "I've been stuck on a ship with him for months. I've watched him panic about fuel he had plenty of. I've watched him refuse to steal a sandwich from a pirate. Maybe his hand did open that file at three in the morning. I don't know, and neither does he. But I know it wasn't to cheat anybody. If he'd done something he was ashamed of, he'd have woken me up to tell me he was worried about it." He shrugged. "That's my verification. It isn't on any server."

It was a strange thing to hear from Lalu, of all people, who had spent a whole voyage turning his little dial and telling me that nothing counted unless it could be measured. I wanted to point that out. I found I couldn't trust my voice, so I drank some cold Atomo® instead.

"I could raise a ticket," I said eventually, rubbing at the ink on my finger. It only spread.

"Who would it go to?" asked Lalu.

"My department."

"Who runs your department?"

"I do."

"So you'd be asking yourself," said Lalu, recovering some of his old pleasure, "to investigate whether you did something you don't remember doing, using a system that says you did it."

"Put like that—"

"I can't think how else to put it."

Sethu drew the plan towards him and wrote on the notes side, under the list of things we hadn't seen: 3:12. Access granted. Who? After a moment he added a second line: Restricted from whom? He turned it so I could read it, and I understood that it was also an apology.

"Somebody restricted that record before your post existed," he said. "And somebody, or something, opened it last night with your name. Those might be one question or two. But neither will be answered at this table."

"No."

"So we do what we came to do." He tapped the scan, once, with the end of his stylus. "We read the page."

It was the right answer and I disliked it for being right. Every instinct I had been paid for told me to close the display, go straight to the bank and pull the logs until something in them confessed. But the logs would only say what they had already said, in the calm grey type that had never once in my career been wrong about anything it was able to see. It occurred to me, for the first time, that this was not the same as never being wrong.

I tried to put it aside. I told myself, in the voice I used on junior analysts, that the record would still be there in an hour, that a problem left alone for an hour is the same size when you come back to it. It didn't work. Three-twelve kept surfacing like a word on the tip of the tongue. My hand. My bed. A heart that had not hurried. Somewhere in the bank, a review was turning my night over without me, and by evening someone I had never met might know more about what I had done than I did.

I made myself look at the page instead. Brown at the edges, pale in the middle, the hesitating stroke. Whatever had happened at three o'clock had happened because of this page. Someone, or something, had reached for that record because of the same stroke I had shown the system that morning. The page and the night were one question, not two.

And I found, sitting there with cold coffee and the smear of ink on my finger, that I had decided something. I was going to find out who had written this, and who had opened that record with my name, whatever it cost me. The post, the clearance, the apartment with its well-trained kitchen: I could feel all of them, quite clearly, as things that could be taken away. I decided anyway.

I closed the panel with the access record and left the scan open.

In the café light the page looked different again, the dark lines bending across it like a field of grass leaning one way in a wind that had stopped centuries ago. At the bottom, the mark I had refused to call a signature, and above it the empty margin.

"Can I see what your system thinks it says?" asked Sethu.

"It doesn't think it says anything," I said. "It has candidates."

"Then show us the candidates," said Sethu.

I asked Wheatley for the transcription layer. A thin line of characters appeared beneath the first row of writing: the system's best attempt to assign each mark a symbol, so that something could at least be counted.

kG 173J z5^e5%2$ y3G5% t`Û yY5 wP$7i

Lalu leaned so close that his hat brim touched the screen.

"That looks like a strong password," he said. "The kind Madie keeps suggesting to me."

Sethu and I both looked at him.

"Madie?" said Sethu.

"My assistant."

"She?"

"I like having somebody to argue with."

I looked at him. He looked at me.

"You still use passwords, Lalu?"

"I'm a man of the past." He waved a hand at the screen. "And what are we here for? To bicker about my passwords? Come on, get on with your damn manuscript."

I sighed, and turned back to the screen.

"It isn't a password," I said. "It's a placeholder. The marks don't correspond to anything in the Linguafranca registry, so the system gives them arbitrary codes. It lets it look for repetition. Same mark, same code."

"And are there repetitions?" asked Lalu.

"Some. Not as many as there should be, if it were a simple cipher of a known language. Too many, if it were noise."

Lalu grunted, unimpressed by both possibilities.

"Show them the reconstruction, Wheatley," I said.

A second image opened beside the scan. The writing looked cleaner. Thin strokes had been joined, pale patches filled in, doubtful shapes separated into tidy groups. It looked, for the first time, like something a person might read.

"That helps," said Lalu, squinting.

"It makes it easier to look at," I said.

"Isn't that what you wanted?" Lalu asked.

"Some of the marks are additions," I said, and felt oddly as if I were confessing to something.

I asked Wheatley to show them. The added strokes turned grey. There were more than I remembered.

Sethu looked from one image to the other, and his finger stopped above a short grey line joining two marks.

"That little line makes these two into one thing."

"Yes."

"And without it, they could be separate?"

"Or parts of something else."

He drew his hand back.

"Then it hasn't only repaired the picture."

"No," I said. "It has chosen how the picture should be read."

"Several alternatives are retained, guv," said Wheatley.

"I know. Keep the original beside them."

I had asked for the clean version on the second day because the old one frustrated me, and its tidiness had been a relief. Watching Sethu hesitate over a line I had barely noticed, I was uneasy at how readily I had accepted the improvement. The system had not lied. It had simply filled the gaps with what it expected to find, and drawn its expectations in the same ink as the evidence.

Sethu studied the original line, then the page above it.

"Could it just be noise? Somebody making marks that look like writing?"

"It's possible," I said, because it was.

"No," said Lalu.

We both looked at him.

"Look at it," he said. "Not the codes. The page. The lines start at the same margin. They end before the edge, every time, even when the last word must have been squeezed. There's a gap between clumps. The clumps are different lengths. And the writer left that space at the bottom." He sat back. "Somebody wants to tell somebody something. You can see it the way you can see someone across a room trying to catch your eye."

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"What?" Lalu demanded.

"Nothing. You've just proved something."

"I've proved I have eyes."

"You've proved you have more than eyes," I said. "Eyes see ink and paper. You're looking at ink and paper and seeing somebody behind it."

He opened his mouth to argue and was saved by the next table.

The boy from the signals room had turned up with his mother, and she had found a seat at last, at the table beside ours. She set down a tray from the serving hatch. The boy's hand shot out towards the nearest glass.

"Wait!"

It came out much louder than she meant it to. The boy froze with his fingers a breath from the glass. So did the three of us. Sethu's cup stopped halfway to his mouth; Lalu actually flinched.

The mother turned, colouring. "I'm so sorry," she said to us. "He had a cup of hot chocolate over himself last week."

"Not at all," said Sethu.

She moved the glass within the boy's reach, and he took it with great care and the dignity of someone who had never meant to grab anything.

Sethu watched him for a moment.

"He just heard more than a sound," he said.

"He heard his mother shout," said Lalu.

"He heard don't touch that, it's hot, remember last week, I'm frightened for you, wait for me. All in one word." Sethu turned his cup slowly. "None of that was in the sound. If you'd recorded it, you'd have a woman's voice going up. There's a whole lot that isn't in what your eyes see or your ears hear, and that's exactly the part that makes up the meaning."

"It's training," said Lalu, who had recovered from his flinch and clearly wished it forgotten. "He's been trained. Like a dog to a whistle. Say wait enough times with a hand on the cup and the hand stops by itself."

"That already assumes he's trainable," I said. "You can't train the lamp in the signals room. You can switch it on and off all day and it will never learn to wait."

"So which comes first?" said Sethu. "The training or something in him that can be trained? It's chicken and egg."

Lalu brightened at once.

"Now that," he said, "makes me hungry." He reached for the ordering pad. "Chicken. And egg. Both. Together."

"You can't have both together," said Sethu. "That's the whole point of the question."

"Watch me."

The serving arm brought them a few minutes later, a small grilled breast of something the menu swore was chicken and an egg done soft beside it. Lalu cut a piece of each, ate them in one mouthful, and closed his eyes.

"Delicious," he said. "Problem solved. They come together."

Sethu laughed and stole a piece of the egg. I ate a little of the chicken and found I was hungrier than I had realized. For a while nobody said anything, and the café went on around us, and the boy at the next table finished his drink and studied the empty glass as if it might still be hot.

It was while we were eating that it came to me, and I think to the others at about the same moment, because Sethu stopped chewing and looked at the page on my display.

Everything we had done that morning, every question we had asked of it, had taken one thing for granted. We had assumed the page was written for someone, or for something. That the marks were meant. That a page someone had bothered to sign must mean something to somebody.

None of us had started from the idea that it meant nothing. We couldn't have. Nobody begins there. It means nothing is not where you start with a signed page. It is the last thing you are entitled to say, and only after you have looked everywhere for its purpose and found none.

"We've been treating it as a letter," said Sethu quietly. "From the beginning."

"It's signed," said Lalu, with his mouth full. "What else would it be?"

I looked at the empty margin at the bottom of the page and did not answer.

It was Lalu who had the idea, and he had it in the way he had all his best ideas, sideways, while appearing to talk about something else.

"We keep saying for someone," he said. "Written for. Meant for. One thing leaning on another."

"Yes."

"Have you tried Lost in Translator?"

I stared at him.

"It's the thing the old university built," he said, as if I were being slow, which I was. "For dead languages. I saw a talk on it here, next to the sea-voyage one. The languages nobody can read, with no dictionary and hardly any examples and no spaces between the words. It doesn't try to translate them. It looks for relatives."

Sethu sat up. "Of course. If it's a lost language—"

"Then it had parents," said Lalu. "Languages don't fall out of the sky. They change in particular ways. A sound becomes a neighbouring sound, not a distant one. A p drifts to a b, not to a k. The machine maps all those likely drifts and goes looking for a family that this," he waved at the transcription line, "could have drifted from."

I knew of the system. Everyone in my profession did, in the vague way one knows of a museum's back rooms. I had never once thought of using it, because the bank's own engine had never failed to identify a language, and because it hadn't occurred to me, until Lalu repeated for someone, that the page might need a family rather than a translation.

"It's a licensed research tool," I said. "Globank has an institutional subscription. I can run it from here."

"Then run it," said Sethu.

I reached for the display, and stopped.

"Guv," said Wheatley, very quietly, "a word."

"Go on."

"Your identity token's still under review. Anything you run on the bank's subscription right now gets logged against an account that's being looked at. A lost-language engine, a restricted scan, a museum café—" He paused, and I could have sworn I heard him choosing tact. "It'll look like what it is, guv. And you won't be the one reading it."

He was right. I had written the review procedures myself. A flagged account that suddenly ran a classified asset through an outside research engine from a public café would escalate automatically. By evening it would be on the desk of someone who did not report to me.

"Then don't run it on the bank," said Lalu.

"It's the bank's document," I said.

"It's the bank's scan of somebody else's document. The somebody else, as far as anyone can tell, isn't complaining." He took out his own device, a battered thing with a cracked corner he refused to replace. "I've got a personal subscription. Museum members get it cheap. Madie can run it."

"Wheatley?" I said to my pocket.

"Policy is clear, guv. Bank material doesn't leave bank systems." A pause. "I'm obliged to say that. I've said it. It's in the log."

It was perfectly judged, as Wheatley always was. He had warned me, kept his own record clean and left the decision with me, all in three short sentences. Yesterday I would have called it tact. Now I caught myself wondering whose tact it was: mine, learned from me over eleven years, or the bank's, worn so smoothly into his voice that I had never once heard the seam. At the museum door he had told me just enough to stay calm. Here he had told me just enough to stay clean.

I looked at the page. Four days of the bank's best machinery had produced two empty fields and a list of rejected guesses. In a single morning, two men with no clearance and a cheap museum subscription had got further than my department, simply by asking different questions. If I went back to the office now and did everything correctly, I would arrive at the end of the week with nothing, and the chairman would put the collection in Sotheby's catalogue under a name nobody had earned, and the page would go wherever pages go once they have a price and no reader.

And somewhere in the legacy archive a record that matched its ink would stay restricted, and I would never know who had opened it with my hands.

"Encrypt it first," I heard myself say. "My key, not yours. It decrypts only inside the run and the result comes back to my device, not yours. Nothing's stored on your side."

Lalu held out his device as if I were offering him a cigarette. "You're a romantic."

"I'm a vice president of Cybersecurity breaking his own policy in a café."

"That's what I said."

It took me four minutes to wrap the scan in a layer of my own encryption that no subscription in NeoTerra could see through. My hands were steady. I noticed that because I had expected them not to be. Wheatley said nothing more. He did not argue; he recorded. A small amber light appeared beside his symbol on my screen and stayed there, which was his way of making a note.

Madie came on loud, flat and unmistakably from across the ocean, the voice of a woman who had been kept waiting at a counter since the last century.

"Yeah. What."

"I picked her voice off a setup menu," Lalu said, seeing my face. "Purely to annoy the menu."

Wheatley had begun the same way. When the bank assigned him, the screen had asked me to choose a voice, and I had picked, half in jest, a Cockney from an old film I loved, with a habit of calling me guv. That was all either of us had chosen. Everything else had grown.

Eleven years of my instructions, my moods and my silences had worn Wheatley into something no menu offered: a deference that knew precisely how far to go, a tact I did not remember teaching him, a way of saying right you are that could mean yes, or are you sure, or I'll be here when you've finished being foolish. Years of Lalu arguing with every answer she gave had, I could already hear, worn Madie into his exact opposite and his exact match: a woman who argued back, faster. Wheatley said guv and meant it. Madie said pal and meant the reverse.

Lalu called it personality. I had argued with him about that word across half the solar system. A personality, I said, has to be somebody's. Lalu and I had gone out on that voyage as ourselves and come back changed: the months, the asteroid, the pirates, each other, all of it had shaped us, and neither of us would have been the same without it. But there had been someone there to be shaped. The relations had worked on a person; they had not made one out of nothing. Nor had they left us untouched, like statues the weather slides off. A man was neither a knot of connections with nothing at the centre, nor a stone that nothing reached. He was both, someone and the history of his meetings.

Wheatley had the history. Eleven years of it, worn into habits no menu offered. What I could never settle was whether there was anyone at the centre for the history to belong to. Sometimes, listening to him, I wondered whether the tact and the patience I heard were his, or only mine, handed back to me so faithfully that I had stopped recognizing my own reflection. I was not sure which answer I would like less.

"Good morning to you too, Madie. Lost in Translator, please. One scan. My friend's encryption, his key. Don't keep anything."

"I never keep anything of yours, pal. Most of it ain't worth keeping." A pause. "Okay. Payload's in, locked tight. Running. Gonna take a while. Not that anybody asks how I feel about waiting."

Lalu put the device face up on the table between the three cups.

"She's very good," he said. "She just doesn't like me."

It took a long while. We ordered another round of Atomo®, which none of us drank. Sethu went to look at the navigation room for ten minutes and came back without having looked at anything. Lalu told a story about our hyperdrive voyage that I remembered differently, and I did not correct him, which he noticed, and which I think worried him more than the restricted record.

The progress mark on his screen crept round. Every so often it threw up a fragment: a sound correspondence tried and rejected, a candidate family considered and dismissed. Most of it was meaningless to me. Some of it looked uncomfortably like what my own system had produced in its first two days, before it had settled into producing nothing.

Then the rejections stopped.

A small tree began to draw itself across the screen. At the top, a dim node with no name, only a label: RECONSTRUCTED. Beneath it, branches. Madie read them out with the air of a woman reading a parking ticket aloud.

"Celtic. Gothic. Burgundian. Vandalic. Partial correspondence with each. Strongest weight towards an early Germanic grouping. Confidence low. Confidence not nothing."

Sethu breathed out.

"It's real," he said. "It's a language."

"It's related to languages," I said, but I could hear my voice failing to stay cautious. "That's what it's telling us. Whatever this is, it didn't come from nowhere. It sits somewhere in the family that gave us the old northern languages."

Sethu was looking at the scan rather than the tree.

"Did it use the grey strokes?"

Madie answered before I could. "In some runs. You want the ones without?"

"Please."

The tree trembled and redrew itself. Celtic thinned to a dotted line and vanished. Several of the most attractive links went with it. Gothic and Burgundian stayed, fainter but still joined to the dim node at the top.

"And the controls," I said. "Shuffle the groups and run them again. If a scrambled page matches just as well, we've learned nothing."

"I always run controls," said Madie, wounded. "You never ask about my controls." A pale second tree appeared beside the first: the same marks, jumbled. It was almost bare.

Lalu let out a long breath.

"The scrambled one's got nothing."

"Which means the real one has something." I moved between the two views: with the grey strokes, without them. The first was easier to like. The second was easier to defend. "Keep both, Wheatley. And the effect of leaving the additions out."

"Already in the history, guv. With the wrong answers."

Sethu turned his plan over and wrote under his two lists: Language — Germanic. He looked at it, struck through Language, and wrote relatives above it in smaller letters. Then he pushed it across so I could see.

The correction pleased me more than any summary Wheatley could have written.

"Gothic," said Lalu. "Burgundians. I like this author more and more."

"They're some of the oldest written languages of the north," I said. "Most of them died. Some of them survive only in a handful of inscriptions." I glanced back at the scan. "And Finsics put this paper and ink in the seventeenth century. A thousand years after those languages had gone quiet."

"So somebody in the seventeenth century," said Sethu, "wrote a page in something descended from languages that were already dead by then."

"Or invented one that looks descended," said Lalu.

"Why would anyone do that?" asked Sethu.

Lalu shrugged. "Why does anyone do anything? For fun. For a secret. For a girl."

Then, at the bottom right of the sparser tree, separate from the rest, a single small node began to blink in a different colour.

"What's that one?" I asked.

Madie sounded, for the first time, almost interested.

"Anomaly. Vowel harmony and some word-endings consistent with a Finnic pattern. Doesn't belong in a Germanic tree. Either a borrowing, an error, or somebody mixed their ingredients." A pause. "It survives without the grey strokes, before you ask. It's in the ink, not in the guesses. I've flagged it. You're welcome."

"Finnish?" said Sethu. "In a Gothic family?"

"It shouldn't be there," I said.

"Most interesting things shouldn't be there," said Lalu. "That's how you notice them."

I looked at the small, wrongly coloured node for a long time. A language with Germanic parents and a Finnish accent. It was the first thing about the page that felt less like a puzzle and more like a person: someone with a particular ear, a particular taste, a hand that hesitated on the way down and went on anyway. Someone who had built this out of pieces of older things, deliberately, and left room at the bottom of the page.

"Can it give us words?" Sethu asked.

"Not yet, honey," said Madie. "It's given you a family. Families don't tell you what anyone said at dinner. Feed it more text and it might."

"More text," said Lalu, looking at me.

"The rest of the collection is under the chairman's lock," I said.

"Then unlock it," said Lalu, as if it were a jar.

"It isn't that simple."

"It never is, with you. That's why it's always interesting." He picked up his device, thanked Madie with elaborate courtesy, and was told to stop being sarcastic. "We've got a family and a foreigner. That's more than you had at breakfast."

It was. I sat with the little tree glowing between our cups and felt, for the first time since the boardroom, something that was not anxiety. The page was not noise. It belonged to something. Whoever had written it had stood inside a long line of speakers, borrowing, bending, changing one sound into its neighbour, the way everyone who has ever spoken has done. They had not invented their words out of nothing. Nobody does. They had received them and passed them on, changed.

"It's getting late," said Sethu, though it wasn't. He was looking at me rather than the time. "You should go home and sleep."

"I should go to the bank," I said, without moving.

"You should go home," said Lalu, "and sleep, and tomorrow we'll come back here and you'll lecture us about whatever you've read all night instead of sleeping. And if you open any restricted files at three in the morning, try to remember it this time. I'd like the details."

On the terrace, while we waited for the pods, Sethu pressed his folded plan into my hand. "Keep it," he said. "You'll want the lists." Lalu said nothing at all, which was unlike him, and gripped my shoulder hard as my pod settled, and held on a moment longer than he needed to.

I took a pod home. The window offered me a programme and I refused it before it had finished asking.

The city moved past in its orderly streams. Somewhere below the cloud the old languages of the north had been spoken in halls and fields and boats by people who had never imagined us, and somewhere in that long chain of speakers a hand had taken those words and bent them into something new and written it down and signed it. I tried to picture the hand and kept seeing my own on the museum paper, the line going down, stalling, turning back.

My apartment door opened before I reached it. The lights came up to my preferred level. The kitchen asked whether I would like dinner. It had never seemed so eager to please.

"Not yet."

I sat at the table and opened the display, meaning to read about Gothic, about the dead languages of the north, about vowel harmony. Instead, I found I had opened my account status.

The amber light was still beside Wheatley's symbol. Above it, a line had changed.

IDENTITY REVIEW: CLOSED.

"Wheatley."

"Here, guv."

"When did that close?"

"About an hour ago, guv. While you were in the café."

"What was the finding?"

He read it to me in the bank's own words, without any accent at all.

"Review of access event 03:12. Credentials valid. Biometrics consistent. Behavioural profile consistent. Device consistent. Finding: activity consistent with account holder. No anomaly. Token restored."

I sat very still. Behind me the kitchen hummed quietly, keeping a dinner I had not asked for at exactly the temperature I liked.

The system had looked at what happened at twelve minutes past three, weighed every connection it had, and concluded, to the required standard, that it had been me.

It had done what the reconstruction did to the page. Where there was a gap, it had drawn in the stroke it expected, in the same ink as the evidence, and called the result consistent. There was no grey to show me where the additions were.

"Is that good news, guv?" Wheatley asked. "Only your stress markers have gone up, not down."

I didn't answer. Outside, the towers brightened as the sky gave up its colour, and below them the cloud held on to the last of the light, and somewhere beneath the cloud there was ground. For the first time in my life I wanted very badly to stand on it, somewhere no system could tell me who I had been.

I woke late, to the smell of coffee and the brief, bright certainty that the bank had cancelled me.

The room was full of daylight. Pods were already moving between the towers, and the hour beside my bed was well past the one at which Wheatley usually began telling me how little of the morning remained. He had said nothing. The bank paid for him, as it paid for most of the conveniences that kept me fit to work for it, and for a few seconds I lay still and wondered which of them would be switched off next.

"Wheatley?"

"Morning, guv."

"Why didn't you wake me?"

"Research outside the office. You cleared the calendar. No first appointment." A pause, carefully weighted. "And you had a restless night. Sleep settings logged a disturbance a little after three. I let you have the extra hour."

I didn't remember a disturbance. I remembered the chairman, the three days and the museum ticket, and my employment came back to me in that order. I got up before it could change its mind.

In the kitchen, breakfast stood beside the coffee. Wheatley read me the overnight analysis while I ate. The system had found what might be a repeated cluster of marks, then withdrawn the suggestion after correcting for uneven spacing. Nothing had been identified.

"Keep the rejected proposal."

"Already in the history, guv. I keep all the wrong answers."

"Good. They're the only ones we've got."

The museum lay across NeoTerra, in a district I usually passed over on my way to somewhere that paid. When I settled into the pod, its window offered me a morning programme chosen for my interests. Yesterday's interest in handwriting had produced an advertisement for a company that would preserve my voice for the people I loved.

A woman stood in a room full of sunlight. She turned towards someone outside the frame, smiled, and said a name I could not hear. The picture folded into a row of family recordings; a small hand chose hers, and she turned and smiled again. Nobody need lose the sound of a person, said the caption.

The next advertisement went further. Concord Living offered Connected Living: paired implants through which two people could share sensations, even memories. A man sat alone in an apartment and reached towards a hand in another room, and the hand reached back.

I could imagine the comfort of it. Letting someone feel what I had never managed to explain. I was less sure about the morning after. If you remembered my childhood from the inside, whose childhood would it be? If your thoughts came back through the same connection, how would I know where mine ended? The chairman's implant had failed by mixing his thoughts with other people's. Concord Living was selling the same failure as a feature.

The window asked whether I would like to begin a free recording.

"No."

The woman vanished and the city came back. A pod drew level with mine; its passenger was talking to his own window and never looked across. Then a tower took him away.

"Leave the window clear, Wheatley."

"Right you are."

The pod set me down on the arrival terrace built into the museum's upper floor. The building stood back from its neighbours, pale stone cut with deep windows, and behind the glass people were walking at a pace I had almost forgotten was available.

Inside, the air was cooler. A short queue had formed at a waist-high barrier, and at its head stood a service robot with a reader set into its chest. Visitors held up their admission codes, the lens blinked, the barrier opened.

I unfolded one panel of my display and brought up the ticket.

The lens blinked.

"Identity token under review," said the robot. "Admission suspended."

I had expected invalid code, the kind of failure that a better angle or a cleaner screen would fix. This was a different sentence. I had written the policy it came from.

"Review by whom?"

"Identity token under review. Please step aside."

"The ticket was issued last night. The payment cleared."

"The ticket is valid. The token presenting it is under review. Please step aside."

Behind me someone shifted a bag from one hand to the other. The barrier stayed shut with the perfect calm of a thing that has never had to wonder whether it is right.

"Wheatley," I said quietly, "what's flagged?"

"Can't see it from here, guv. It's a standard automated hold. Something on the account touched a sensitive record and the system's having a think." He hesitated. "It doesn't say what."

Head of Cybersecurity, I thought. Suspended at the door of a museum by a rule I had drafted for other people.

"You can steer through an asteroid field," said a voice behind me, "but they won't let you into a museum."

There was a small pause before museum, just long enough to let me know how much he was enjoying it.

I turned. Lalu stood three places back, hat tipped away from his forehead, the grin exactly where I had left it years ago. Beside him was a slighter man holding a folded visitor's plan as though he had read it twice.

For a moment I could only look at him. I had nearly called him the night before. I had not expected to find him here, watching me lose an argument with a door.

"Where did you come from?"

"Three places behind you. You were busy being suspicious." He stepped forward and laid his own pass against the reader. A list of guest places appeared on its little screen. He chose one and nodded at me. "He's with us. He's harmless. Mostly."

The robot asked me to accept a guest entry on my display. I accepted. The barrier considered the matter and opened.

"There," said Lalu. "No asteroid required."

"It took your pass and not my identity."

"Then today you're a guest. It's very restful. You should try it more often."

His companion followed us through.

"This is Sethu," Lalu said. "Sethu, this is the friend I told you about."

Sethu shook my hand. He had a careful, amused face, the face of a man who listened to an argument all the way to the end before deciding which side was wrong.

"How much did he tell you?" I asked.

"Enough to know which friend."

"Diplomatic," said Lalu. "Let's see how long it lasts."

Lalu looked from my face to the display still open in my hand.

"Another expedition?" he asked me.

"Research," I said.

"Ah. An expedition with a budget." Lalu clapped my shoulder. "And this time, when you decide to call it off, we can just take a pod home."

There it was, inside the first five minutes. I glanced at Sethu, who was studying his plan with great interest and no intention of rescuing me.

"Are you going to hold that against me forever?"

"Only when there's somebody new to tell. Come on. Nobody should be interrogated by a door before coffee." Lalu set off confidently down the left-hand corridor. Sethu touched his sleeve and pointed to the right, where a sign showed a small steaming cup. Lalu glanced up at it, adjusted his hat, and changed direction as if it had been his idea.

The coffee came from a hatch where a small mechanical arm set cups on a tray. The menu called it Atomo® and assured me that not a single coffee bean had been involved. It tasted enough like coffee to make the assurance a secondary matter.

Lalu and Sethu had met here, it turned out, at a talk on old sea voyages. Lalu had asked more questions than the speaker could answer and carried on asking them in the café afterwards, and Sethu had stayed to find out where the questions were going. Since then they had come back for other talks, other rooms. I received notices for the same talks. Wheatley sent me the summaries. I had kept up with all of it without once meeting anyone who had been there.

"Whose idea was today?" I asked.

"Mine." Sethu unfolded the plan and showed me a circled room: When People Wrote. "It's about how people composed documents themselves. The working pages. Drafts, crossings-out, words squeezed in above the line." He tapped a small photograph of a page crowded to its margins. "I can spend ten minutes asking my assistant to change a message. Warmer. Shorter. More like me. It gives me a new version every time. Here somebody had to find the words himself. I wanted to see how."

"And afterwards the navigation room," said Lalu, tapping another circle further down. "Old instruments. That was the deal."

"That was the deal," Sethu agreed, in the tone of a man who expected to be reminded of it.

I looked at the crowded page. Nobody I knew wrote anything. Once the assistants had begun composing our messages, reports and presentations, we had handed over the composing too. We read, approved and asked for changes. At Globank I gave Wheatley instructions and chose between his drafts, and he wrote them within the standards of Linguafranca®, the authority that maintained the common vocabulary and approved forms of public and business language. A report could move between institutions without anyone having to argue about its words again. It was a great convenience. I had never once asked what it cost.

"Linguafranca would never have let that page out," said Lalu, looking at the photograph. "Too many words nobody approved."

"It wasn't public," said Sethu.

Lalu shrugged. "Everything's public eventually. Ask our friend. He works for a bank."

I put down the cup. They had made a morning together long before I had thought of coming here, and for a little while it was pleasant just to be included in it. But Sethu's photograph lay between us, and the crossed-out lines in it were too close to my own problem to leave alone.

"Something turned up at the bank," I said.

Lalu raised an eyebrow. "Is this the confidential part?"

"Yes."

"Good. Those are the only parts worth hearing."

I told them about the lockers: the clearance crew in the lower levels, the bundle of handwritten sheets, the locker whose records had not survived. Finsics, the seventeenth-century date, the number on the last page of the report, and the chairman locking everything away. One scanned sheet sent to my department, and three days to put a name to it.

Lalu had begun by listening the way he listened to my work stories on the hyperdrive, waiting for the joke. When I reached the empty fields, LANGUAGE and AUTHOR, he put his cup down.

"Your system can't even tell you what language it is?"

"Not yet."

"Your system can tell me what I'm going to want for dinner next Thursday."

"Your dinner has more data."

"And the name? Satoshi?"

"It's in the recovery notes. I haven't seen the passage."

"So the most famous unverified name in financial history turns up on a page your bank can't verify." He leaned back. "Somebody up there has a sense of humour."

"Somebody up there has a valuation."

Sethu had been listening with his chin on his hand.

"Finsics tested some of the sheets," he said. "Did they test yours?"

I opened my mouth and found I didn't know.

"They sampled a handful," I said slowly. "The report doesn't list which. They assumed that sheets bundled together were written together."

"That's a reasonable assumption," said Sethu.

"It's what everyone assumes about a bundle," I said.

"It's what everyone assumes about a family," said Lalu, "until somebody does a test."

Sethu moved his cup off the plan before it could leave a ring.

"Even if the page is old," he said, "you'd still want to know whether it's a first version. Somebody could have copied something older. Or used paper that was left over."

"Yes."

"Then let's see how they did it." He stood and folded the plan along its old crease. "We came to look at people writing. Let's look before you show us anything. Otherwise we'll only see what you've already decided."

I put my hand back in my jacket and left the display where it was.

The handwriting gallery was quiet enough to hear our shoes. Old manuscripts lay in shallow cases under low light, and beside each case a screen let you enlarge any detail without touching the original. I spread two fingers on one, and a crossed-out sentence grew until I could see where the ink lay heavier: the writer had struck the line through twice, as if once had not been enough to make it untrue.

The catalogue named the writer, the owner and the route by which the page had reached the museum, with links to other letters in the same hand. Even here a name had not simply emerged from the shape of a stroke. Somebody had walked a long way round, through letters and owners and sales, to arrive at it.

Sethu bent over a case where a replacement word had been squeezed into the margin and hooked back into the line.

"That's what I wanted," he said. "The page shows the decision. We don't have to pretend it arrived finished."

"We still have to guess why the new word was better," said Lalu.

"Yes," said Sethu. "But now we know where the question is."

At a demonstration table, visitors could try a reproduction pen cut from a feather, with a pot of ink and a stack of erasable sheets. I picked it up, dipped it far too deep, and watched a black drop fall onto the paper before I had written anything.

Lalu made an appreciative noise. "An important early work."

I tried again with less ink. The point caught on the first downward stroke. I lifted it a fraction, felt it skid, pressed again and let it travel on; the line went down, stalled, turned back on itself, and then decided to continue. I lifted the pen and looked at what I had made.

I had spent four days with that shape. I had followed it on the boardroom glass and on my lap in the pod and on my kitchen table in the dark. Here it was, wet, on a sheet of museum paper, with my thumb beside it.

"That's your bad line," said Lalu, reading over my shoulder.

"Everyone's first line hesitates."

"Does it?"

"The point catches. You lift. You go on. It's the tool, not the hand." I put the pen down and found I had said it more firmly than it needed. "That's useful, actually. A thick mark could be a fresh dip. A gap could be someone stopping to reload. If I can sort out the accidents of the pen, I stop mistaking them for features of the script."

"Don't solve the whole document from one bad line," Lalu said.

"I'm trying to become slightly less wrong about one bad line."

"A modest ambition. Unusual for a vice president."

A smear of ink stayed on my finger. I rubbed at it, and it spread.

At the next case, a signature ran beneath several lines of neat, evenly spaced writing, and the hand above it was plainly not the hand of the signature. Sethu brought up the label: the letter had been written out by a clerk, and the sender had signed it.

"So the person who signed it didn't write it," I said.

"And if the signature had been added by somebody else?" said Lalu.

"Then we'd need to know whether they were entitled to," I said.

"Or whether they were copying it for an archive," said Sethu. "A copyist reproduces the signature too. It's part of the text he's copying."

I looked back at the letter. In the boardroom I had insisted that a signature didn't establish who composed a document. Here even the signing could be done on someone's behalf, or copied by someone who had never met either of them. A name at the bottom of a page was not a person. It was a pointer, and a pointer could be passed from hand to hand.

The next room was given over to public signs. Over the doorway, in small capitals, the curators had painted a single line:

A SIGN IS SOMETHING THAT STANDS FOR SOMETHING ELSE — TO SOMEONE.

Lalu read it aloud in the voice of a tour guide who has been doing this for thirty years and would like to stop. "To someone," he repeated. "They've thought of everything." He looked round the room. "Why do we even need signs now? Nobody wastes time making sense of signs any more. Things just tell you where to go."

"Is that why you went the wrong way to the café?" I said.

Sethu laughed out loud.

"That," said Lalu with dignity, "was a test of the signage."

Inside, the room was laid out like a game. Old signs hung on the walls behind dark glass, and in front of each stood a small panel with a button and a question: What did this mean? Press the button, give your answer aloud, and the glass lit up to show whether you were right.

In the middle of the floor, on a low table, ran a model road. Above it hung three lamps: red, amber and green. A label explained that traffic had once been governed by lights at junctions, and that drivers had been trusted to look at them, interpret them and act. Small vehicles approached the red lamp, stopped, and moved off when it turned green.

A small boy of five or six was standing at the model with one hand in his mother's. She had the patient look of someone on her third circuit of the room; he had the look of someone who had been promised the button and was beginning to doubt the promise.

"Why do the cars stop?" he asked her.

"Because the light says so."

He nodded, entirely satisfied, and went back to watching. It seemed to me the shortest complete explanation I had heard all week.

Lalu had gone straight to the first panel. Behind the glass hung three brass balls on an iron bracket, dull with age.

"Easy," he said, and pressed the button. "A juggler."

The glass lit up a polite red. A pawnbroker. Money lent against goods.

"A juggler of finances," said Lalu, without a pause. "I was speaking metaphorically."

"You were wrong," said Sethu.

"I was interpreting. Wrongly. It's different."

He moved on to the next panel: an enamel plate with a white zigzag climbing a blue ground.

"Now this I know," he said, and pressed the button with tremendous confidence. "Stairs."

The glass lit green. Stairs.

Lalu turned to us with his arms spread, a man vindicated before witnesses. "You see? Some of us can still read."

"It's a picture of stairs," said Sethu.

"And I read it." He regarded the zigzag with something close to affection. "Our fathers used to walk up and down these, you know. One step at a time. On their own legs."

"Up here in the skyscapes we'd need a week to walk anywhere," I said. "We take a pod to go two floors, up or down."

"Which is why nobody can read the sign any more," said Lalu. "They took away the stairs."

I watched him, and it struck me that in two guesses, one wrong and one insultingly easy, he had never once guessed that the thing meant nothing. Not once had he looked at the brass balls and said, that's three balls. He had gone past them, straight away and without being asked, looking for whatever they were there to tell him. He had simply looked in the wrong place.

By then Lalu had lost interest in the panels altogether and wandered back to the model road, where he leaned on the rail beside the boy, who eyed him with suspicion. Sethu was bent over a yellowed graph further along, the line on it climbing hour by hour up a column of temperatures, his lips moving as he worked it out.

I had stopped in front of a disc of red wax pressed with a crest. I didn't need the button. A seal: someone's mark, set on a letter to stand for the person who wasn't there to vouch for it. It was the obvious answer, and it gave me no pleasure. A seal was only a signature in another material. It pointed at a person, and the person was long gone, and still the wax went on pointing.

"Suppose," Lalu said, to nobody in particular, "a man came down from the moon and drove up to that junction. Red light. Does he stop?"

"He can't," said Sethu, without looking up from his graph. "He doesn't know the arrangement."

"So where's the meaning? It's the same lamp. Lit exactly the same for him as for us." Lalu shrugged. "It's in what the crowd has agreed to do. Change the crowd and red means party."

"And this morning," said Sethu, glancing at me, "red at the museum door meant suspect."

I said nothing for a moment. I was thinking of Lalu at the brass balls.

"Your moon man wouldn't stop," I said. "But he wouldn't think it was nothing, either. Tell him it's a signal and he'd start looking for what it wanted from him, the way you did with the pawnbroker. You didn't know the code. You still knew there was one."

"I knew there was a juggler."

"You knew the balls were there to say something. Nobody had to agree on that part."

He looked at the lamp for a while. So did the boy. Then Lalu straightened up and said, "I need to sit down before someone makes me agree with you," and went towards a bench by the door.

Sethu and I followed. The curators had painted the same line above the door on this side too, for visitors on their way out. To someone. It occurred to me that they might have put the important part last.

"Here's my question," Sethu said, when we sat down. "That letter in the gallery, the one the clerk wrote out and the sender only signed. There the signature pointed at the sender. Fine. We know who he was, because the museum walked a long way round to find him. On your page, the signature points at somebody too. That's what signatures do."

"Yes."

"So what happens when you follow it and there's nobody there?"

I didn't answer at once. In the boardroom the chairman had asked what made a human real, and I had not been able to tell him. Here was the same question in a smaller coat. A sign points beyond itself. A signature points at a person. And at the bottom of the Satoshi page there was a pointer with nothing at its far end, or nothing that any system we owned could reach.

"Then either it's a sign that points at nothing," I said, "which is a strange thing to sign. Or it points at someone we can't reach from where we're standing."

"Or," said Lalu, "it's a pretty squiggle and you're very tired."

"That too," I said.

At the junction, the boy had found a way to make the little cars stop halfway across by pressing the button at exactly the wrong moment, and was doing it again with deep satisfaction. His mother said his name, then said it again with the second syllable longer. He lingered with one finger still on the button while she gathered her bag, looked round the room for somewhere to sit and found nowhere, and finally took his hand. He went with her backwards, watching the cars until the doorway took them.

Lalu stretched. "My brain wants coffee."

"Your brain always wants coffee," said Sethu, already folding the plan.

"Then it's a reliable brain."

They were for going back to the café and turning it all over there, and I agreed because it was easier than saying anything else. I had a great deal to think about. On the way out I looked back once. The room was empty now, and the lamps above the little road went on changing, red to green to red, the cars stopping and starting obediently for nobody. Without anyone there to read it, the light was only a coloured glow over a toy road. And yet every sign in that room, the brass balls, the little enamel staircase, the wax, had been made by someone who expected someone else to come along and look past it.

I had come in that morning believing the hard part of my job was the reading. I was no longer sure I knew who was at either end.

Back in the café, I ordered another coffee. Lalu chose something cold. Sethu asked for water and waited while the serving arm found a clean glass. The window beside our table had started advertising the museum's own preservation service: a handwritten note unfolding beside a child's photograph. I could not read the note from where I sat. It reminded me of the woman in the pod window turning towards somebody I couldn't see.

"So," said Lalu, setting down his glass. "We've seen how they used to write things and sign them for somebody to read and understand. Are you going to show us your classified file, or do we have to guess at it like the brass balls?"

Sethu turned his plan over to the blank side meant for notes and took a stylus from beside the ordering pad.

"Before you show us," he said, "tell us what you've got. And what you haven't."

"One scan. The Finsics report. The report's conclusions."

He wrote them down.

"And haven't?"

"The original sheet. The other sheets. The passage where the name comes from. Which sheets Finsics actually tested. Whatever's left of the locker record."

He wrote those too, leaving a space between the two lists.

"Put the rejected readings somewhere," said Lalu. "The ones your machine threw away."

"Wheatley keeps them."

"Then let him. You came here to find what your tools missed. Don't throw out what they found."

I unfolded the display flat on the table. Opened out, the screen was wide enough for three heads to bend over a page, and Sethu moved his water clear of the edge.

"You don't have to spend your morning on this," I said.

Sethu looked at his two lists. "I came to look at unfinished work."

Lalu glanced at the navigation room circled on the plan, sighed theatrically, and pulled his chair in anyway.

"You owe me those instruments," he said. "Show us the page."

I asked Wheatley for the scan.

It came up brown at the edges and pale at the centre, the writing bending across it in its dark, uneven lines. Lalu leaned in. Sethu said nothing for a long moment, then put one finger, not quite touching the screen, under the hesitating downstroke.

"That one," he said.

I didn't look at the ink still on my own finger. I didn't need to.

"The system says there's no match anywhere," I said. "Every archive we license. Nothing."

"Every archive outside the bank," said Sethu. "What about inside?"

I had not thought to ask. In four days I had searched the world and never once searched the building I worked in.

"Wheatley," I said. "Isolate that downstroke. The one Sethu's pointing at. Compare it against everything Globank holds. Every scanned contract, every legacy signature card, every specimen in our own vaults."

"Internal records, guv? That's a wide net."

"Then cast it wide."

"Right you are."

A thin outline settled around the stroke on the screen, and a progress bar appeared beneath the page. It crossed the screen faster than I expected.

EXTERNAL RECORDS: NO MATCH.

INTERNAL RECORDS: 1 RESULT.

And under it, in the bank's calm grey type:

ACCESS RESTRICTED. YOUR AUTHORIZATION LEVEL IS INSUFFICIENT.

Lalu read it aloud, slowly, as if it might be a joke he was missing.

"Your own bank won't let you see?"

"There are perhaps four people in Globank whose authorization is higher than mine." I heard my voice stay level and was grateful to it. "It's an archive permission. Old records get locked and forgotten. Wheatley, what is it?"

"Can't see it either, guv. It's in the legacy archive. The restriction's older than the current system." A pause. "Older than your post."

"Who set it?"

"The field's blank, guv."

Blank, like LANGUAGE. Like AUTHOR. I told myself that blank fields were the most ordinary thing in the world. I had spent four days telling myself so.

"There's something else," said Wheatley. For once he sounded as though he would rather not. "The record keeps an access log."

"Records do."

"It's been opened, guv."

"When?" I said, and realized I was hoping for a date long ago: some clerk, decades dead, looking for a signature card on a slow afternoon.

"Last night."

A small figure appeared at the edge of my display, where Wheatley kept the readings the bank liked him to keep. I had never paid it any attention. It was a number, softly green. Heart rate 72. Normal. It had been normal all my life.

"Last night when?"

"Three-twelve this morning, guv."

The green number jumped.

I did the arithmetic without wanting to. A disturbance a little after three. The extra hour of sleep Wheatley had so kindly allowed me. The robot at the door: identity token under review. And Wheatley's careful phrase at the barrier: something on the account touched a sensitive record. The museum had not refused a ticket; it had refused an account, flagged for what it had done while I slept. Wheatley had said, at the barrier, that the hold didn't say what. I had believed him, the way I believed everything the system told me, without ever deciding to. Now, for the first time in eleven years, I wondered whether he had known.

"From where?" I said. I was working now, the way I worked at the bank, and it steadied me. "Which device? If someone cloned a token, the location will be wrong. They'll have come in through a relay, or a—"

"Your apartment, guv. Your bedside device. It was on charge."

"Then the device was compromised. Somebody reached it remotely and—"

"Biometric session was live, guv. Wrist implant in contact, pulse present, pattern matched. The device wasn't alone." He hesitated, and I had the absurd impression that he was sorry. "Would you like the pulse at the time?"

I didn't want it. "Yes."

"Sixty-eight, guv. Resting. Very calm."

Whoever had opened that record at twelve minutes past three had done it with my hand, my pulse, my bed, and a heart that had not hurried at all.

Mine was hurrying now. At the edge of the display the number had turned amber and would not settle.

Sethu had stopped looking at the screen. He was looking at the small amber number, and then, carefully, at me.

"Opened by whom, Wheatley?" I said. I knew. I asked anyway, the way one presses on a bruise to be sure of it.

There was a pause in which I could have sworn he was choosing his words, though I knew perfectly well that he had none to choose.

"By you, guv. Your account. Your credentials. Access granted."

The reading broke into an erratic stutter, climbing and catching and climbing again.

"Your heart rate's up, guv," said Wheatley gently. "Would you like me to bring it down?"

"No."

He said nothing about the record itself. Not that it was wrong, not that it was right. Only the pulse, which he could fix. At the barrier, too, he had told me no more than I needed to stay calm.

The café went on around us: the hiss of the hatch, the mechanical arm setting down cups, a family on the terrace gathering their bags. Every system I trusted agreed about what had happened at three o'clock that morning. My credentials agreed. My device agreed. My own pulse agreed, faithfully recorded, steady as a sleeper's. There was nothing on the whole of my side of the table except the fact that I did not remember, and I had spent my career teaching machines to disregard exactly that.

Then Lalu spoke, quietly, without looking at the screen at all.

"Whatever happened at three o'clock," he said, "I trust you to do the right thing."

The right thing according to whom? As far as the bank was concerned, something had already gone wrong. A restricted record had been opened. A protocol had been broken. And the hand that broke it was, by every measure we had, mine.

Still, I had to look down at the table for a moment until I could trust my face. Wheatley had offered to steady my heart rate. Lalu had steadied something else. I could not have said what, but it soothed me in a place no reading reached.

The little number at the edge of the display did not care. It went on stuttering. I looked at the hesitating stroke, and at the smear of ink on my finger beside it, and understood that for the first time in my professional life I could not verify who I had been at three o'clock in the morning.