February 20. The empty dispatch had remained on the desk since yesterday.
It was the same form as the empty dispatch the predecessor's terminal had received in the hour before he vanished. Empty sender field, empty recipient field, empty body field. Immediately after I submitted the archive's confirmed-vacancy form yesterday, it had risen to the top of my terminal screen and not moved from there. Refreshing kept the top line the same empty dispatch. After I had stood up from the desk and returned, the same empty dispatch. Even while I worked on other things, the terminal kept that empty dispatch pinned to the first line.
The sender field was demanding an answer. But the answer, I had not yet entered.
Nine a.m. A personnel notice came up on the second line of the terminal. The firm's headcount reduction was two seats. One archive seat — the seat my entry yesterday had closed as a confirmed vacancy. And one Resource Development seat — one surveyor processed as a confirmed vacancy, the notice read.
I did not know the surveyor's name. About Resource Development I knew only that the surveyors had been several before the crisis, had thinned one by one through the crisis, and were three at the last count. I did not know the name. I looked at the employee number.
To look at an employee number without knowing the name was to see a person as a seat. The seat the number pointed to was a coordinate within the firm. The digit-system of department, rank, tenure, and serial number made the coordinate.
The employee number of yesterday's closed archive vacancy was in my terminal's memo pad. The predecessor's employee number. Beside it I placed the surveyor's employee number closed today in Resource Development.
The difference in the last two digits was exactly one unit.
In the digit-system the last two digits were the serial-number slot. That two seats held the same one-unit interval in the same slot meant the same distance lay between them. Converted to a department-scale, when the archive cut one and Resource Development cut one, the distance between the two seats the two had occupied within the firm was exactly one unit.
I pulled up the employee numbers of the other departments from the terminal. Archive → Resource Development → Accounting → Receivables → Sales Administration → one seat in Personnel Administration → the department where the predecessor had last registered his entry before vanishing. The employee numbers of the seven seats that had been processed as confirmed vacancies yesterday and today across seven departments — I laid them out in one line.
Same intervals. The six differences across seven numbers were all the same one unit.
Add one unit to the archive's vacancy number and Resource Development's vacancy number came out. Add one unit to Resource Development's and Accounting's came out. Accounting → Receivables. Receivables → Sales Administration. Following that line to the seventh, the next number — to which one unit more would need to be added — was the next one seat.
The unit of relocation had come down one more level.
From firm to person, from person to seat, from seat to the blank of a form — and into the constant interval between the vacancy numbers the form's blank generated. That interval determined the destination of relocation. Close a seat, and a seat one unit away closed. Close the closed seat, and yet another seat one unit away closed. Relocation was not a person but a seat-line.
The predecessor's log was overlaid for a stretch near its end with notes about employee numbers. A short entry that the column intervals on the mining survey maps he had drawn and the last-two-digit interval of some department's vacancy numbers were the same one unit. I had re-read the entry yesterday and could not place its meaning, so I let it lie. After today's personnel notice the entry was legible. A column on the map was a seat-line within the firm. The lines a surveyor drew on a map were configured by the digit-system so that they became seat-lines within the firm's personnel system. The firm's seat-system and the columns of the map held the same unit. The two systems had never been separated.
I called up my own employee number on the terminal. The last two digits.
Add one unit to the seventh vacancy number, and one employee number emerged.
The last two digits of that number were the same as the last two digits of mine.
The same last two digits meant the same seat-line. Department, rank, and tenure differed, but within the firm's seat-layout the seat-line was the same. Between my number and that number on the same seat-line lay a distance of two department floors. A seat-line in a department I had never been to. The name of the person at that seat I did not know.
If that one employee number went in as the answer to the empty sender field, the firm's headcount reduction would be complete there.
I did not enter the number.
I placed a hand on the sender field and lifted it. I lifted it and ran a personnel query for that one seat on the same seat-line. The department came up. The rank came up. The tenure came up. The name came up one character at a time. When a character had begun to come up I closed the terminal.
If I looked closely the name would recover at my fingertip. Entering the recovered name into the sender field would be the same one motion as entering the predecessor's name into the personnel form's name field yesterday. When the form of the hand is the same, the grain of the result is the same. Yesterday's task had been to erase an already-erased person; the name today, written by the same form of the hand, would be the name of a living person.
Without looking at the name I stood up and walked to the end of the archive and back. The head archivist sat at her small desk with her back turned, and the two assistants were each transcribing rosters. The four living people in the archive — the four who had survived because of my entry yesterday — were each working one unit apart in the same archive. The interval between seats had not been perceived until yesterday. After this morning's seven vacancy numbers, the interval between me and the head archivist, between the head archivist and the assistants, was now visibly exactly one unit apart.
Every seat in the firm was lined up at one-unit intervals. The unit of relocation was closing the line one seat at a time.
In the brief idleness between closing and reopening the terminal, one thought briefly passed. The thought that the unit of relocation might have come down one more level. From seat to seat-line, from seat-line to the interval between seat-lines, from the interval to the empty space between intervals — if the unit kept descending, the last unit would be a seat where there was no one to enter and nothing to close. In that seat there was no seat for me.
I turned the terminal back on.
The terminal refreshed.
The empty dispatch was the same. Sender field empty, recipient field empty — body field. The body field had been empty since yesterday. But in the moment the terminal refreshed after two departments' confirmed vacancies were processed today, one character was written in the body field.
I had not entered it.
The character was the first character of my employee number.
The sender field was still empty, but the body field had begun to grow. One character at a time, following my employee number. A character I was not entering, the body was entering on its own. The body field's hand was the same hand as the sender field's, but it was not my hand. Before I had entered an answer in the sender field, the body field was entering the answer first.
Relocation no longer waited for my entry.
The empty sender field was still empty. The body grew one character at a time. How much the body would have grown by the time I turned the terminal back on — until I turned the terminal back on, I could not know.
