February 20. The empty dispatch had stayed on the desk since yesterday.
It was the same form as the empty dispatch the predecessor's terminal had taken in the hour before he vanished. Empty sending column, empty receiver cell, empty body. The moment I submitted the records room's confirmed-vacancy form yesterday, it had risen to the top of my terminal and not moved from there. I refreshed; the top line was the same empty dispatch. I stood once and came back; the same empty dispatch. Even while I worked at other things, the terminal held it pinned to the first line.
The sending column was demanding an answer. But what that answer was, I had not yet written.
Nine in the morning. A personnel notice came up on the terminal's second line. The firm's reduction was two seats. One records-room seat — the seat my entry had closed yesterday as a confirmed vacancy. And one seat in Resource Development — one surveyor processed as a confirmed vacancy, the notice read.
I did not know the surveyor's name. Of Resource Development I knew only this much: the surveyors had numbered several before the crisis, had thinned one by one through it, and stood at three by the last count. I did not know the name. I looked at the employee number.
To look at an employee number without the name was to see a person as a seat. The seat the number pointed to was a coordinate inside the firm. The place-value system — department, rank, tenure, serial number — built that coordinate.
The employee number of yesterday's closed records-room vacancy sat in my terminal memo pad. The predecessor's number. Beside it I set the surveyor's number, closed today in Resource Development.
The difference in the last two digits was exactly one unit.
In the place-value system the last two digits were the serial slot. Two seats holding the same one-unit interval in the same slot meant the same distance lay between them. Cast in department terms: cut one from the records room and one from Resource Development, and the distance between the two seats the two had held inside the firm was exactly one unit.
I pulled the other departments' confirmed-vacancy numbers up from the terminal. Records room → Resource Development → Accounting → Receivables → Sales Administration → one seat in Personnel Administration → on to the department where the predecessor had last logged an entry before he vanished. Seven seats across seven departments, processed as confirmed vacancies between yesterday and today — I laid the numbers out in a single line.
The intervals were the same. The six gaps across the seven numbers were all the one unit.
Add one unit to the records room's vacancy number, and Resource Development's came out. Add one to Resource Development's, and Accounting's came out. Accounting to Receivables. Receivables to Sales Administration. Follow the line to the seventh, and there sat the number of the next seat, waiting for one more unit to be added to it.
The unit of relocation had come down another level.
Firm to person, person to seat, seat to the blank of a form — and then into the fixed interval between the vacancy numbers the blank produced. That interval settled where the relocation would land. Close a seat, and a seat one unit off closed; close that closed seat, and yet another one unit off closed. Relocation was not a person but a seat-line.
The tail of the predecessor's log was buried for a stretch under notes on employee numbers. A short entry: the column intervals on the mine-survey maps he had drawn and the last-two-digit interval of some department's vacancy numbers were the same one unit. I had reread it yesterday, could not place its meaning, and left it. After this morning's notice it read plainly. A column on the map was a seat-line inside the firm. The lines a surveyor drew on a map had been set, through the place-value system, to become seat-lines inside the firm's personnel system. The firm's seat-system and the map's columns held the same unit. The two systems had never once been apart.
I brought my own employee number up on the terminal. The last two digits.
Add one unit to the seventh vacancy number, and a number emerged.
Its last two digits were the same as the last two 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 one. 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 set foot in. The name of the person at that seat I did not know.
If that one number went in as the empty sending column's answer, the firm's reduction was complete there.
I did not write the number.
I laid a hand on the sending column and lifted it. I lifted it and ran a personnel query on 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 single character had begun to surface, I shut the terminal off.
Look closely and the name would recover under my fingertip. To enter the recovered name in the sending column would be the same one motion as entering the predecessor's name in the confirmed-vacancy form's name field yesterday. When the shape of the hand is the same, so is the grain of the result. Yesterday's task had been to erase a person already erased; the name today, written by the same shape of hand, would be a living person's.
Without looking at the name, I rose from the desk and walked to the end of the records room and back. The head archivist sat at his small desk, his back turned; the two assistants were each copying out rosters. The four living people in the records room — the four who had survived by my entry yesterday — worked one unit apart, in the same room. The interval between the seats had gone unnoticed until yesterday. After this morning's seven vacancy numbers, the gap between me and the head archivist, between the head archivist and the assistants, showed itself as exactly one unit apart as well.
Every seat in the firm stood ranged at one-unit intervals. The unit of relocation was closing that line one seat at a time.
In the brief idle stretch between shutting the terminal and turning it on again, one thought passed through me. The thought that the unit of relocation might have come down another level. Seat to seat-line, seat-line to the interval between seat-lines, interval to the empty space between intervals — if the unit kept descending, the final unit would be a seat with 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. Sending column empty, receiver cell empty — the body. The body had stood empty since yesterday. But in the moment the terminal refreshed, after today's two confirmed vacancies were processed, one character stood in the body.
I had not entered it.
The character was the first character of my employee number.
The sending column was still empty, but the body had begun to grow. One character at a time, tracking my employee number. A character I was not entering, the body was entering on its own. The hand in the body was the same hand as the sending column's, but it was not my hand. Before I had entered an answer in the sending column, the body was entering the answer first.
Relocation no longer waited on my writing.
The empty sending column was still empty. The body grew one character at a time. How far it would grow while I kept the terminal off, waiting on the next character, there was no knowing — not until I turned the terminal back on.
