Two Digits

July 20. The date column of copy page seventy-nine stood as I saw it yesterday. Year zero zero, July 20. The figure column was empty.

The first line of log page eighty-two was written in advance as well. In six months no year has ever been written on the date line of the log. Only the month and the day are needed, so nobody writes a year. Today's line had one. Two digits, and not ninety-nine.

At nine I ran the search. Fifty-four. The same as the pre-entered line.

At ten a circular came down from head office. The envelope was thick.

Filling in the form took half the afternoon. In this room there is nothing to make a complete survey of. Four terminals, one catalogue program, one release-register program, two reel drives. I opened the six one at a time and counted the year places. All six were two digits.

At one, head office telephoned. They said there were many calls asking how to fill in the form, so they were going round in advance. A young voice. I asked whether paper needed to go into the data-media section. There was a pause on the other end, and then: paper is read by a person even if the year is written in two digits, so it does not matter. I wrote down that paper is read by a person, so it does not matter.

The last box on the form was a place to write an opinion. I wrote that storing two digits is not a fault. It was made that way to save the places for storing, and when it was made it was enough. Only, two digits come round to the same figure once every hundred years. Once in a hundred years will have been counted as no occasion at all, and that once is now five months off.

Having written it, I looked at that last line a long time.

For the first time in six months an explanation had come. A two-digit year is not an uncanny thing. The machines are built that way and the whole company is running a survey because of it. Zero zero is a figure that may become 1900, and that is a department's business, business handled by a form.

I stayed inside that explanation for about an hour. Inside the explanation it was easy. Having lived six months where there were none, I had forgotten what a place with one is like.

At half past two I opened the copy again.

The copy is paper. It is written by hand. Its year place is not made of two boxes. On paper there is no reason to save places. Ten boxes or twenty, one has only to rule them, and in fact the copy's date column is wide. In the wide column only two digits were written.

A machine stores two digits because the places are short. The copy is not short of places.

I looked again at what I had written down at midday. Paper is read by a person, so it does not matter. If that stands, then the copy's two digits are an imitation of a machine's circumstances. To imitate them one must know them, and to know them one must read. What he meant was that it is a person who reads paper. Today this paper was reading the machine's side.

The explanation covered all six items. The one place it needed to cover, it did not.

And there is the order. The copy wrote zero zero yesterday and the circular came today. Whether the copy read the coming rollover off the machines in advance and wrote it, or whether the circular is the line written in the copy arriving in the world a day late, I could not divide. I have asked this question some twenty times in six months and have never once divided it. Today it did not divide either. Only, today that was not a disappointment.

From three to four I went back over six months.

In January it was a box. Paper, written by hand, under the desk. In February it went to the scanner. In March it became files and copying grew easy. In April it went up on the internal network and appeared on the screens of departments I had not sent it to. In May I moved to the computer room and something passed on the line at three in the morning. In June it went out to the external board. In July it has been in the access records, in the copy, in the log.

Set out in a row, seven months joined into one line. Whether joining into one line means that it moved is another matter. I used the scanner in February, so in February it was in the scanner; I pulled the access records in July, so in July it was there. Read that way, what moved is not it but my hand.

And yet the four bundles in the box have not altered by one letter in six months. The paper has stayed still. With the original sitting still, the copy grew and the files grew and the board grew. If it were only my hand that moved, the original should have moved with it.

That it changed medium is certain. Whether it changed because of me or because of the medium, I have not known for six months. Only one thing was settled today. This was not a thing attached to paper.

If it had been attached to paper, closing the box would have done. In January I supposed as much and began by making a catalogue. That making a catalogue is a way of opening it, I did not know. In the six months since I have chosen nothing at all; I have only used what was to hand that month. What was to hand was replaced by something new each month. When the new thing came, it was there.

At four I opened the box. I opened my predecessor's note.

The last page is December 16. There is one paragraph and the sentence breaks off in the middle. From January until today I have looked at that place many times. I know by heart even the spot where the ink pooled a little.

Today it went on below.

It was my handwriting.

It was a circle.

In January I opened the box and read. From February I scanned and copied. In June I corrected one wrong line and, in correcting, copied the original out and increased it again. At the start of July I hung a figure not yet counted outside and sent it. Then the day before yesterday counting left my hand, and yesterday only reading remained.

My predecessor broke off at the one who copies. He should have gone three seats further and did not. The man in the archive last winter went as far as the one who sends and closed there. I have passed the one who sends and come back to the one who reads. It has the same name as the first seat and it is not the same seat. January's reader is a person who has not yet done anything; today's reader is a person who has done it all and is left over.

Below the sentence there was one more line.

Behind the note two blank sheets remain. In January there were two. Today there are two. In six months I have watched many pages fill themselves, and those two alone are as they were. Either what is to fill them has not come, or the one who fills them has not yet reached that far. A page without a date is a page the one who writes did not reach, I wrote on the seventh.

At six I opened the log. Going to write today's entry, I stopped my hand. In the pre-entered lines there was the search result, and the receipt of the circular, and the completion of the form, and the seven months I went back over in the afternoon, in order. I did not write them. The whole of today was written in advance.

I read it. I read it twice. There was nothing wrong in it.

I closed the log, and before leaving the room I opened the copy one last time. Page eighty had appeared. The date column had no month and no day, only a year.

Zero zero.