September 21. What I did not send is outside.
At twenty past nine I opened the fourth envelope.
Thicker than the three before.
Twelve sheets.
At twenty to ten I looked at the form.
It is the form of the computer room log.
The rule lines are the same weight. The fields are laid out the same. The place for the page number at the top right is the same.
The page numbers run from two hundred and eleven to two hundred and twenty-two.
At ten I took out those pages of my log.
From the twenty-fifth of December of ninety-nine to the fifth of January of two thousand.
From twenty past ten to eleven I matched them.
Eleven of the twelve are the same.
The characters are the same and the lines are the same. The spacing is the same.
I counted the figures digit by digit. There is nowhere it is wrong.
At five past eleven I wrote out what it means that eleven are the same.
Every time I have matched, I have been looking for where it diverged. In eight months there has not been a matching without divergence.
Today eleven did not diverge.
Not to diverge, every character must be carried across. Thirty lines to a page and twelve pages.
Someone outside copied twelve pages by hand.
At eleven I looked at the hand.
It is not my hand.
The strokes break and are drawn again.
It is the hand of someone who writes a thing twice and matches it.
It has the character of my hand and it is not my hand.
At twenty to twelve I looked at the remaining sheet.
Page two hundred and seventeen.
The last of December of ninety-nine.
That page of my original ends with the midnight item.
What is entered is one word. Standing by.
At twelve I looked at that page of the copy.
Below standing by there is one more line.
It carries the name of a field.
The number who read.
The value is one.
From half past twelve to one I looked for when that field came into being.
The end of January.
The fields I had copied out were five. One was added and they became six.
The sixth is that field.
On the last of December there were five.
At one I set it down in a line.
The value of a field that did not exist is entered in that day's place.
That day the field did not exist. There was no place for a value.
If the place was made and entered after the field came into being, it was entered later.
A thing entered later, entered on an earlier page, makes that page the later one.
At twenty past one I looked at the value being one.
One means one person read that day.
That day at midnight there was one person in this room. Sitting in front of the screen.
Whether that field could have counted what that person read is not knowable. The field did not exist.
What an absent field did not count, a field that came later has entered as one.
From twenty to two to twenty past two I looked for how the log got outside.
The log is not subject to outside reading.
The application for sub-number six was made on the twenty-fourth of August. The date for processing is the seventeenth of November.
It is not in the list yet. It does not show on the screen.
At twenty past two I read what had gone out again.
There is no sentence from the log in March's reply. Nor in August's.
What is in the eighth field is one line. That line is not in the log. I wrote it in the note field.
There is no sentence from the log in anything that went out.
At three I counted who has come into this room.
One man from the third floor. He came in February and looked only at the screen.
The cleaner comes in the evening. The log is in the drawer.
There was a head office stocktaking last October. Page two hundred and eleven did not exist then.
At twenty to four I looked at the drawer.
There is a lock. It is open.
There is one key and I have it.
I looked in the log for the day I locked it. There is none.
I have never locked it.
From four to twenty past four I traced the eight months back.
What grew was always in a copy.
That copy was written by me.
Today's is a copy and I did not write it.
For the first time a hand that is not mine has come in on the copying side.
At half past four I opened the right-hand material.
Four hundred and eighty-two pages. The date on the page gained is the twentieth of October of ninety-eight.
My log is also on its four hundred and eighty-second page today.
At ten to five I opened the box.
Seven. Six impressions. The two hundred and tenth day.
At five I looked at the sixth box.
Two thousand seven hundred and sixty-eight.
At ten past five I ran off the query record. The set's row was opened twenty-three times yesterday. Eleven by the imprint route.
At twenty past five I registered the donation.
The fourth. Donor unknown, confirming officer my name.
I looked at what to put in the box for the name of the article.
I entered: transcript of the computer room log.
The transcript exists and the original of that transcript is in this room. This room received a transcript whose original is in this room.
At half past five I looked at the last of the twelve.
Page two hundred and twenty-two.
The foot of that page in my original is blank.
There is an impression in that place on the copy.
At twenty to six I held the impression up to the window.
No ink. No character formed. Only an outline left.
I set the stamp of the four against it. The outline is the same size.
In April I saw the same thing at the foot of the fifth bundle's last page.
That was paper more than fifty years old.
This is paper nine months old.