A Number of My Own

I checked my number on the transit tube home, the way I had checked it ten thousand times, and it was eighty-three. Two points. I had gained two points in an afternoon, and I sat very still in the grey carriage and understood, with a calm that frightened me more than panic would have, exactly what that meant. The Score does not measure your happiness. I had spent eleven years not letting myself know this, and Elias Park had spent one afternoon making it impossible not to. The Score measures your *legibility* — how completely your inner state can be accounted for by the inputs the Office can see. A citizen whose number sits flat is a citizen the system has fully explained. When my number rose two points after an unscheduled, unsanctioned, unformed conversation, it was not rewarding me for feeling good. It was flagging me. It was saying: *something has changed in this auditor that we did not put there, and we cannot see where it came from.* I had become, in one afternoon, the precise thing I had been sent to audit. I did not sleep. I sat in my standard unit, in the issued chair, and I looked at the grey wall beside the table, the unworn grey wall, and I thought about Elias Park's hand and the pale soft patch eleven years of small private contentment had left in the paint. I had never worn a patch in any wall. I had been so careful, for so long, to leave no mark the Office could not read, that I had also left no mark at all. I want to tell you I made a brave decision that night. I didn't. I am not brave; I am an auditor, and what auditors have instead of bravery is procedure. So I did the only thing my training had ever taught me to do with a thing I did not understand. I investigated it. I pulled the file histories. Not Elias Park's — I had those. I pulled the others. Every Positive Deviation case the Office had flagged in my sector in the last three years, and there were more of them than I expected, far more, a quiet steady scatter of citizens whose numbers had begun, for no box-shaped reason, to climb. I laid their grey rising lines side by side on my screen in the dark. And then I pulled what the Office had done about them. *Audit and resolve.* I had wondered, that first morning, what *resolve* meant for a rise, when for a fall it meant intervention and care and a gentle managed return to the tolerable middle. Now I read it. For a rise, *resolve* meant the line stopped. Not gently. Not with a regimen or a course of care. The files simply showed the rising line, and the audit, and then — within a month of the audit, every time, all of them — the line falling. Falling fast, and then flattening, back down into the safe grey unremarkable middle, eighty, seventy-six, seventy-three, and staying there. The Office had a word for it in the file. RESOLVED. EXPECTED RANGE RESTORED. CITIZEN STABLE. Forty-some citizens. Forty-some people who had found, somehow, in the cracks of a measured life, some small unscored happiness — a worn patch in a wall, a kettle, a thing the form had no box for — and the Office had found them, and audited them, and made them stop. Made them legible again. Made them safe. And the most recent file in that quiet scatter, the newest rising line, flagged in red four hours ago by a system that does not care which way a number moves, was mine. I sat in the dark of my standard unit, eighty-three and climbing, and for the first time in eleven years I let myself feel a thing all the way to the end without filing it. It was not happiness. Elias had been wrong about me, that afternoon, on one small count — I was not close to *that* answer. It was fear, clean and total and entirely my own. And underneath it, worn into me already like a hand into paint, was the thing I had been sent to Elias Park's door to resolve, and had caught instead, and would not now be able to put down. I wanted to know. I wanted, more than I wanted to be safe, to know where the happiness came from — the *where* with no box. And tomorrow the Office would assign someone in grey to find out why my number was moving, and they would sit at my issued table, and they would not be able to fill in the form either.