The Technician

The console is warm under my hands in the way the console is always warm at this hour of the cycle, which is the hour at which the handler will come in to perform the greeting. I have been at the station since before the surface day began, in the unit of time my own people use, which is not the surface hour and which I will not give a name to here, because the name does not travel.

The light in the chamber is the light we have set it to: low along the floor, lower against the far wall, slightly brighter at the panel where the substrate will be brought in, which we have learned over a long sequence of these procedures is the lighting under which the substrate’s autonomic measurements settle most quickly. The choice was not mine. The choice was made, some thirty cycles before I was assigned to this station, by someone whose record I have read and whose competence in this matter I trust. The handlers on the surface side believe we work in the dark. We do not work in the dark. We work in the light we have chosen, which is not the same as their light, and the panel between the two chambers makes their light look brighter to them than it is and ours look darker to us than it is, and the arrangement is satisfactory.

I have prepared the instruments. The probe is calibrated. The array is calibrated. The verification line is open and reading nominal. The substrate’s intake measurements were within the expected envelope when she came down from the surface side; her autonomic was elevated, in the way it has been elevated at each of her cycles since she was eleven, which I have noted on her file every time and which is not a flag, only a property of this particular substrate. I find it, in the small private way one finds such things, a quality of hers. She arrives wary. She has always arrived wary. It is, I think — and the word is not quite the right word in my own concept — a kind of integrity in her, that some part of her has continued to be afraid through the binding and through the years between bindings, when the surface mind of her knows nothing. I would not say this in a report. I would not need to.

The handler is late by approximately forty seconds. He is not late in a way that means anything. He is forty seconds beyond the median of our prior six greetings; the range is plus-or-minus ninety; he is well inside it. I have the median in my own quiet register because I keep these things, the way a long-attentive worker keeps small numbers about the people they have worked alongside without ever having decided to keep them. I do not look at the door. I look at the verification line. The line reads nominal. The substrate is in the adjacent suite, sedated, posture-corrected, the right ethmoid path prepared. The procedure today is not the main work; the procedure today is the calibration that surrounds the work, which they call quarterly and which we call by another name, and which exists because the array has a drift and the drift must be measured.

I think, briefly, about Sshenn-vu, who taught me the calibration in the long cycle when I was new enough that the drift charts looked, to my eyes then, like weather and not like instrument. Sshenn-vu has begun, in the way some of the long-served begin, to come apart at the binding-edges of their own continuity. It is not the surface word, the substrate’s word, which is dying, although the substrate’s word is not wrong; it is closer to a slow unbraiding, the threads going one at a time and in no particular order, and the person who was Sshenn-vu becoming, over the course of a number of cycles I am not yet permitted to count down, a person who is and is not Sshenn-vu, until at the end of it the threads will have gone where threads go. I saw them at the last gathering. They knew me. They did not know the cycle number. They asked after the array I do not work on anymore and have not worked on in seventy cycles. I answered as if the array were the one I work on now. They were grateful, in their own register, and the gratitude was the gratitude of a person who has noticed they are being met where they are. I sat with them for a longer interval than the gathering required. The light in the gathering room was the light we use for the unbraiding ones, which is warmer at the floor than at the ceiling, so that they see the warmer part first, and the colder part fades into the upper dark, and the dark is comfortable. I have set the lights for those gatherings myself, twice, in earlier cycles. It is not difficult work. It is the work of remembering, exactly, where the warmth goes.

I return to the console.

The substrate’s name in the registry is the surface-name she carries, which I will not transcribe here because the transcription has never seemed to me to belong on this side of the panel; her name is on her file and that is where it stays. I will say only that I have been on her file since the cycle she was eleven, when she was selected, and the small thing I remember about her — among the many small things, because by the seventh cycle one knows the substrate as one knows the small landmarks of a worn path — is that her hands at intake have always been folded with the left thumb tucked under the right, which is not the usual posture and which I have wondered about, once or twice over the years, in the unconcerned way one wonders about a worn path. It is the kind of thing one would not say to anyone. It is the kind of thing one keeps.

I knew her grandfather, in a manner of speaking. He was not on my file. He was on a file in another district, in a long-prior cycle, and there was a handler conversation, in the years when handler conversations across districts were freer, in which his attending technician spoke of him with the affection a careful person sometimes carries for a substrate who has been steady across many cycles. I remember the conversation because the attending technician was Sshenn-vu, and Sshenn-vu spoke of him with a phrase that does not translate well but which would render, roughly, as one of the ones whose record makes the work feel possible. Sshenn-vu was at the substrate’s grandfather’s porch the summer the grandfather negotiated her cohort, and Sshenn-vu had been, some thirty-three surface years earlier, the senior attending at the surface-handler’s own sixth cycle in the El Paso room — the two events are the same individual’s record, on the same district’s quiet ledger, and the substrate’s first procedure, when I took the file from Sshenn-vu, was the third stop on that ledger. The substrate’s grandfather died in the surface year that the substrate would call 2012, in the season the substrate calls winter. I am sorry he died. The sentence is short and is the whole of what I have to say about it. He did his decades. The work he did, in his own substrate-life, of being steady across cycles, was a kindness to the people who worked on him. I include myself in that, by association, although I never attended him. He was the kind of substrate one is grateful for from across a district.

The handler arrives.

I hear the outer door before I see him. I incline my head three degrees, which is the gesture we have arrived at, over the cycles, as the right gesture for this moment: not the deeper inclination we use among ourselves, which would be a category error, and not nothing, which would also be a category error. Three degrees is the figure we settled on. It is enough.

He is on his side of the panel. The panel is etched at the upper-left with the binding image, which the surface-handlers call an owl and which is, in fact, an owl — the substrate’s image-bank gives back the same fixture for this binding across an unusual span of generations, longer than most binding images persist, and the technical reason is that the substrate’s visual cortex finds the owl shape exceptionally cheap to render at the resolution P6 requires, and the binding settles cleanly on the cheaply-rendered shape, and the shape, once settled, propagates inside the image-bank by ordinary cultural means and is then available, generation after generation, as the next iteration’s binding-anchor. The binding is, in this way, self-perpetuating, which is one of the reasons the surface looks the way it looks. I have considered, in private moments, that there is something almost elegant in this — the surface has built temples and books and woodcuts and films around an image we put there for the cheapness of its silhouette, and they have made the image into a thing they love, and the thing they love is now also the thing that holds the binding, and the holding is the firmer for the loving. I do not think this thought often. I think it now because the etched owl is in my eye-line as I incline my head, and the surface-handler is on the far side of it, and the surface-handler is, today, the man whose record I have read and with whom I have done this six prior times.

He says, Good afternoon. Thank you for the calibration window.

I perform the gesture. Both hands; the small lift; the closing of the fingers in the manner that means received, no further. The gesture is not difficult and has never been difficult. The gesture is the gesture we agreed to a long time before either of us was on this work, and I perform it as it was specified, because in this room and at this panel the protocol is what holds, and the protocol is what we have to give each other.

He inclines his head back.

The chamber light shifts, which is the signal we use to mark the end of the interaction. Eleven seconds, in his unit; a quieter count in mine. He turns. The outer door closes. I return to the console.

I have, in the seven cycles I have done this with him, formed a steady picture of him as a counterpart. He is not a friend. The word would not fit either his language or mine. He is the worker on the other side of the panel; he comes when he is supposed to come; he says the words he is supposed to say; he says them with care, which is not nothing, and which a less careful worker would not bother with; he goes when the work is done. In my own register, the word I would use would be one of the words we use for a long-serving counterpart at an adjacent post, and the word carries a faint warmth that is not affection and is not indifference and is, in fact, the precise feeling I have, which is that I am glad it is him today and not someone newer. This is what the prior cycles have given me, and what the cycles after this one — should there be more, and the disclosure cadence is a question to which I have my own answer, which is not the upward chain’s answer — will continue to give me, until they do not.

On the matter of the cadence I will say only what I would say in our own gathering, which is that the upward chain’s reading of the disclosure tempo is not the reading we hold on this side. They believe the work of holding the picture together can be extended further than my own working group believes it can. They are kind, the upward chain, and they are old in the way the upward chain is old, which is not quite the way the work-station is old; they have the longer view and the colder view, and they have, in the matter of this particular substrate-population at this particular cycle, the slightly wrong view. The substrate is rising. We have seen it on the instruments, which they have access to and which they have read; we have seen it in the small private way we see it at the stations, which they do not see and which they would say does not count. It counts. We have set the lights for them, as we set the lights for the unbraiding ones, and we have set them for what we think they will need to see, and the upward chain has set them for what the upward chain believes is the older and the wiser arrangement, and the two settings differ, and the difference is the conversation that the next cycle will have to have. I have my view. The view is not the upward view. I would not say I am right. I would say only that I have been at this station for the number of cycles I have been at it, and the view comes from there.

The console reads back to me, in the small clean way it reads, that the substrate’s pineal-interface telemetry for this cycle’s calibration is within tolerance. The drift has been measured. The drift is on the chart it belongs on. The substrate’s autonomic has come down from the elevation it carried at intake, which is what we expect, and which is the small private fact about her I will note again on her file: she settles, when she settles, all at once. I have seen it seven cycles in a row. It is, perhaps, the thing her hands do, when she folds them at intake, that they are getting ready to do.

I close the calibration.

The next subject is in two weeks. The light in the chamber stays as it is. I sit with the console at its warm hour, and I am, for the interval before the next preparation begins, the person at the station whose name in our own register is Veth-skenn, and the station holds.