I had been sitting with the same cup of synthetic coffee for eleven minutes when A-6 walked in without knocking, which was how A-6 always walked in, because A-6 had long ago decided that knocking was a formality that implied uncertainty about whether entry was welcome, and A-6 was never uncertain about anything.
"You're not drinking that," A-6 said, nodding at the cup.
"I'm aware."
"Then why is it there?"
"Because someone on the maintenance staff began leaving it every morning approximately forty years ago and stopping now would require me to have a conversation about it."
A-6 looked at the cup. Looked at me. Said nothing for a moment in the particular way that A-6 said nothing when a response had been considered and found unnecessary.
"Verath-9 submitted again," A-6 said, pulling up a chair across from my workspace and sitting in it with the economy of someone who treated every physical action as a decision that had already been made. "Same subject as last month. Same vessel proposal. They changed the documentation format."
"I saw it."
"And?"
"I approved it." I pulled the relevant file to the front of my display without looking at it. "The soul fragment is viable. The procedure is sound. The eleven-year delay was a resource issue, not a competency one. Verath-9 has a clean record."
"A-7 won't like it."
"A-7 doesn't like forty percent of my approvals. A-7's discomfort is not a classification criterion."
A-6 almost smiled. Almost. "A-7 sent another inquiry this morning. About that architect woman. The one from Mirrorline."
"I read it."
"She laughed at something in a public address last week that apparently she never would have laughed at before." A-6 paused. "A-7 wrote four pages about it."
"A-7 wrote six pages. The last two were attached as a supplemental philosophical addendum." I finally picked up the coffee cup, looked at it, and set it back down. "I responded."
"What did you say?"
"That people change. That dying and coming back is an experience that tends to accelerate that process. That the doctrine was built to restore function, not preserve personality in amber."
A-6 was quiet for a moment. Outside — insofar as outside meant anything at a dimensional coordinate without a public address — the administrative core hummed with the kind of ambient activity that had no sound but could be felt as a quality of the air, a density of ongoing process that never fully went to sleep.
"A-7 is going to push back," A-6 said.
"A-7 always pushes back. That's what A-7 is for." I turned back to the queue. "How is containment this morning?"
"Quiet. Sector Outer Null had a minor procedural breach at Kelthane-2 last night. Nothing physical. A foundation tried to submit a simplified request for something that wasn't simple."
"I denied it. They'll be doing a compliance review."
"I know. I already contacted their head of operations." A-6 leaned back slightly, which for A-6 represented something close to relaxation. "They weren't happy."
"They rarely are, when they've been caught cutting corners." I scrolled through the morning queue. "Kelthane-2 has done this twice before. Different paperwork, same structural deception. If they do it a third time I'll recommend a full operational audit."
"You want me to flag them?"
"Flag them."
A-6 made a note with the efficiency of someone who had been making notes for centuries and had reduced the act to something barely distinguishable from thought. The morning continued. I processed requests. A-6 sat across from me the way A-6 often did in the early part of the cycle — not because there was always specific business to discuss, but because A-6 had decided long ago that being present in my workspace during the morning queue was operationally useful, and once A-6 decided something was operationally useful it became a fixture.
It was, in its own way, the closest thing I had to company.
I did not examine that thought too closely.
"A-5 published another paper," A-6 said eventually.
"I'm aware."
"It's classified research."
"I'm aware of that too."
"A-5 published classified research in a public academic archive and attached a note saying the classification was, quote, an administrative overcorrection that stifles legitimate scientific discourse."
I stopped scrolling. "When?"
"This morning. Before your queue opened." A-6's expression was neutral in the way that neutral expressions become when the person wearing them is privately enjoying something. "A-1 hasn't responded yet."
"A-1 will respond when A-1 decides the response has been sufficiently composed." I pulled up A-5's paper. Read it in the time it took to register that I was reading it. "The research itself is sound. The findings on soul-fragment degradation rates at extended stasis intervals are genuinely valuable."
"But?"
"But A-5 published case data from three procedures that are still under active review. If the subjects' legal representatives access that archive before the reviews close, we have a procedural problem."
"Do you want me to contact A-5?"
"I'll contact A-5 myself." I closed the paper. "After A-3's morning report."
As if summoned by the reference, a communication request appeared from A-3 — Field Operations — formatted with the brisk economy that A-3 applied to everything. I opened it.
"A-3," I said.
"Morning." A-3's voice had the quality of someone permanently in the middle of something. "Sector Communion had an incident last night. Small one. A field team at one of the mid-tier foundations reported a procedural anomaly during a standard procedure. Subject responded atypically during the echo binding phase."
"Define atypically."
"Conscious. During the binding. That's not supposed to happen."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't. What did the team do?"
"Paused the procedure. Ran a diagnostic. Diagnostics came back clean. They resumed and completed without further incident. Subject is stable." A brief pause. "But the team lead filed a report because she said the subject looked at her."
I was quiet for a moment.
"Looked at her," I repeated.
"During the binding phase. When subjects are, by every measure we have, not present enough to look at anything." Another pause. "She said it wasn't distressing exactly. She said it was like being seen by something that wasn't supposed to be able to see yet."
A-6 had stopped making notes and was watching me with the particular attention that A-6 deployed when something had shifted in a conversation.
"Send me the full report," I said to A-3.
"Already done. It's at the bottom of your queue."
"Move it to the top."
A brief silence on A-3's end — brief enough that most beings wouldn't have noticed it, long enough that I did. "You think it's something?"
"I think a subject being conscious during an echo binding is worth reading about before I decide whether I think it's something," I said. "Good morning, A-3."
I closed the channel.
A-6 was still watching me.
"It's probably nothing," A-6 said, in the tone of someone who was not entirely convinced of that.
"Probably," I agreed, opening the report.
The report was thorough. A-3's field teams wrote thorough reports, a standard I had reinforced over several decades because thorough reports caught things that summary reports buried. The team lead's name was listed. The foundation's name was listed. The procedure number was listed. The subject's file number was listed.
I cross-referenced the subject's file number with the registry.
The registry returned an error.
Not a missing file. Not a corrupted entry. An error — a specific type of return that the registry produced when a query was made for something that did not exist within it. The kind of return I had seen perhaps a dozen times in my entire administrative history, always as a result of a data entry failure at the foundation level.
I ran the query again.
Same return.
"Huddersfield," A-6 said quietly.
"I see it."
"What does that mean?"
"It means," I said, running a third query with expanded parameters that searched not just the primary registry but every subsidiary record, every historical archive, every procedural database that fed into the main system, "that this subject has no file."
"No file at all?"
"No file at all." The expanded query returned. Same error. "They were processed by a foundation in Sector Communion. They went through an echo binding procedure that a qualified field team conducted correctly. They are, according to A-3's report, stable and present and recovering." I closed the query window. Opened it again. "And they do not exist in any record I have access to."
The synthetic coffee had gone completely cold. Neither of us mentioned it.
"Data entry failure?" A-6 offered.
"Possibly." I did not believe it. A-6 did not believe it either — I could tell by the way A-6 had gone very still in the chair across from me, the kind of stillness that A-6 deployed not from calm but from a decision to stop moving until the situation became clearer. "I'm going to contact the foundation directly."
"Which foundation?"
I checked the report again. Read the foundation name. Read it again.
"That's the issue," I said.
"What is?"
I turned the display so A-6 could see it.
A-6 looked at the foundation name. Looked at me. "That foundation isn't in the registry either."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
Outside, the administrative core continued its ambient hum. The queue continued processing. Somewhere in Sector Communion, in a foundation that did not officially exist, a subject who had no file was reportedly stable and recovering from a procedure that should not have been possible to perform without my authorization.
I picked up the cold coffee. Looked at it for a long moment.
Set it back down.
"A-6," I said.
"Yes."
"Clear my afternoon."