Corina Balta

The Gauge

There is a brass hand gauge in her left coat pocket. It is from the calibration years and it requires no license to be correct, which is most of why she keeps it and all of why she is not allowed to use it.

In the second week of the summer sweep she read her own ledger, saw her class fire on a structural record on the number nine gantry, and understood what had happened before she got to the end of the line. A stringer that had passed clean in the spring had cracked under thermal cycling off the pour line. The third read handed back the spring's verdict. A clean verdict summons nobody.

She went down after shift with the gauge and found it in about four seconds.

Then she stood there, because her certificate names fault induction and margin maintenance, and inspecting a structural weld is not on it, and an act outside the enumerated set opens a file whatever it achieved. The wing that could have filed it was working bays four through seven. The wing exists because of her.

She walked the reading over to the Cathodics, who are certified in nothing and therefore cannot exceed anything, who wrote it up as an uncertified diagnosis, and whose diagnoses the Foundry accepts because they cost a fifteenth of the alternative and are right. She paid cash. They have never asked her trade.

Osian Pryce had already gone down four meters by then and broken his hip in two places. He is fifty-one and twenty-six years on the gantries, and his shift is one of the shifts her delivery preserves. She told him what happened, in the ward, without being asked. He is the only person she has told.

What She Does Not Say

She does not say sabotage. She does not say fix. She says hold, and she says return, and she has said them for three years with the flat consistency of someone who chose the words on purpose.

She corrects people who call a fault a bug. A bug is something nobody meant.

She does not talk about what she does after shift, which is unbilled repair work on genuine faults in stacks she is contracted to degrade. She has done it upwards of sixty times. Every one of them is an exceedance, and any one of them would end the certificate, and she has never explained the arithmetic by which the same hand does both.

Asked directly whether the trade is sabotage, she says the contract reads three point one, and waits, and does not fill the silence.

Field Observations

The ledger is hand-ruled, in pencil, with a second column for retired classes — faults a vendor has patched, which can never be used again. Every operator keeps one. Hers has eleven entries in neither column: her own class firing at sites she has never contracted with, at firms with no margin line, attributable to no certificate reference at all. Either somebody is running it without her, or read-caching under sustained load has been producing it on its own the whole time, and she has spent nine years selling something the machine was already doing for free.

She has asked the hall for an inquiry twice. Both times the request went to the floor and both times the floor moved on, because an inquiry means deciding which answer the trade survives. The Load-Bearing school wants her ledger read aloud at the Closing as evidence. The Harmless school wants it read as vindication. She has declined both, without giving a reason either time.

She buys Osian Pryce coffee on Thursdays. He does not think she should have told him. He has not repeated it. He still lets her pay.