Vesna Arriola

Appearance

Grey coverall, worn shiny at the right hip where she leans on the valve stand while she waits out a bed cycle. Forearms scarred pale in short parallel lines from nineteen years of reaching past hot ducting. Hair cut by herself, badly, twice a year.

Two things are always on her. A wind-up stopwatch on a boot-lace cord, which she winds at the start of each shift and has needed eleven times. A pencil behind her ear, never in a pocket, because a pocket costs three seconds.

The deck holds a cot, a kettle, a shelf of notebooks, and the certificate in its brass frame at eye height, as the register requires. From the cot the struck part number is legible. Beside the valve stand, on painted steel, a column of pencilled times runs down past her knee, and every entry that is not one of the eleven is a morning she walked the route without opening anything.

Voice

Short declaratives. She answers a question about a feeling with a number, and it is not evasion, it is the register she thinks in. Asked how long she has been down here she says nineteen years. Asked if that is a long time she says the second handle seizes.

She uses trade words precisely and general words carelessly. Beds, cycles, windows, and the bar are exact. Fine, later, and my sister do a great deal of work.

She will not discuss whether she would take relief. She has been asked by Milena, by two placement officers, and once by a lineman from the Lamplighters who came down in 2176 to look at the single name on her certificate. All four times she talked about the valves. The lineman went back up and told the guild to refuse the bloc commissioning. She heard about that four years later and has repeated their reason accurately ever since: a commission is one name and a guild is a rota.

Sample Dialogue

"Eleven. Six minutes was the second one, I was already stood at the stand. Forty-one was February. The second handle seizes."

"It says on the certificate. You ask, they put a second name in, that's it. It's above where I signed. Same size letters."

"I've not been above nine since our mother went. Milena's got the flat. She's got the book with both names in it and she can't do anything with it, and that's mine, that's not the registry's fault."

"Don't ask me that. Ask me about the bar. The bar's behind the second bed and it should be at the stand and I've written that down eleven times."

History

Water quality, Sector 2, from 2151. Bench work: sampling, reagents, a log. In the autumn of 2164 the bench was deprecated. The sampling went to a sealed loop, the log went to a model, and the release notice said her function had been consolidated. She was thirty-three.

Eleven weeks later, in the January of 2165, a placement officer came to her mother's flat on floor nine with commission 4-771 and a schedule showing the struck part number. Vesna signed on the deck that afternoon, under the frame, with the officer holding the pen out and the relief clause directly above the line.

Her mother died in 2181. The tenancy on floor nine carried both their names, and a joint tenancy cannot be transferred, closed, or reassigned while one holder is neither present nor legally absent. Milena has filed three petitions to have Vesna declared absent. Two registrars refused, in 2182 and 2183, on the ground that a woman whose bay number is printed on a certificate is not missing. The third was filed in the spring of 2184 and cites the Halvard ruling, which held that the statute asks whether a person has been available, not where.

Vesna has contested none of them. She has also never told Milena to stop. She will not say which of those two decisions came first.

Open Mysteries

Nobody has ever established what she thinks the post is. The register's file records exemplary compliance, zero incidents, and no relief request, and the Purpose Wards have her family in their notes and not her. Her notebooks are on the shelf, unlocked, and hold nineteen years of times and nothing else — no dates beyond the shift number, no names, no sentences.

The eleven marks are in ink. Every dry run is in pencil. She has never explained the difference, and the deck has been repainted twice: both times she restored the whole column from the notebooks, in order, in the same two media.