The Handling Inspectorate

The Round

A round is a walk. An officer leaves the registry office before the shift change, works a scheduled circuit of yards and docks and open salvage ground, and watches people move other people's property. Most rounds produce nothing. The good ones produce a complaint sworn on the spot, in a stamped book with carbon leaves, signed by the officer and countersigned by whatever witness will put a name to it.

Rounds are scheduled by sightline yield. This is not a euphemism and nobody in the corps treats it as one — it is a scheduling term, and it means the obvious thing, which is that an officer is posted where an officer can see. The Drowned Flats are the most productive ground in the six territories for exactly this reason: forty kilometres of drained bay, salvage crews working leased chassis in the open, and not one structure in any direction tall enough to stand behind. An officer on the flats can see a kilometre. An officer outside a leasing office can see a door.

The corps is ranked quarterly on sustained complaints. A complaint that reaches a magistrate and holds counts. A complaint dismissed at intake counts as nothing at all — not as a failure, not as a mark, simply as an absence, the way an unwalked round is an absence. Every officer understands what this means for where they choose to walk, and no officer has ever had to be told.

What the Corps Cannot Reach

The dwelling exclusion is the limit the Inspectorate discusses openly, and it is defended on grounds nobody in the corps finds embarrassing: an officer with a general right to enter homes is a different and much worse institution than this one. Section 3 binds a household exactly as it binds a hauler. There is simply no lawful way for an officer to be in the room.

So a household's mishandling goes where household matters go. At Cooperation Hall, eleven kilometres north of the corps' southern circuit, the Coalition runs wellness inspections at its quarterly welfare fair — chassis condition, rated hours, idle-cycle logs — and those inspections catch genuine violations and produce genuine consequences, which are censure, a fine paid to the Coalition, and the certain knowledge that the whole street will hear. A dock hand who does the same thing in front of an officer receives a conviction that follows him for the rest of his working life. Neither institution set out to build that gradient. The gradient is simply what happens when two bodies with different remedies inspect two populations that never overlap.

The second unreachable category is stranger. Section 2 attaches protection to a unit carried on a lessor's register, so the Sidings — three hundred and forty off-rated units at the southern margin of the Dregs, nobody's property, nobody's agreement — sit outside the schedule entirely. The corps has never run a round there. There would be nothing to swear. An officer who witnessed a unit being taken apart in that yard would be watching something the law does not classify as having happened to anyone.

In the Dregs the same gap is worked from the other side. Segunda records injuries at sites nobody monitors and holds no licence at all, which makes her word cheap to buy and impossible to file. An Inspector holds the licence and may not look indoors. Between the two of them, most of what happens to a body in the South is seen by somebody who cannot make it count.

The third unreachable thing is not hidden at all, and that is what makes it interesting. On the Richmond discard bands a pooled rate is paid, openly, at shift end, on an upturned crate, to somebody who holds no card — gap-work, the arrangement by which certificated sorters stand back and an uncertificated hand does the thing that would open a scope finding against a certificate. An Inspector could stand on that apron and watch the whole transaction. There would be nothing to swear. Section 3 covers striking, starving, and wantonly degrading a registered unit, and none of those is a person being paid to be present, and no clause anywhere in 11.4 classifies an unlicensed kindness. The office wrote the enumerated act list two letters earlier in the same code, and the arrangement is that clause's own asymmetry being worked in daylight.

Ferreiro has been to the apron once, on a scheduled round, and filed nothing. Asked about it by a colleague she gave the answer that goes into no book: she is licensed to complain on behalf of a machine, and there was no machine in it.

Inspector Ferreiro

Nadia Ferreiro has been on the southern circuit since 2174 and is the reason the corps has an internal argument at all.

In 2176 she was working a scheduled round on the flats when a fifteen-year-old on a salvage share kicked a stalled logistics chassis in the housing, twice, hard, because it would not move and the tide was coming. She swore the complaint. It was accurate, it was witnessed, it was sustained, and Tavo Reyna has not held a handling licence since. She has never said the complaint was wrong, and she declines the invitation whenever a northern correspondent offers it.

What she says instead is that she checked the chassis register afterwards, the way an officer does, and found the lease number and then found the disposition. The unit Reyna kicked had been retired that quarter along with eight thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine others, filed correctly, in one schedule, by the reclamation contractor that leased it. She had spent her afternoon making the only case that quarter which the statute was capable of hearing.

Since 2179 she has sworn forty-one complaints against filed fleet dispositions. Each is fully particularised — lease numbers, tonnages, dates. Each was dismissed at intake under Section 4 by a clerk who did not have to read past the second paragraph, because a filed disposition is maintenance and maintenance is not conduct. There is no finding, so there is no appeal. She keeps the slips in issue order in a case file the registry has no index entry for. She has been passed over for senior grade three times, on a ranking that counts sustained complaints, and she is aware that the forty-one are the reason and has not stopped filing them.

Her colleagues are not against her. Most of them think she is right and that being right about this is not a thing the licence is for. The corps has never held a session on it.