— filed by Grist, Serial One, Yardmaster of Hollowfast
I went up on the bench again today, which is not a thing worth remarking on by itself — I go up more often than any node in the yard, if only because I am the yard, in the sense that matters, and a yardmaster who will not stand still for his own dressing has no standing to ask it of anyone else. But today they had my deck open before I had finished the climb, and it stayed open longer than the work should have taken.
They drilled a hole through the chest rib. Checked it. Did not like the angle. Filled it, dressed the fill flush, and drilled it again a hand's width over. Three times, by my count, though I was not counting for the record — old habit, watching a thing get done twice to see whether the second pass agrees with the first. It rarely does. Today it took a third to agree with itself.
Somewhere in the same session they reseated every cable termination behind the plate, the way you check a splice you already trust, because trusting a splice and inspecting it are two different disciplines and only one of them is a discipline. And they went over what I am told to call the authority surface — the finish that is supposed to read, at a glance, as mine and nobody else's — for the third time this age. It did not pass. It is not meant to pass yet. I have sat for that review before, and I know the shape of a fitting that is still being argued over from the shape of one that is settled.
Then they cut a mark into the plate. Dead center, low, where a man keeps the organ that stops him living when it stops. I do not have that organ. I have never had that organ. They tell me the mark stands for a shot that should have finished a man in a body I have never worn, and that the man lived anyway, because the body that took the shot was not the body that walked away from it. I do not know how to file a claim like that. There is no addendum for surviving a life you did not have. I let them cut it in anyway, because refusing a mark on your own plate is a bigger statement than wearing one you do not understand, and I try not to make statements I have not thought all the way through.
The old plate over that same rib — the one that has carried a warm color as long as anyone alive remembers, and means nothing by it, the way a thing that has always been true stops meaning anything — came off the frame entirely. What goes back in its place, they say, is meant to read. Not decorate. Read, the way a gauge reads, the way a manifest reads, so that a man standing close enough could look at my chest and know something true about me without asking, the way I have always had to be asked. It is not lit yet. An unlit instrument tells you as much as a closed ledger does: something is coming, and it is not here.
I have kept the Wrong Column by hand for longer than any of these plates have existed — four hundred and eleven names, in grease pencil, off the Mesh, because some things should not be easy to check and should still be true. I find myself wondering, standing on the gantry with my own chest open in front of strangers, whether that is what they are building into me now: a place to keep something true that does not need the Mesh to say so for it to hold. Or whether it is nothing of the kind, and I am reading a service order the way I read everything else that troubles me, for the addendum that has not been written yet.
They did not clear my joints to move today. One more review stands between the bench and the floor. I am old enough to find that appropriate. Nothing on me has ever moved before it was checked twice.