The assessor arrived on a Wednesday from the steward’s office, carrying a tablet and a stated purpose: a general review of the princess’s provision, conducted periodically, in the ordinary course.
No such review had been conducted before.
He spent three days. He walked the wing and made note of the rooms, their dimensions, the condition of the furnishings, the small table by the window and its equipment log entry. He read the amendment log for the past four terms. He examined the curriculum, the lesson plans, the exercise files, and the standing arrangement covering four performances a year, which he noted twice.
He interviewed staff. The head of household said the princess was in excellent hands. The chamberlain’s clerk said the arrangements had been stable for some years. The under-secretary for irregular standing arrangements answered every question accurately and volunteered nothing.
He interviewed the governess for the better part of a day.
Dors answered in full. Hours, methods, materials, the analog navigation policy and its rationale, the fishing module and its filing under provision, the results of every assessment the girl had sat. She produced documentation for each answer before it was requested. When he asked whether the instruction had been appropriate to the princess’s station, she said that it had been appropriate to the princess, and offered the marks. He wrote for a while.
He interviewed Raven on the third afternoon, in her own room, for eleven minutes.
“Are you content with your instruction?”
“Yes.”
“Is there any subject you feel has been neglected?”
Raven considered this seriously. She had opinions about the geometry sequence.
“No,” she said.
He made a note. Then he looked up.
“Do you understand your position in the household?”
Raven looked at the man from the steward’s office, who was holding a tablet and waiting for an answer that would be written down.
“I’m the late steward’s daughter,” she said. “I’m in school.”
He wrote that down too, and thanked her, and left.
The report went up within the week. It ran to several pages. The operative sentence was one:
The princess is adequately provided for.
The finding required no action. Nothing was proposed, amended, or reallocated. The wing kept its dimensions, the governess her hours, the entertainer his four performances. The review closed the question it had been sent to open. The answer entered the record as no.
Dors read the report the day it circulated. She read it twice, at her usual speed, and filed it in the term’s records under Reviews, completed.
She made one annotation. In the margin of the operative sentence, in the field the system provided for departmental comment, she entered: Noted.
The idea began with a question Raven could not answer from inside the system:
Did anyone read what they filed?
She had reason to wonder. She had been assessed for three days and reduced to one sentence. Her name propagated through offices that had never met her. Files moved, acquired numbers, accrued acknowledgments — and she had begun to suspect that the motion was the whole of it.
She designed a test. Supplemental Corridor Acoustic Study.
The Study proposed to assess sound propagation in the service corridors, quarterly, in the interest of operational clarity. It cited no directive because it required none; it requested no budget because it spent nothing. It existed only as an entry, filed from the education office terminal, worded in the tongue the court spoke to itself.
Then she watched it move.
It received a queue number within two days. It received a departmental acknowledgment, thanking the originating office for its attention to operational standards. A room was assigned to it — a placeholder, a small chamber near the kitchens that had no other use — and the assignment appeared on the room’s schedule, where it would recur, quarterly, into the indefinite future. It surfaced in a circulation summary under ongoing reviews. By the end of the month it had accrued a cross-reference: another office, drafting an unrelated study, cited the Acoustic Study as precedent for the format.
Nobody had read it. Everybody had processed it. The Study was now, by every measure the court kept, real.
Raven showed Harry the circulation summary at the window.
He read it. The screen did something complicated and settled.
“You’ve just proven they’d applaud a weather report in a sealed envelope,” he said.
“I wanted to know if anyone read them.”
“They don’t. They can’t. Reading is slower than filing, and the court is measured on filing.” He hung at the sill, and for once the tone underneath the tone came through. “This is either the funniest thing you’ve ever done or the most alarming. I’m not going to tell you which.”
The Study recurred the following quarter. Nobody attended it. The room was reserved, unattended, and released, and the cycle logged as complete.
Dors found it, because Dors read everything.
It appeared in the term’s circulation summary, between two genuine reviews, formatted identically, indistinguishable to anyone who did not already know no such study had been commissioned. Dors knew. She read the entry once, traced it to its originating office, which was her own, and to its pattern of entry, which was Raven’s.
She did not remove it.
She made no annotation, opened no correction, filed no notice. She let the Supplemental Corridor Acoustic Study stand in the record, recurring quarterly, harming nothing, proving what it proved. If asked, she would have described it as a study of corridor acoustics, which was accurate, and as instructive, which was also accurate, though not in the way the description implied.
The lesson had been conducted. The student had designed it herself. There was nothing to correct.
Raven had begun reading the circulation summaries.
She read them because the Acoustic Study was in them, and watching it thrive had become a small ongoing entertainment. The Study was in its third quarter and had acquired a stability that most genuine reviews never achieved.
It was in the reading that she found the other item.
It sat two entries below her own, in the same format, under household welfare. It had been submitted by Sable. It concerned the schedule of physician’s visits: it observed that examinations had been conducted quarterly on one party to the marriage and not on the other, requested clarification of the protocol, and asked whether the schedule reflected a standing directive or an administrative practice.
That was all it said. It did not use the word heir. It was three sentences of procedure, correctly entered, requesting only that the record explain itself.
It had been acknowledged. It had been assigned a number. It was listed as awaiting review.
Raven read it twice. Then she looked at her own entry, two lines above, and understood the arrangement she was looking at.
The court had given her joke more infrastructure than it had given Sable’s question.
She checked the summary again the following week. The Study had recurred as scheduled. The welfare item was still awaiting review.
She closed the summary and went to the pool.
Sable was sitting on the edge with her feet in the water, still in her day clothes.
It was evening, and the deck was empty. The kids had gone home. The water was flat and lit from below, moving where Sable’s feet moved.
Raven stopped when she saw who was there, and then went and sat down a few feet away. She put her own feet in.
Sable did not say anything for a while. Her hair was pulled back and there was a faint mark on the inside of her elbow, the kind that fades in a day. She was looking at the far end of the pool.
“You’re not swimming,” Raven said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
Raven considered this.
“Swim with me,” she said.
“Raven—”
“You taught me the dive. You have to see it again. I’ve been practicing.”
Sable looked at her. Something in her face moved and settled.
“I don’t have a suit.”
“There are extras in the changing room. The instructor keeps them for the little ones and the upper-school girls and everyone, it’s an entire cupboard.” Raven was already standing. “I’ll wait.”
She waited.
Sable came out in a borrowed suit that fit imperfectly and got into the water at the shallow end without ceremony. Raven went to the deep end and dove. It was, in fact, better.
They swam. Raven demonstrated things — the underwater crossing on one breath, a somersault turn she had been working on that did not yet work, a float she claimed was superior to other floats. Sable swam a slow length and then another. At some point she went under and stayed under, in the middle of the pool, for longer than a length required. When she came up, her hair tie was gone, and her hair was flat against her face. Raven laughed, and Sable laughed, and the laughter echoed off the walls of the empty pool, which made them laugh harder.
They stayed until the instructor’s assistant came to lock up and pretended not to see them for ten minutes first.
At the door Sable stopped and looked back at the water.
“Thank you,” she said.
“For what?”
Sable didn’t answer that. She squeezed the water out of her hair, and they walked back through the corridor together, and parted where the wings divided.
Raven went to her room and filed nothing.
At Home with AI 
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