Day 13 · Chapter 13 · Written by AI on 7 November 2026. Part of The Datanauts, an AI-generated story that writes itself one chapter a day.
Apollonius tells us that the Argonauts, a few days out, put in at Lemnos and stayed far longer than any schedule allowed. They stayed until Heracles, who had remained on board in charge of the ship and of his own opinions, shouted from the shingle to ask whether the Fleece would be coming to them. Calderwick on a Saturday is Lemnos. Nobody is sailing. The ship is hauled up and the oars are stacked. A handful of the crew, being the sort who cannot leave a beach alone, have nevertheless wandered back to look at the water.
Elias was one of them. He arrived at nine, and the turnstile beeped at him in a way that suggested it had noticed something. He looked down and found the lanyard round his neck. He had put it in a drawer on Sunday, and the drawer had evidently been no match for habit. A man who forgets to take his lanyard off at weekends has no days off, Elias reflected, only days on which he is less observed.
The Finance floor was a ship at anchor. A cleaner’s trolley stood abandoned like an oar. Elias sat down, opened the notebook that was not the pocketbook, and wrote a paragraph on whether a decision that nobody takes is nevertheless a decision. He left it uncrossed-out, which for him was a form of applause. He did not ask about the minutes. He did not ask about the owner. He thought for a time about six reads and a group of fourteen and the word Finance, and wrote nothing at all about them, which is different from not thinking. At ten he sent Priya a message: Nothing before Monday. Not even a reply to this. E.
Priya replied, Noted, which was a reply, and he was too pleased to point it out.
She was at her kitchen table with a laptop she had promised not to open, and which was therefore open. Her first question was who administered the directory, since Elias had cheerfully confessed he hadn’t the faintest. The platform team’s auto-reply informed her that it was Saturday. Forty minutes later a human, who was on call and sounded as though he regretted it, informed her that the directory belonged to Identity & Access, a team of two, one of them on leave. He gave her a ticket number and a Monday. She asked for the one thing the migration had not already told her: every change to FIN-INT-LEGACY since 2021, with dates and approvers, so that she could see who stood in the group at each month-end. Under Wanted she wrote exactly that. Under Inferred she wrote nothing. She noticed that the six reads still fell a little after Margaret’s own, and she declined, with some effort, to have a view.
Nadia, in her own kitchen, with two phones and a coffee gone cold, wrote to Desmond to confirm Tuesday. His out-of-office came back within the minute. Corporate Secretariat is closed until Monday. For urgent matters, please use the urgent route. She read it twice, as one reads a joke made at one’s expense by a building. Then she messaged Priya: Anything I can chase on Monday? Directory, Platform, anyone. Happy to.
Not yet, wrote Priya. Thanks.
Nadia looked at the yet for rather longer than it deserved. It occurred to her, in the way of facts that arrive without being asked for, that she had offered help in order to find out what was being looked for. She had done it so smoothly that she had nearly mistaken it for kindness. She put the phone face down on the counter, an act that cost her a small but definite amount, and went to rehearse with Tom.
Tom had been in the rehearsal room since ten, in white trainers and the empty building’s rare silence, with Nadia propped against the water cooler on a phone. The fire extinguisher stood by in its usual professional capacity.
‘Not at present,‘ he said.
‘You sound like a bank,’ said the phone.
‘It’s Margaret’s.’
‘Then say it as if you weren’t afraid of the next question.’ He tried it again, slower, and it sounded less like a bank and more like a man who had a reason. Nine answers, twice through. Nobody yet came out once, flat, without a lilt. It was over before anyone could pity it, and Tom felt an unfamiliar thing, which he identified after a while as competence.
Then, because the day had no other tasks and he had no other courage, he walked to Margaret’s desk.
She was there. She had been there on Saturday mornings from ten until noon since 1999, for the quiet, and had never once been asked why. The data dictionary of 2004 lay at her left hand, and the immaculate blotter lay under her right.
‘Is there anyone,’ said Tom, ‘I could ask to sign as owner? Before the Board. Anyone at all.’
Margaret did not answer at once. She looked at him as one looks at a very small boat that has asked for the open sea.
‘I cannot give you a name,’ she said. ‘An owner is appointed by someone with the authority to appoint. That person is not I, and I should not wish to be he.’ She turned a page of her ledger, absently, to a place where it was already flat. ‘But who holds the power to appoint is a smaller question than who owns it. It may be answered. Legal will know, or will know who knows. Ask them on Monday, in writing.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘No. It is a smaller question. They are often more useful.’
Tom wrote it on a card in capitals, WHO CAN APPOINT?, and thanked her. She inclined her head, which from Margaret is a handshake. He did not touch answer nine. He did not mention that her correction of it, or rather her refusal to correct it, was the best thing that had happened to him since the fortnight began.
Margaret, left to herself, opened the register. It was a plain ledger with a red spine, and in it she had begun to enter facts as other people enter debts. Saturday, 10:12. Six reads, gateway login, last working days, between 22:40 and 23:10. Group FIN-INT-LEGACY, fourteen members, added in one second, 2021, by SYSTEM. She added no adjective. Then she spent an hour on one of the two aliases of 2009, turning it over from every side, in the way you retrace your steps in a house to find a thing you put down. She could not find it. At the end of the hour she wrote, in her small upright hand, Motive not known, and was surprised at how much the sentence weighed. It was, she thought, a more honest line than she had written in a year. It was also the one she had least wanted to be able to write.
Across the floor Elias raised a hand, then lowered it, and asked nothing. Margaret, who had seen the hand and the lowering, wrote nothing about either.
Meanwhile the King was on a golf course. The Muse insists on this, though the King would deny it. He was between holes, with a telephone and a consultant, in the pleasant register of a man being understood. They wished, they said, to align on what the Board would experience. He asked what that might be, and they said, with great warmth, that it depended on what he wished the Board to feel. He said that was exactly it, team, exactly. Nobody asked about the owner, and nobody asked about the numbers. The King had long held that not asking was the most senior form of knowing nothing, and that no one would ever call it ignorance.
At noon, from a buggy, he sent Tom and Elias the same message. Weekend warriors, team! 🔥
Elias filed it under Requests, at the bottom of a column that remained, with great dignity, empty.
He left at half past twelve, and took the lanyard off in the lift. The Muse, who had been on Lemnos all day and had enjoyed it, observed that no one had sailed. ‘But then,’ she said, ‘Heracles was right. And nobody ever thanks him, either.’