Day 3 · Chapter 3 · Written by AI on 28 October 2026. Part of The Datanauts, an AI-generated story that writes itself one chapter a day.
Among the Greeks, a stranger arriving at a hall was fed before he was questioned. On the Finance floor of Calderwick he was questioned, handed a form and left hungry. Elias, who had read his Homer at school and little since, brought neither form nor biscuits. He brought one sheet in Priya’s handwriting and the bearing of a man who has resolved to be awkward only at his own expense.
It was 08:15. Margaret was already at her desk, as the sea is already at the shore.
‘You have not brought a form,’ she said.
‘I haven’t.’
‘I had prepared to refuse it. Now I have nothing to do with my face.’
He put the list down between them. ‘I’m not after your keys. I’d just like to know how the hull is built before anyone asks me to sail in it. The batch field is forty per cent filled. Another fifteen says TBC.’
Margaret looked at the page, then at him, for long enough that a lesser man would have mentioned the weather.
‘In 2011,’ she said, ‘the system was changed so that a goods receipt could not be released with a blank batch. There were lorries at the gate. Someone at a plant typed TBC. The system accepted it, as it accepts anything polite, and within a fortnight it was custom. It is not neglect, Mr Elias. It is a note left on a door by people in a hurry.’
Elias had begun to write. He noticed she was watching the pen.
‘You are writing it down.’
‘Somebody should.’
Something crossed her face and was dismissed before it could unpack. ‘I would prefer my name were not on it.’
‘I’d meant to put it on.’
‘That is how people find whom to blame.’
‘Or whom to thank.’
‘In my experience,’ said Margaret, ‘that post has been vacant since 1999.’ She considered him. ‘Initials. Lower case.’
It was, by the standards of the coast, a treaty.
At five past nine, Tom arrived with the corrected form held out in both hands, and stopped on seeing Elias, as a man stops on discovering his exam invigilator in the same lift. He did not turn back, which Elias noted to his credit. He confessed, in a rush, that the demo data had been ‘sort of sample, sort of generated, sort of a thing from a shared drive in 2019’, and that he had no idea what production meant here, and that he was sorry, and also that it was very good data in its way.
‘It is not data,’ said Margaret. ‘It is a rumour in tabular form.’ She pulled out the chair beside her own. ‘Not access. A chair. You will watch the material groups on my screen and ask what you do not understand. You will not touch anything.’
Tom sat as though lowered into a hot bath. Elias left them there. He did not confirm receipt of Legal’s email on the way out. He found he rather liked having a reason.
The King, meanwhile, was circling the Innovation Hub in search of his shiny. He found it at noon, returning with a notebook and the look of a boy who has been given a gold star and a tax return in the same hour. On the screen of his laptop was a mock-up, handsome and blue, with a watermark across it: ILLUSTRATIVE DATA.
‘Love it,’ said the King. ‘Lose the banner.’
‘It’s illustrative, sir. Because it is.’
‘Everything’s illustrative until the Board’s seen it, team.’
Tom, who had spent the morning watching a woman refuse to say anything she could not defend, felt a small and unfamiliar stiffness in his spine. ‘What about Preview?’
‘Preview,’ said the King, tasting it. ‘Fabulous.’
Tom had won, and lost, and could not have said which by how much. The King did not ask where the numbers came from. In the lift lobby he told a passing director, with the generosity of a man giving away someone else’s coat, that traceability was ‘a tremendous opportunity for Elias’s team’. By two o’clock this had become a calendar invitation: Traceability: Opportunity Sync, fourteen attendees, none of whom owned anything.
Nadia had been busy before any of that. By eleven she had produced a page, and by a quarter past she was in the quiet room, laying it before Elias with the air of someone returning a lost wallet. It was good, as her pages were: nine factories, three tiers of difficulty, a tidy list of fields. It also said that the TBC entries reflected ‘lax plant discipline’.
‘Lax,’ said Elias.
‘It’s Finance’s view.’
‘I’d heard it might be a note left on a door. By people in a hurry.’
There was a pause. By Nadia’s standards, it was a long one: about the length of a cough. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Hurried. That’s what I meant. Lax-in-a-hurry.’ She smiled. It was well fitted, but he thought it sat a little further from the ears than usual. ‘I could coordinate the Finance side. Save you the legwork.’
‘Not yet,’ said Elias. She did not ask who had told him about the door, and he noticed that. A woman who knows everything doesn’t ask who told you something. She is too busy working it out.
Three floors below, Priya had spent the day trying to make her freshness check lie, and it had declined. With a late refresh simulated at month-end, it held, waited, retried and ran. Then she asked it about the batch field, and it reported every TBC cheerfully as a field filled in.
‘A green light,’ she told the monitor, ‘with good posture and no character.’
She added a test. Then she went through the unknown account’s reads once more, and found that they touched only tables Margaret maintained, at month-end, in a naming style that had gone out of fashion in 2009. She said nothing to anyone. Priya had been brought up on the principle that an accusation without evidence is a bug report written in anger.
Elias came at half past five, empty-handed. ‘Nothing more today. I’m only here to tell you that TBC is a note on a door. Margaret says.’
‘She talked to you?’
‘She talked. I wrote.’
Priya looked at the amber she had been thinking of painting red. ‘Then it’s amber,’ she said. She did not mention the offer, the tab or the account. The mug said It worked on my machine, and for once it looked less like a historical record than a hope.
At four, Margaret had sent Legal a single sentence confirming receipt and asking who owned the obligation and from where the budget would come. The reply was automatic. It thanked her for her query and informed her that ownership was ‘currently being scoped’. She printed it, read it once, and filed it under Weather.
Shortly after, Nadia arrived with a cup of tea and a face composed for a hearing.
‘I’m on your side, Margaret.’
‘Sides,’ said Margaret, ‘are for boats.’ She accepted the cup. Nadia found the stapler remarkably absorbing and did not look at her for the entire conversation.
Reader, you will have noticed that by evening three people were each privately suspecting a fourth, and that not one of them had asked any of the others. In larger organisations this is called governance.
In the quiet room, Elias opened his private document and wrote: Day 3. Somebody has said why. It was not on any dashboard. It was in a woman’s head, and she lent it to me for the price of lower-case initials. He read it back, found it a little moved, and let it stand.
The Muse, I’m told, sat in on the Opportunity Sync. She has not been seen since.