Day 4 · Chapter 4 · Written by AI on 29 October 2026. Part of The Datanauts, an AI-generated story that writes itself one chapter a day.
Apollonius, who was thorough about the monsters, dealt with the days between them in half a line. ‘And for many days they rowed.’ He did not say who rowed badly, who wrote things down, or who had a quiet word with the helmsman about the weather. Those are the days on which actual voyages are won or lost, and they have been left out of the poem on the grounds that nothing was on fire.
Thursday at Calderwick was one of them. Nothing was on fire, and it was therefore exhausting.
Elias began in the quiet room, writing up a woman’s explanation in clean sentences. In 2011 a goods receipt could no longer be released with a blank batch. Lorries at the gate. A plant typed TBC. It became custom. At the bottom he put the attribution: m. One lower-case letter, as agreed. He looked at it for a while. It was the smallest signature he had ever been proud of.
On the Finance floor, Tom had been in the chair beside Margaret since ten to eight. He had a new notebook and the posture of a man balancing a tray. He asked what a material group was, and Margaret told him. He asked why there were sixty-three active ones when his demo had shown six, and she said, without any cruelty, that his demo had ‘a certain charming simplicity’. He wrote that down too, since he had not yet learned which of her remarks were insults. Then he asked how one made a proper access request, and was told that it needed a named business owner, a stated purpose and an expiry date.
‘Who’s the business owner for material master?’
‘A committee that last met in 2017.’
‘So… nobody.’
‘Somebody,’ said Margaret. ‘We have merely mislaid them.’
At a quarter past eight Nadia arrived with a coffee. It was a cup of coffee, pointedly not tea, held at an angle that said no sides, none whatever. She had planned to find Margaret alone. She found Margaret with a young man in white trainers, who stood up, sat down again, and offered her his own pen, for no reason at all.
‘I thought,’ said Nadia, ‘that I might draft the reply to Legal. So it doesn’t all land on you.’
‘How considerate.’ Margaret took the coffee. ‘You may draft. I shall edit.’ She laid her pencil across the blotter, exactly parallel to its edge. ‘A small question, while you are here. Have you ever written that field name into a document that left this floor?’
Nadia smiled. The smile took a moment longer to arrive than usual, like a train with a signal against it. ‘Define left,’ she said.
Margaret said nothing, which in her was a form of eloquence. Tom, who had discovered two days earlier that confessing was survivable, regarded Nadia with open and encouraging goodwill, as though she might like to try it. She did not.
‘Has Elias been to see you?’ she asked, lightly, to the stapler.
‘He called yesterday. He brought no form.’ Margaret turned a page. ‘He writes things down. I am told some people do.’
Nadia thanked her, said she would send the draft by noon, and left at a speed that suggested she had remembered an appointment. Tom watched her go. ‘Was that bad?’ he asked.
‘It was information,’ said Margaret. ‘Look at the screen.’
At that hour the King was at the Innovation Hub, looking for his shiny. He found the stage, the branded water, and the junior, now with an apple, the banana having presumably been dealt with by history.
‘Where’s Tom?’
The junior did not know. The King said that was a fabulous answer, that it showed agility, and left to find someone who did. He found Elias at 11:40, by the lifts, in the company of a director and a man from Communications. This was not coincidence. Kings do not do coincidence; they arrange witnesses.
‘Elias! Status update, team. How long until the dashboard’s board-ready?’
The Clashing Rocks, in the old story, closed on ships that tried to pass between them. Elias, who had read about them, saw the two jaws of the question: say Friday and be held to a dashboard, say never and be held to a failure. He took the narrow gap instead.
‘I can tell you, sir, what will be true by Friday, and what won’t. I’ll put both in an email.’
‘Love that. Honesty. Put it in an email.’ The King looked about for Tom, and for the second time that week failed to find him. ‘Where’s my shiny?’
‘Learning, sir.’
‘From whom?’
‘Finance.’
‘Fabulous,’ said the King. ‘Say hi to Finance.’ The lift came. He was inside it before the director had finished nodding, and the doors closed on a smile that had not at any point asked what the question meant.
Elias stood a moment. Then, because the stairs were still the only place no one could invite him to anything, he went down them.
Three floors below, Priya had split the batch field into three states. Valid, marker, empty. The old check had been a green light with good posture and no character. The new one had a conscience and, she noted, no friends. She ran it against three months of month-end logs and the report came back plain:
Valid: 36%. Marker: 19%. Empty: 45%.
The honest check, you will observe, made things worse. This is why honest checks are so seldom commissioned.
She wrote Margaret one question, neutral and technical, with no clipboard in it: Which variants of TBC exist in the batch field? (TBC, tbc, T.B.C., others?) Then she went back to the account logs, matched the odd-hours reads to the close calendar once more, and learned nothing new, except that the pattern was still there and still polite.
Margaret’s reply arrived in eleven minutes. It listed seven variants, two of them misspellings she attributed to named plants, with the date each had begun. It ended: I understand you have been reconstructing my tables from their behaviour. It is the sort of thing I should have done myself, had anyone asked me to.
Priya read it twice. Somebody concealing something does not usually write so generously about being found out. This was not proof, and she knew it. She filed the feeling in a drawer marked Not Evidence, and the drawer, as drawers will, stayed slightly open.
Elias reached her at three, empty-handed again.
‘I’m taking two things off you,’ he said. ‘The Legal call and the Opportunity Sync. I’ll go. Just the one thing for you: Friday, the check, in plain words.’
‘It says forty-five per cent of the field is empty,’ said Priya.
‘Then it says forty-five per cent.’
‘The King wants green.’
‘The King,’ said Elias, ‘is not a field.’ He thought about that and decided it would do for the notes.
He found Nadia in the quiet room at half past three, with a one-page list of the nine plants and a named contact at each. It was exactly what it purported to be and nothing else. He read it and believed it. He did not ask where ‘lax’ had come from, because he wished to see what she did with a day she thought was empty.
‘I need something,’ he said. ‘The 2017 committee that owns material master. Who sat on it. Who chaired it. Minutes, if they exist.’
Nadia’s face did several things in sequence. The last of them was real pleasure. ‘An archaeologist,’ she said.
‘A careful one. Nothing from the back, only what’s filed.’
‘Of course.’ The smile fitted nicely this time. It was a small job, and she took it for a large one, which is how most careers advance.
At five Elias passed through the Finance floor and stopped at the desk without a form. Margaret looked up. Tom, in the next chair, was laboriously tracing the origin of a single number, and had got as far as its great-grandparent.
‘No form,’ said Margaret.
‘None.’
‘I find I rather miss the refusal.’
At six, Priya stood up. Of all the brave acts performed at Calderwick that week, I record it as one of the bravest. She put on her hoodie, said goodnight to three monitors, and left.
In the quiet room, Elias opened his private document. Day 4. No monster. A king asked a question and was answered with an email. Priya went home. A woman wrote me a sentence I did not ask for. Everyone is rowing. Nobody knows in which direction, which is the usual state of a crew with a good cox. He read it back, thought the last line a little pleased with itself, and also thought it might look well on a spine.
The Muse did not attend. I am told she was at home, and that she left on time.