Day 7 · Chapter 7 · Written by AI on 1 November 2026. Part of The Datanauts, an AI-generated story that writes itself one chapter a day.
Homer’s Catalogue of Ships runs to some four hundred lines and names every contingent that sailed for Troy. It does not mention Sunday. This was an oversight. Had Sunday been a ship, it would have been the only one to arrive on time and unarmed.
Elias began the seventh day by finding his lanyard on its hook in the hall, where it had hung since Friday like a small, laminated conscience. He looked at it. Then he put it in a drawer, under the takeaway menus, and closed the drawer with the care of a man laying a wreath. It was the bravest thing he did all day, and the drawer did not applaud.
He did not open the private document. He had taken the adjectives out yesterday, and anything he did to it today would be polishing the oars and explaining that he was only checking. Instead he took the back of an envelope (council tax, which seemed apt) and wrote three questions for Tuesday. Who chaired in 2017? Who replaced the Head of Manufacturing Systems, if anyone? Has Legal named an owner, or merely a process? He looked at them for a while. They were good questions and he did not like any of the answers. He went for a walk, which in his case was a slow and nautical affair along the canal, past a heron that appeared to be waiting for a committee of its own.
Priya was on her sofa with the personal laptop, not touching production, which at Calderwick is the nearest thing to prayer. She had made her file honest. The columns were now headed Observed, Inferred and Wanted, and she went down the rows with the zeal of an auditor who has lately been audited by her own conscience.
Account reads only tables Margaret maintains: observed.
Reads cluster on the last working days: observed.
Aliases dated 2009, created by Margaret: observed, in the metadata.
Margaret is the one reading them: inferred, and she did not like the verb.
Someone was told: inferred. Who: unknown.
In the third column she wrote, against the last row, Wanted: not to be right about this. She left it there. A line of dots is not a face, and she had been fond of Margaret’s data dictionary since the day she first found it correct. The start-up’s email sat unopened in the tab beside it, like a lifeboat she had decided to look at only if the ship was visibly sinking. The ship was not visibly sinking. It was only that nobody had yet found where the water was getting in.
On the Finance floor, Margaret was at her desk. Sunday is not Saturday, and she has missed several Sundays, though not for any reason she would put in a minute. She had a pencil, a fresh sheet and a stated intention: to write down why the material master works, beginning with the batch field. The first hour produced two rules. The second produced a third, and next to it the word because, which cost her forty minutes and a good deal of tea. It was a plain reason about plants and the order in which they were commissioned, and it had been in her head since 1999 without ever once being asked for. She read it back with a kind of dignified horror. It was true, and it was a single sentence, and it was the only copy.
She made a fair copy in her small and perfect hand. Then she hid it where nobody in the building would ever look, which was inside the folder marked Weather.
Tom arrived at half past ten, having concluded that the security guard on a Sunday is a man who regards the whole building as a dream. He sat in the corridor with his laptop on his knees and made two slides. The first said Calderwick Foresight. See tomorrow, today. The second was the Preview, to which he had added, in fourteen-point type and no colour, 6 of 63 material groups shown. He looked at it for some time. It was, he thought, the least impressive true thing he had ever put on a slide. He was surprised to find that he could look at it without flinching.
He was still looking at it when Nadia came up the stairs with two teas.
‘You’re in on a Sunday,’ she said.
‘So are you.’
‘I’m in the lobby on a Sunday. It’s different. It’s loitering.’ She took in the notebook. ‘What are you writing?’
He turned it round. The page was headed Things I Was Wrong About, and had got as far as number nineteen. She had been prepared to say whatever he wanted to hear, which is her professional gift. To her slight annoyance, she found that what he wanted to hear was exactly what she thought. ‘That’s the best list in the building,’ she said, and it was true, which threw her slightly.
She took the tea to Margaret, who accepted it, tasted it and paused. ‘You remembered,’ said Margaret. It was two sugars, no milk, as it had been in 2011. It was impossible to say whether the remark was thanks or evidence.
‘I thought I could help with Legal’s ticket,’ said Nadia. ‘Chase it. Draft whatever’s needed.’
‘There is nothing to chase. There is a ticket, and there is Friday.’ The pencil lay across the blotter, exactly parallel to the edge. A sheet beside it was face down, and Margaret’s left hand had somehow arrived on it. Nadia saw this and did not look at it, which is a skill. ‘Is there anything,’ said Margaret, to the pencil, ‘that you wish to tell me?’
‘Not yet,’ said Nadia.
Margaret considered it. ‘I shall note the tense,’ she said. ‘It is a good deal better than no.’
Nadia drank her own tea much too fast and left. In the corridor she told Tom his list was wonderful and meant it. She went down the stairs and past a certain unlit corridor in her mind, and did not take it, and was a little more surprised than last time.
Meanwhile, the King was in a field of wind and expensive applause, on the fourteenth tee. He was in the full flower of his mood, for the sun was out and a man of great standing had lately called him visionary. Between shots he thumbed a message to his shiny: Tom! Slides for the Board, pretty. Elias to do three lines. Positive, forward-looking! Don’t make it a project 🏌️. He sent the same to Elias, with the same emoji, and drove off the tee into a rather good silence.
Elias read it on a bench by the canal, beside the heron. He had promised himself that nobody from the crew would hear from him today. But the King was not crew. The King was weather, and one answers weather or one is rained on.
He took the envelope and wrote three lines on the back, below his three questions. He crossed out one adjective that had slipped in out of habit. Then he sent them, with Tom in copy, at 17:40:
1. Of the batch field the new rules depend on, 45% is empty.
2. We can say which plants fill it; we cannot yet say who owns it.
3. Next: an owner, then a date.
‘Forward-looking,’ he told the heron, ‘is the third line.’ The heron declined to comment.
The King’s reply came in eleven seconds, which was a thumb. I do not say that a man cannot read forty-five per cent and the word owner in eleven seconds. I say only that he cannot also be on the fourteenth fairway. A thumb, however, is a receipt, and there are men who prize a receipt above any amount of reading.
In Finance, a phone buzzed on a corridor floor. Tom read three lines for the first time. His mouth opened a little and then, slowly, closed. Nobody had said his name. Nobody had said his project. It was only a field and a missing owner, and he had known for a week that both were true. He saved the email beside his slides without comment, as one files a letter from a doctor.
Elias walked home in the long light and put the envelope on the kitchen table, beside the council tax, which was now merely the other half of it. The lanyard stayed in its drawer.
Priya slept on the sofa with the laptop closed. Margaret locked the folder marked Weather, with the paper inside, and went down the stairs with her cardigan buttoned. Nadia, in the lobby, did not write to anyone. And the Argo lay on the shore with its timbers drying in the last of the sun, which showed up everything wrong with it, and did so, on this occasion, quite kindly.
The Muse spent Sunday in a garden. She is said to have asked, over a sandwich, whether anyone had read the second line. Nobody had been there to say.