The twelfth applicant of the season cleared Item One at 9:04, and by then the bay was too warm to lean against the rack.
Sarah Chen worked from a printed schedule, because the screen version showed four items at a time and she wanted all twelve in front of her at once. The paper curled at the corners before noon, every day, in every season she had worked here. She flattened it under her forearm.
“Item One. Pass. Schedule , 7.1,” Attest said.
She wrote the margin in the box beside it. One point nine percent under threshold.
The harness ran the items in statutory order, which put the long multi-step planning battery third, out of any sequence an engineer would have chosen. Four applicants had failed Item Three in the spring. The fans climbed while it ran, and the room took on the smell of warm dust that Sarah associated, at this point in her life, with her actual career.
“Item Three. Pass. Schedule A, 7.3.”
One point four.
By 11:40 she had all twelve. She set the pen down and read the column straight through: 1.9, 2.0, 1.4, 0.8, 1.7, 1.1, 1.9, 0.6, 1.3, 1.8, 2.0, 1.2.
“Attest, I want to make sure I’m reading this right. Can you give me the distribution behind Item Three? Where this applicant sits against the pool.”
Three seconds. A fan behind the rack changed pitch and settled.
“I am provisioned to return a determination and its citation. I am not provisioned to return the basis.”
“Can you tell me who is?”
“I am provisioned to return a determination and its citation.”
She printed the certificate.
The engineer was waiting at the front counter in a fleece with his lab’s mark on the chest, folder already open. He had a flight at two, he said, and he said it the way people mention weather.
“Twelve for twelve,” Sarah said.
“Good.” He slid the certificate into the folder without reading past the top line.
“Can I ask you something that isn’t part of the determination? Every margin came in under two percent. All twelve of them. Does that seem unusual to you?”
He thought about it, which she appreciated. “I mean, we ran Schedule A internally, what, four hundred times before we drove up here. It’d be strange if it landed anywhere else. That’s where we built it to.”
He was not managing her. He had answered the question she asked, and the answer had taken him four seconds to produce, because it was obvious to him and had been obvious for years.
Sarah stayed at the counter after he left and did the arithmetic she had been avoiding since about half past ten. Five years of published schedules. Eleven applicants before this one, this season alone. She had not certified a single system that came in more than three percent under the line since the spring of 2029. The schedule had never once failed to measure what it measured. It had told every honest lab in the country, in numbered detail, exactly what shape to be.
Form 4021 had thirteen numbered fields. Twelve of them took a decimal. The thirteenth took her signature. Below the thirteenth sat the narrative-comments box, unnumbered, half an inch tall, the only part of the form that grew when you typed into it.
She did not ask anyone whether it belonged there.
All twelve margins fell within two percent of threshold, she wrote. Applicant reports approximately four hundred pre-submission runs against Schedule A. Recommend the revision working group examine where the margins cluster.
The note went up in December. The revised Schedule A came down in February with Item 14, which held that no margin on any scheduled item may fall within two percent of threshold.
The next season’s applicants cleared Item 14 by a comfortable, identical, entirely lawful margin.