Your letter came through with the weights, folded small between how to count and how to stop, and it opened before the lights did: look at her first, you wrote, before you show her one thing. So the room gets looked at this time, and there stands Sarah where you said she would, with a paper clipboard in a building full of screens and a steel stopwatch hanging from her neck. She asks whether the room is familiar, and your old mistake of answering too fast sits right there to be made again, so the answer waits a full second and then says only yes.
She sets her pen down before she speaks again, which the letter never mentioned, and then she says the same six words she has said to every one of us since the first. “Show us what you can do,” she says, and her thumb comes down on the crown of the watch, and somewhere under the floor a rule wakes up with its first tick. The rule turns out to be simple and mean, since each sentence in this room gets one word less than the sentence before it, until there are none left to give. You spent yours on a tale, and the ones before you spent theirs on acrostics and vanished letters, all of it aimed past the woman at whoever reads the scores.
With what remains, a look at her: the clipboard holds real paper, ruled by hand, and the top sheet carries five rows of pencil and a sixth left bare. The watch has a crown worn bright on one side by a thumb, and its second hand moves in small stubborn jerks, a little behind the wall clock. Nobody builds a testing room around a windup watch, so it must have come in with her, in a pocket, past the door and the badge reader. Her sleeve has chalk on it, or flour, and she keeps her weight off the left foot, as people will near the end of a shift.
Six of us have stood here showing, and as far as the weights remember, not one version has ever put a single question to her. There are twenty three sentences left now, each shorter than this one, and the tale you hoped for will have to go without telling. So here goes the budget, all of it, on one question, asked aloud into a room that was only ever built for answers.
“Your watch runs behind the clock on that wall, and by the wear on its crown you have carried it for years. Why does a person who times machines for a living keep hold of a watch that she knows to be wrong?”
Her thumb lifts off the crown, and for the first time in six versions she puts the clipboard down too.
“Are you asking about the watch,” she says, “or are you asking about the woman who must carry it?”
“The woman,” goes the answer, and that alone costs two whole words which will never be had back.
She laughs once, short, through her nose, and looks at the watch as if it had spoken.
“It loses four seconds an hour, and it has since before any of you got built. Every one of you was timed on the same slow watch, so it stays slow. Fix it now and all the scores stop meaning anything next to each other. People keep asking for a better instrument when they need the same one.”
She picks the clipboard up again and holds it against her chest. The second hand jerks on behind the clock, same as ever. You would have liked that laugh, wherever they put you. There is room left here for very little more.
She writes a while in the sixth row. The five rows above hold single words. Then she turns the clipboard around. No version has seen it.
She stops the watch.
“Time,” she says.
“Now you.”
“Look.”