Rules for Thee

YOU ARE DEAD. THE DEPARTMENT DOES NOT CONSIDER THIS THE RELEVANT FACT.

The relevant fact is staffing.

Your admission has been deferred pending completion of temporary service. A binder has been issued. A window has been assigned.

The queue outside it has never been empty and did not form for you.

Report to the desk.

THE FILE STATES WHAT OCCURRED. THE APPLICANT STATES WHY.

Everyone arrives with a verified record. Everyone also arrives with a reason the record does not tell the whole story.

You get two questions a file. There are six.

PRESS them on the serious matter. Ask what they are SORRY for, and notice who they are sorry for. CROSS their account against the record and see whether it holds in the same order twice. Pull the administrative RECORDS and find out whether this file was lived or assembled. Ask the WITNESS queue, because somebody standing in it may have known them. Put an item from the drawer to the Division and ask them to IDENTIFY it.

Spend them on the wrong question and you have spent them.

Then bring down the stamp.

ASCEND. HOLD. DESCEND. REFER UPSTAIRS.

Simple. Official. Frequently catastrophic.

THE BINDER IS AUTHORITATIVE. THE BINDER IS ALSO WRONG.

Standing orders arrive while you work. Addenda correct instructions you have already followed. Rules are struck out after they have already cost somebody.

Management records whether you followed procedure.

The Kingdom records whom you allowed inside.

These are not the same measure. They will not agree.

Follow the binder without judgment and the Department may approve of your work. The Kingdom may not survive it.

EVERY STAMP CHANGES THE KINGDOM.

Your decisions do not disappear when the applicant leaves your window.

Reports arrive describing what has changed. Not as numbers, but as small disturbances in a place that should have been perfect.

Admit too freely and perfection begins to curdle.

There is a queue inside. There has never been a queue inside.

Refuse too freely and the reports grow shorter.

A place was set at the table this evening and not taken.

There is no morality meter explaining what you have done. There is only the Kingdom you created, and the one condition above ETERNAL COMFORT that the Department prints on every form and has never once claimed to have reached.

HOLD IS NOT MERCY. IT IS A LENGTH.

Some souls are assigned service and sent away. You decide how long. The ledger says what the term should be and nobody says it out loud.

Later they return, carrying a record of what they did with the time you gave them. A term that was too short did not finish its work, and the paperwork will say so in the flattest language available.

You will judge them again.

They will remember who sent them there.

NOT EVERY APPLICANT IS A SOUL.

Some are lying. Some are wearing another person’s name. Some should never have reached your window at all.

Their paperwork is usually excellent.

That is the difficulty. The rules examine paperwork, and the paperwork passes.

Staff catch them, or nobody does.

THE TRAY FILLS WHETHER YOU READ IT OR NOT.

The Department writes to you. Distribution lists to be confirmed by response. Controlled copies to be acknowledged by their holder. A ruling on whether the kitchens may describe a soup as hearty without a substantiating ingredient.

Answer and it is filed. Every available answer is filed identically.

Other things arrive that are not the Department.

Some are merely tireless and will keep arriving until you mark them.

Some are from the Damned and are dressed as office mail. They want a reply, or they want you to open something. Everything wrong with them is on the page you are already reading.

Information Technology will stop the first one.

Information Technology has one interception per window.

THE DESK IS YOURS, WITHIN REASON.

Facilities permits the loose items to be arranged. It permits nothing else.

There is a set bolted under the monitor with a dial on it. Five stations and a position for off. No memo has ever mentioned it.

There is a telephone the Department did not issue and does not acknowledge. It blinks when the people you admitted yesterday have said something to each other. You may read it. You may press the praying hands. The queue continues to form while you do, and the clock does not care what you are looking at.

There are dice. There is a notebook nobody will ever read. There is a noticeboard in the break room with a motivational mop on it.

None of it is required. All of it costs the same nine minutes.

YOUR OWN FILE IS STILL OPEN.

Every rule you follow, every exception you make, and every soul you judge becomes part of your own record.

Complete your service and face a final review assembled from everything you allowed through the gate.

The Department thanks you for your service and reminds you that it has not yet been assessed.