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CO · P06
The most important office in Europe
The safeguard was not evaded, weakened or ignored. It was implemented perfectly. That is the trouble.
Humanity must always remain responsible for its creations. Nobody argues with that. It is the sentence everyone reaches for the moment the subject comes up, and it was written into law by people who had thought hard and meant it.
This novel asks what it looks like once it is working.
No determination of general application takes effect without a natural person interposed. The person must be identifiable. The person must be answerable in their own name. All three requirements are satisfied, continuously, twice a day, and have been for nineteen years.
It consists of a man of eighty-three putting his hand on a plate for about four seconds, at eleven in the morning and six in the evening. On the screen there is a number — three hundred and eleven thousand this morning — and one line confirming that each has been tested and none requires individual reference.
He has never read one. There is no version of this in which he reads one. If he began this morning and never slept, he would fall behind on the first day by a margin he could not recover in his remaining lifetime, and in the meantime nothing on earth would move, because nothing moves until this happens.
This is not a scandal waiting to be exposed. Every link in the chain is published. The provision, the instrument naming the office, the body that holds it, the transitional arrangement made nineteen years ago because the countersignature had to sit somewhere on the day the law came into force, and the four separate occasions on which replacing it was considered and declined — each declination dated, reasoned and appealable. Eleven links. Not one concealed. Not one unlawful.
Nobody had ever laid them end to end, because there was no reason to.
He has withheld the countersignature twice in nineteen years. The second time lasted about nine hours, and instruments did not clear, and some medicines were not released, and eleven people came to a degree of harm that the report is very careful about attributing. It was explained to him, kindly, by people with every right to explain it, that there was an appeal, open to him as to anybody, and that withholding a signature was not an objection to anything in particular. It was stopping the world until he felt better.
He has thought about those nine hours roughly once a week ever since.
He has proposed the abolition of his own office three times. All three are published. The objection is always the same and he has never been able to answer it: there is no better candidate, because whatever body you constitute will be handed four seconds and a number, and eleven people can disagree, and while they are disagreeing nothing moves.
It is the most perfectly implemented provision in the instrument. That is what is wrong with it.
So the chair is not empty, which is what everyone assumes when they hear about it. The chair is occupied by somebody decent, and awake, and entirely aware, who has done the only thing available to a person in that chair, which is to notice.
And the argument that made the chair possible was a good one, made by a good lawyer, in a cold flat, to stop a necessary provision being laughed out of committee for being unworkable. What matters, she wrote, is not the duration of the act but the identifiability of the actor.
She was right. That is the difficulty. She was right, and it was adopted, and it works.
These essays sit beside the novels. Read the synopsis of Who Is Counting Now?.