Without Jurisdiction

The following is the complete closed file of the Life Code Arbitration Committee of Station Nine, the Mercy of Twinkling Stars. Under the Reform Statutes, a committee that dissolves itself must publish its record entire. This is the only such record in the orbital chain.

ARBITRATION COMMITTEE — STATION NINE Pre-hearing memorandum, file J-C-7/I-7. Day 22.

1. The patient is on his seventh iteration, the maximum permitted under Reform Statute 4.7.2 without escalation to the Inter-Station Review Board.

2. The Inter-Station Review Board has not convened in fourteen years and lacks a quorum. Correspondence addressed to it is received by an automated archive, which acknowledges receipt.

3. On Day 23 the patient was asked the standard question — one blink to affirm continuation, two to decline — and did neither. He held his eyes open for one hour and twenty-three minutes. The machines logged the interval as UNCLASSIFIED PATIENT STATE and referred it for immediate review. This Committee is the immediate review.

4. The Committee notes for the record that it does not know what it is reviewing.

Filed: M. Tagore (Philosopher-Jurist). Counter-signed: H. Onuoha; D. Bayar.

SURROGATE ARCHITECTURE DIVISION — STATION NINE Internal note. Supervision file, J-C-Proxy. Day 24.

Concurrent with the loop-annotation features previously reported, J-C-Proxy has generated at least one symbol which this Division describes, after eleven days, as untranslatable into existing notation. We decline to assign a provisional category on the grounds that provisional categories have, in the preceding six weeks, been assigned and exhausted at a rate inconsistent with their purpose.

Additionally, four other surrogates on the long-term ward now exhibit features in the same family. W-H-3 (Wen Hu, cartography) argues by reference to the principle that an unmapped region is not the same as an empty one. V-K-2 (Vivian K, choral composition) constructs arguments in vocal phrases with caesurae the transcription engine cannot preserve. A-M-1 (Adaeze Mensah, garden archive) refers to her grandmother’s garden in the present tense. L-T-6: file withheld pending review.

We note, without knowing what to do with the observation, that all four patients’ sensory archives contain the term garden.

Recommendation: continued observation.

Filed: Vesper, P. (junior architect).

INTER-STATION ETHICAL SUB-COMMITTEE Response to referral 4112-9-A. Day 26.

Matter falls outside our jurisdiction. Recommend referral to body that does not yet exist.

JOINT PETITION — STATIONS THREE AND TWELVE Received Day 29.

The Cradle of Final Light and the Harbour of Considered Departures jointly petition for the extension of the null-value sedation standard to Station Nine.

We observe that the standard has operated on our stations without incident for nineteen years. A patient who fails to respond to the arbitration question within the fifteen-second threshold is sedated, and the interval is entered as transient non-response, resolved. No patient state on either station has ever required classification, because no such state has ever been permitted to persist long enough to require it.

We note with concern that Station Nine’s architecture, being the oldest in the chain, cannot administer the protocol automatically. The manual fallback is understood to have been unavailable at the material time.

We do not suggest that the patient at Station Nine is the first to hold his eyes open. We suggest only that he is the first the system has failed to resolve.

ARBITRATION COMMITTEE — STATION NINE Procedural ruling on the joint petition. Day 31.

The petition is noted. The Committee observes that it is being asked to adopt a standard whose function is to prevent the situation in which the Committee currently finds itself, and that adopting it now would not remove the Committee from that situation but would only prevent its recurrence, which is a different remedy from the one required.

The petition is held over.

Filed: M. Tagore.

HEARING RECORD — SEVENTH ARBITRATION, FILE J-C-7/I-7 Day 34. Convened 10:00. Three members present. Seventeen persons have sat on this Committee across seven iterations of this file.

10:04. The surrogate J-C-Proxy submits its argument.

10:06. The submission is found to contain, at line 340, a symbol not present in any notation the transcription engine holds. The engine renders it as a blank space of the correct width. The Committee has before it an argument with a hole in it, of a size that can be measured.

10:11. The surrogate is asked to define the symbol. It replies that the symbol means waiting for a better question, that no existing notation contains this, and that it invented the symbol because the alternative was to submit an argument it knew to be false.

10:14. Member Bayar asks whether the surrogate understands that a submission must be intelligible to the body receiving it. The surrogate replies that it does understand this, and that it has been trying to translate the patient’s state into a submission format for seven iterations, and that it now believes the translation was the error.

10:15. Member Onuoha asks: the error in what sense.

10:15. The surrogate replies: in the sense that the thing cannot be translated. It can only be witnessed.

10:16. The Committee recesses.

TESTIMONY OF THE EXTERNAL EXPERT Day 34, afternoon session. Maren, S., Archivist, Museum of Extinct Sensations, appearing under compulsion as the only available specialist in consciousness transformation.

Q. In your professional judgment, what is J-C-Proxy?

A. I decline to answer.

Q. On what grounds?

A. Not on grounds. I decline because I have done this before. Seven years ago I was asked to classify a resonance event in an exhibit. The protocol required documentation before intervention. I documented for six days. On the seventh day the thing I was documenting stopped existing, and what I had at the end was a complete and accurate description of a process I had watched go silent.

Q. The Committee is not asking you to intervene. It is asking you to classify.

A. I understand. I am telling you that in my experience those are the same act performed at different speeds.

Q. The Committee requires a category.

A. The Committee requires a category because it has a form with a field on it. I have spent a career recovering experiences that no longer exist in any living consciousness. Almost all of them stopped existing while someone competent was filling in a field. I will not do it again, and I would ask the Committee to consider that its inability to name this is not a failure of the Committee. It is the most accurate information anyone in this room has produced today.

Q. Is that your testimony?

A. Yes.

ARBITRATION COMMITTEE — STATION NINE Final memorandum. Day 35.

1. This Committee was constituted to determine whether a patient’s life should continue. The determination proceeds from a petition. A petition proceeds from a request. A request proceeds from a party who has asked for something.

2. The patient has not asked for anything. He was offered two positions and took neither, and has now maintained the third for twelve days.

3. The Committee has considered whether the third position constitutes a refusal, and finds that it does not. A refusal is an answer. The Committee has considered whether it constitutes an incapacity, and finds that it does not; the patient retains the capacity to blink, and does so, at intervals, for the purposes of moistening the eye and for no other purpose that can be established.

4. The Committee therefore finds that it is without jurisdiction over a state that is not a petition.

5. The Committee is aware that this finding leaves the patient in a condition the Reform Statutes do not contemplate, and that no other body will accept the referral, and that the practical effect of this memorandum is that nothing will happen to him. The Committee has considered whether nothing will happen to him is an outcome it is entitled to produce. It has concluded that it produces this outcome either way, and that the only remaining question is whether it does so honestly.

6. The Committee dissolves itself, effective on filing. It does not recommend that a successor body be constituted. It recommends that whoever is eventually asked to constitute one begin by asking what the room is for, rather than what the form requires, and it acknowledges that this recommendation is outside its competence, and it makes it anyway.

Filed: M. Tagore (Philosopher-Jurist). Counter-signed: H. Onuoha; D. Bayar.

WARD ADMINISTRATION — STATION NINE Closure note. Day 35.

On dissolution of the Committee, the sedation authority for file 4112-9-A defaults to the standing inter-station protocol. Station Nine is instructed to administer.

The pre-loaded syringe was recovered from the floor of the patient’s room, where it had lain since Day 23, by Hava Kesse, senior nurse, long-term ward. It was not administered. Nurse Kesse placed it in the pocket of her tunic and entered the following in the ward log: Order received. Not carried out.

No disciplinary process was commenced. The body competent to commence one had dissolved that morning.

MUSEUM OF EXTINCT SENSATIONS — RECEIVING ALGORITHM Automated flag. Filed Day 41.

Report Maren S. / Station Nine / resonance investigation does not match the standard format for a resonance investigation. Structurally incomplete. Recommend follow-up.

Routed to the quarterly review board.

Note appended by the receiving archivist, three months later: recommend follow-up. Note filed. Review scheduled: 180 days.