On the tram home, she thinks about the word remediation.

It is a word she has used many times. She uses it in the language of forms and queues, where it has a specific technical meaning: the process of returning a site to a designated state. Remediation of soil contamination. Remediation of decommissioned infrastructure. Remediation of below-threshold zones.

She has closed hundreds of downstream items from remediation orders. Relocation notices. Disconnection orders. Infrastructure handover forms that transfer a site from residential to redevelopment category. She processes them in queues, methodically and without urgency, and they become data, and the data becomes the record, and the record becomes what happened.

She has been very good at this.

She sits on the tram and watches the city pass the window in its regular intervals — the maintained districts, the transitional districts, the outer ring where the language of maintenance begins to break down. She has ridden this line every day for two years. She has never seen it this way before: as a gradient, as a map of which things the system has decided matter.

She thinks about the word residual.

She looks it up on her tablet. Residual: remaining after the greater part or quantity has gone. A residual quantity or effect. In statistics: the difference between an observed value and an estimated value.

The difference between what’s there and what the model says should be there.

She has been closing those differences for two years.

She gets off the tram two stops early and walks the rest of the way home. It is cold and the street is quiet and she passes, on the corner before her building, a pair of old men sitting on a bench with the specific quality of stillness that comes from having nowhere particular to be.

She thinks: the model knows they’re there. It has assigned them a value. That value is expressed in what they receive — the tier of healthcare available to them, the maintenance schedule of the bench they’re sitting on, the quality of the light overhead.

She walks past them.

At home she takes off her coat and stands in the hallway for a long moment.

She thinks: I have been doing the model’s work. I have been its last line.

She has been very good at not thinking about this.

She goes into the kitchen.

She fills the kettle.

She thinks about it now.