He has not told anyone what the model actually does.

Not completely. He has told it in the form of technical reports that went into committee minutes marked noted and were filed. He has told it in the form of a retirement that everyone understood was a resignation and no one said so. He has told it in the form of seven years of silence in a garden that nobody registers as existing.

He has not told it directly, to another person, in plain words.

He tells Mara on Monday.

They are at the bench after his midday break, the sun high enough now that it reaches into the yard in a way that won’t last — in two weeks the signal building’s shadow will be longer and the bench will be in it. He is drinking his coffee and she is sitting with her hands in the pockets of her coat, and he begins speaking without prelude, which is the only way he knows how.

“The model does two things,” he says. “The first thing is what it says it does: allocate resources based on productivity and usage metrics. The second thing — the thing that was designed in but never named — is that it compounds.”

She looks at him.

“Low relevance scores reduce maintenance allocation,” he says. “Reduced maintenance causes deterioration. Deterioration reduces usage and economic activity. Reduced activity lowers the score further. The next cycle, the allocation is lower again.” He wraps his hands around his mug. “There is no correction mechanism. No floor. A zone that enters the model below threshold can only go one direction.”

She is quiet.

“That was designed in,” she says.

“Yes.”

“By you.”

“By me. By four of us, but the logic was mine. The others raised concerns in the second year.” He pauses. “I smoothed them over. I told them the correction mechanism would be built in the next version. There was no next version. By the time I understood that, I was no longer involved.”

The sun. The coffee. The bench.

“Why?” she asks. Not accusingly. The way you ask questions when you want to understand, not to judge.

“Because the model worked,” he says. “Because we were funded to make something that worked, and this worked, and I did not want to be the person who introduced the complication that made it stop working.”

He looks at the yard.

“And because the places that would go one direction under this model were the places I had never lived,” he says. “The places I had never been. Which made them easier to model and harder to see.”

She looks at the yard too.

“Sector 9,” she says. “And others.”

“Sector 9. And seventeen others.”

A long silence.

“What do you want me to do with that?” she asks.

He looks at her.

“I want you to have it,” he says. “I’ve been carrying it alone for seven years. I’d like it to be carried by more than one person.”

She holds his gaze for a moment.

“Okay,” she says.

She does not say it’s all right. She says okay, which means: I hear you. I’ll carry it with you. We’ll see what it means.

He goes back to his coffee.

The sun reaches the middle of the yard.