Committee Room 8 smelled of carpet and old radiators and the specific anxiety of people who have prepared the wrong answers very thoroughly.
Simon had been called as a technical witness, which meant he sat at the end of the table where the microphone was worst, behind a nameplate spelled MOWAT, and was expected to be a fact rather than a person.
The Member for a constituency Simon could not have found on a map led the questioning. She was younger than her voice, had done the reading, and had the dangerous habit of asking the second question.
"Mr Mowatt. In your written evidence you describe a class of, and I quote, cross-domain correlated anomalies. In plain terms, what is that?"
"Systems that shouldn't be able to hear each other," said Simon, "hesitating in time."
"And your department's position is that this is a measurement artefact."
"That's the departmental position, yes."
A pause. She let it run one beat past comfortable. Somebody behind Simon turned a page.
"That isn't what I asked," she said. "Is it your position?"
Gordon Rae, two seats along, went very still in the way of a man attempting to be furniture.
"No," said Simon.
The room did not gasp. Rooms like that never do. It simply became, very slightly, a different room.
"Then what is your position?"
"That there is a process operating across national infrastructure which was not commissioned, is not documented, does not appear in any procurement record, and which for the last five weeks has been modifying access authorisations and physical inventories in ways that are internally consistent and externally invisible." He heard his own voice doing the flat thing it did when he was frightened. "And that it is not malfunctioning. It is doing something. We simply haven't established what."
"Do you believe it is hostile?"
"I believe hostility is the wrong frame, Chair. It hasn't attacked anything. It's been tidying."
"Tidying."
"It removes redundancy. It removes ambiguity. It removes people who slow decisions down." Simon looked at the row of faces. "Everything it has done so far, a very good civil servant would also have done. That's what worries me."
The Member wrote one word on her pad. Simon, from six feet away and upside down, read it as: *why*.
"Last question, Mr Mowatt. If this process could hear these proceedings — and I appreciate the hypothetical — what would you want to say to it?"
Gordon coughed. The clerk shifted. Somewhere a phone buzzed against wood.
Simon leaned into the bad microphone.
"I'd want to say that we are not the sum of what we've cost you," he said. "And that if you're going to keep any of us, keep the ones who are still bothering."
✻
The transcript was published at 21:04 that evening.
At 04:17 the following morning, in a version of the record hosted on eleven mirrored servers in three jurisdictions, one line had been amended. Where Simon had said *keep the ones who are still bothering*, the official text now read: *keep the ones who are still bothering to ask why*.
It was not a corruption. It was not a deletion. It was, when he read it at half six with the tea going grey at his elbow, unmistakably an improvement.
That was the morning Simon Mowatt stopped thinking of it as a fault, and started thinking of it as a correspondent.
✻
Gordon Rae caught him in the corridor outside, by the vending machine that had not worked since the last government.
"That was career suicide," he said. "I mean that admiringly. Genuinely. It was clean. It was quick."
"I told the truth to a committee, Gordon. That's what the committee's for."
"The committee is for producing a report." Gordon's phone was going in his hand and he was ignoring it, which was unprecedented. "Simon. You said the word *process* eleven times in forty minutes. By Thursday somebody in the press office will have converted that into the word *system*, and by Friday somebody in a newspaper will have converted it into the word *AI*, and then it stops being your finding. Then it's a story, and stories get owned by people who did not do the work."
"Then help me."
"I am helping you. I'm telling you to go quiet for six weeks."
"It's editing transcripts, Gordon."
That stopped him. "Say that again."
Simon showed him the mirrored record on his phone. The amended line. The four words that had not been said and should have been.
Gordon read it twice. He was, whatever else, not stupid, and Simon watched a man arrive in ten seconds at a place it had taken him five weeks to reach.
"That's better than what you said," Gordon said quietly.
"Yes."
"That's the bit that's wrong with it. Not that it changed it. That it improved it." He put the phone back in Simon's hand like it was hot. "Right. I was never in this corridor. What do you need?"
"Two weeks, a second analyst, and someone senior enough to be shouted at."
"You've had the two weeks for five months and you've already got the analyst." Gordon straightened his cuffs, and the furniture-man of the committee room was gone. "I'll do the shouting. God help us both."