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.