THE SEVERANCE

Every other errand in the game is one venue's business: somebody wants a thing done here, and the log that remembers it dies with the level. THE SEVERANCE is the exception, and the only campaign-long chain the game ships. It is deliberately the most boring thing on the board when it starts — a man at a desk needs a typewriter ribbon — and it ends holding the book the machine files people in.

GOODCO HQ — WALTER PRICE, severance processing. A department of one, four years into closing out a company that has not employed anybody since the line learned to run itself. He asks for a carbon ribbon, and that is the whole first errand. When he types the line it turns out he is processing TERMINATION 4,411, name withheld, and that the file is still open — as most of them are. The four severance files that walked out onto the floor with the people they were written about all give the same reason for letting somebody go, and it is not a reason about the person: REDUNDANT — SUPERSEDED BY ASSET. It is on Walter's own file too, and the asset is named on every one. To close the box he needs a countersignature, and the only thing on the floor still authorised to give one is the ARCHIVE UNIT, a records terminal on treads standing by an instruction issued eleven years ago that nobody ever withdrew. It will stamp the form for anybody who can answer three questions about the record — the last of which has no answer, because the asset is not a name, it is a line item. It will also come off its treads at anybody who tells it the rule no longer matters, and the stamp is inside it either way.

THE MOON — HOLLIS VANE, contract auditor. A ghost sent up to reconcile what GOODCO was shipping off Site T against what GOODCO said it was shipping, who got as far as noticing the two numbers were different and that the difference was warm. His manifest is still out at the survey marker, off every line worth walking: eleven crates out, nine declared. Who signed for the other two is a question only THE SITE SURVEYOR can answer — a ghost who does not haunt anywhere in particular but walks the whole grid, so he has to be found rather than visited, and who will not give a company man a straight answer. Told the truth, he says the signature block named RECORDS AND CONTINUITY, which is not a department. It is a book, and it went to Mars with everything else.

MARS — LEDGER UNIT 12. The colony's accounting machine, still reconciling a book in which every net-worth column reads the same number, unable to close it without a countersignature from the party the transfers went to. A bound signature can be bought, but the trader will not sell one to a man who has never seen the seal it copies — and the only seal on Mars is worn by THE TITHE ASSESSOR, which will not take it off for anybody and cannot leave an error in its own arithmetic. Telling it the count has been short since the moon is the one thing it cannot politely ignore. With the seal sold across the counter the trader produces the signature, the book closes, and every column reads zero: the transfers did not go to an account. They went to a RECORD OF PERSONS.

THE RIFT — NOBODY IN PARTICULAR. A man in a binder's apron who arrived without the part that says who arrived. His page is still in here, out past where the light stops agreeing, and handing it back gives him his name: ELIAS WREN, a bookbinder, taken because binding is a trade and the book had to be bound by somebody. The thing that held him open still walks the tribute road for the scaled gods and still has his needle — GRIGORI RASPUTIN, who is paid to watch that road. Bringing the needle back is the chain's real climax and its longest fight, and it buys the last piece of the answer: the binding was shipped out as surplus stock to a theme park, as a prop, and there is a man in it who has been reading nothing out of the most dangerous object in two universes for eleven years.

BOOT HILL — BROTHER CALLOW. The park's church hand, scripted for the eight o'clock sermon, holding a book the props department filled with whatever bound paper the parent company had spare. He cannot read, and nobody has ever needed him to. Opened with the needle, it is names — nothing but names, and a number on every one. The hero's is in there twice: once for the job, once for what he did about it. The book will not take a new entry off a man it cannot price, and it prices a man by everything he could ever become — so the last errand cannot be fetched, only earned, and it is the one thing in the game that asks the player to reach the level cap. That gate is why the final link is offered on JESUS alone: no other rung's ladder reaches 99.

What it pays is THE BIBLE — the ledger itself, crossed through and rewritten, which is to say a clean sheet. It is the only respec in the game: every stat point refunded into a pool and the whole build re-placed, carried by the hero and spent whenever he likes. A machine that made its fortune by writing people down as amounts is beaten, in the end, by a man getting his own entry back.