Hollis Sarr

The Reading

The trade predates the lease by a long way. Before the Statutes, before the fleets, before anyone needed a name to rent, the Dregs had a problem that has never been solved: documents arrive written above the reading level the sender's own corporation certifies its customers at, and a person who cannot parse page forty-seven signs it anyway, because the alternative to signing is the street.

Sarr's answer was a table and a rate. He does not give advice. He reads. When a woman brings him a notice she has been carrying in her coat for three days, he reads all of it, at the pace it needs, and then he reads the worst sentence again. He does not tell her what to do. He has been asked to, thousands of times, and he does not, and the refusal is the closest thing he has to a principle: a document read aloud stops being a weapon; what you then do with it is not my business and not my risk.

The same skill, sold upward, is worth an unrecognisable amount of money. [Deep Verification](deep-verification) is the unlicensed market in humans who still actually read the page, and a corporation facing a liability exposure in the tens of billions will pay for one rather than trust its own licensed [Overseers](licensed-human-oversight). It is the same act. Sarr charges ¢2. The gap between those two prices is not a gap in ability; it is the price of who the reading is being done for.

By every reasonable expectation the trade should have ended in 2173. The Grounds Notice made an adverse determination void unless it arrives with its complete operative reasoning, drafted against a readability standard and addressed to the person it is against. The documents crossing his table now explain themselves. There is no buried page forty-seven, because the clause forbids one, and the clerks who write them are graded on whether a woman at a folding table can follow the argument.

She brings it to him anyway. He reads all of it at the pace it needs, and he still slows at the sentence that does the damage — which under the clause is no longer hidden but is still, reliably, on the third page, because the comparison is where the harm is and the standard requires the harm to be followable. She watches his face instead of the page. Then she asks him what he thinks, and he says what he says, and she signs.

What she was buying was never comprehension. It was somebody in the room while she got the news, and that is the one service 11.4(a) did not think to require and could not have. Sarr has never described the work this way. Asked once whether the clause had cost him business, he said it had made the mornings shorter and had not changed the number of people who came.

The Lease

He signed at [Inspire Exchange](inspire-exchange), under the amber light, on Olga's stamp of uncertain provenance, sometime between a facial and a courier run. He had already read it twice at his own table. Olga did not ask what it was. She does not ask.

What he understood, and what almost nobody who signs after him understands until it is explained, is that Article 9 is not a restriction placed on him. It is the thing being purchased. The fleet operator does not need a name; names are cheap. The operator needs a principal who is fully liable and structurally incapable of implicating anyone above them — a person at the end of the chain who cannot be made to testify because there is nothing they were permitted to learn. Sarr worked this out on the second reading, at his own table, in about forty minutes, and then he signed, because ¢1,100 a month is ¢1,100 a month and his rate had not moved since 2162.

Since then the envelopes have arrived. Summonses, notices of finding, one wedding registry confirmation, a garnishment order in a currency he has never held. All of them correctly addressed. He puts them in a cabinet at the back of the room and does not open them, because opening one is a breach and a breach voids the lease, and voiding the lease would require a court to read him his own life aloud before it could release him from it. There are nine years of them. He knows roughly how many there are by the weight of the drawer.

He has read the standard tenancy agreement aloud to eleven other people on Sump Row at his usual rate. He has never advised one of them not to sign. When [Yan Ryze](yan-ryze) asked him why, he said he did not think he had the standing, and then, after a pause that the counsel described afterwards as the longest of his professional life, said that he was also not certain he would be right.

The Rider

The indemnity offer came in 2183. It is in the same cabinet as the letters, on the same shelf, unsigned, and it is the only document in there he is allowed to open, so he has read it more times than he has read anything else.

The premium tier of a tenancy adds a second human to the lease as a named co-principal, and the private side agreement provides that when a custodial finding lands, that second person is the one who presents themselves. The rate is quoted per expected month. Sarr's quote is unusually good, and he understands why: no dependents on record, no medical flags, and a temperament the interviewer's notes describe, in the copy he was given, as unlikely to contest. The offer would roughly quadruple what the lease pays him.

He has not signed it. He does not describe this as a moral position and becomes uncomfortable when anyone else does. What he says, when he says anything, is that he has read the rate sheet, and that there is a line on it for time already served, discounted, because a person who has been inside has less left to sell. He says he keeps returning to that line and cannot get past it, and that he is not sure whether what stops him is conscience or arithmetic, and that he suspects a man who could tell the difference would already have signed or already have burned it.

The Woman Two Streets West

Ynez Barquero brought her first lease to the table in 2179 with the fee already counted out, which almost nobody does.

It was not a tenancy agreement. It was a seasonal licence on a speech marker — a held vowel her grandmother had been corrected for at a company school, now certified by the Authorship Assay and worth money to firms needing an attestation that reads as human. Sarr had not seen the form before. He read all of it, at the pace it needed, and he slowed at the clause that voids the agreement without compensation when the marker is struck from the live register, which is the clause that does the damage. Then he read that sentence again.

She asked him what he thought. He said what he says, which is that he does not think he has the standing, and then he said the other thing, which he has said to eleven people and which he has never been able to stop saying: that he is also not sure he would be right.

He has thought about it more than he lets on, because it is the first case that has ever gone the other way round. What he sold was his name, and a name is a thing the record does to you afterward — the findings accumulate, the rate drops, and the value leaves slowly enough that a man can pretend the lease is stable. What she sells is a sound her family was punished into keeping, and it will not deplete gradually. It will be live in one quarter's bulletin and struck in the next, on a schedule set by a training run in a building neither of them will ever enter.

He has not offered her the observation. She reads better than he does.

Appearance

A heavy, slow-moving man in three layers of salvaged coat, with reading glasses repaired at one hinge with wire and worn low so he can look over them at whoever he is reading to — which he does, constantly, because he is reading the face as much as the page. Grey at the temples, hands stained faintly violet at the fingertips from twenty years of handling stamped documents. He sits. He has always sat. The folding table is the same table.

The one incongruity is the cabinet behind him: metal, corporate-issue, out of place in a Sump Row stall, and locked with a mechanism he did not install and does not have the key for.

Voice

Unhurried to the point that people mistake it for slowness, then correct themselves. He does not editorialise while reading, does not sigh at the bad clause, and does not change his tone when the document turns — he changes his pace, and the regulars have learned to listen for it.

Asked about the tenancy, he answers plainly and completely, up to the boundary, and then says so. He does not perform reluctance. He says I'm not allowed to know that the way another man would say the shop is closed.

Sample Dialogue

"Two a page. Five if it needs explaining. This one needs explaining."

"I'll read it again. Same words. Listen to the second half of it this time."

"No — I don't know. That's not me being careful. There's a clause. I'm not allowed to know."

"I understood the agreement. I want to be clear about that, because people keep trying to make me the one who didn't."

Open Questions

• What is in the drawer, and does anyone have standing to open it before he dies
• Whether the eleven neighbours he read the agreement to would have signed without him
• Whether the indemnity interviewer's note — unlikely to contest — was an assessment or an instruction