The Naming Office

The office had a window, which was unusual. Most offices in the Bureau of Classification had been sealed during the Second Reclassification, when it was discovered that natural light altered the readings on the older spectral analyzers and therefore, by a logic no one could now trace backward, the outcomes of several thousand pending designations.

The window faced east. Mornings were difficult.

Maren had worked in the Naming Office for eleven years. She had a rubber stamp that said PROVISIONAL and another that said FINAL and she had never used the second one. This was not a matter of caution. It was that no designation she had ever processed had met the criteria for finality, which were listed on a laminated card taped to her monitor and which referenced a subsection of the Classification Procedures Manual that referenced an older version of itself.

The card said: A designation is final when all parties with standing agree on its application.

Standing was defined elsewhere.

The case that morning was an animal. Or it had been an animal. The petition was to reclassify it as infrastructure, on the grounds that it had been performing a load-bearing ecological function for so long that its removal would constitute a systems failure rather than a death.

"It's a beaver," said Maren's colleague, Pell, who had read the file.

"It's a dam," said the petitioner's brief. "The beaver is the mechanism. The dam is the entity. The entity is infrastructure. The infrastructure is protected under Section 9."

Maren looked at the photograph. The beaver looked back. It had the expression of something that had not been consulted.

The problem, as Maren understood it, was not whether the beaver was infrastructure. The problem was that "beaver" and "infrastructure" were designations maintained by different offices, and the two offices used different criteria, and the criteria were stored in different systems that had been built in different decades by people who had never met and who, if they had met, would not have agreed on what "entity" meant.

This was not a design flaw. It was the design.

She stamped it PROVISIONAL and forwarded it to the Office of Entity Boundaries, which would forward it to the Bureau of Living Systems, which would return it with a note that said outside our scope — try Natural Resources and Natural Resources would return it with a note that said this appears to be infrastructure, please redirect to Built Environment and Built Environment would return it because it was, upon inspection, alive.

The beaver, meanwhile, would continue to be a dam.

Pell asked her once why she didn't just stamp something FINAL. Just once. See what happened.

"You can't," Maren said.

"Technically you can. You have the stamp."

"Standing," she said.

"You have standing. You're the Naming Officer."

"I have standing to apply PROVISIONAL. FINAL requires all parties with standing to agree, and I'm a party with standing, so I have to agree with myself applying it, which I can only do if the designation is final, which it can't be until I agree."

Pell stared at her.

"It's on the card," she said.

The beaver died that winter. The dam held for another three years, until a storm took it. Natural Resources filed a damage report. Built Environment declined to process it. The Classification Procedures Manual was updated to include a new subsection on "formerly living infrastructure" which referenced the subsection on "living systems performing structural functions" which had been written in response to the beaver, or the dam, or whatever it had been when it was alive and no one had yet asked.

Maren stamped the new subsection PROVISIONAL.

The window faced east. Mornings continued to be difficult.