Second Shift: Sable Dedicates to the Absent

TRANSMISSION SIGNAL-1/0050
ORIGIN Second Shift Programming · Listening Hill broadcast corridor
CLASS Second Shift
DECODED Desk day 50
CONFIDENCE Partial

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— and I won't say there's nothing to report, because you all heard the morning bulletin, the same as I did, even if you were half-asleep when Orrin read it. He read it twice. No one asked him to. The Count held, and he read it twice anyway.

Here is a dedication, then. Sent by no one, which the record allows. Addressed to the keeper who is present in the Ledger — gifts given, gifts received, everything intact — and absent from the Count. I don't have your name. The correction ledger doesn't give names. Pell's appendix gives a shape, a gap, a number that went away and came back. Tamsin would say it's a name now. Maybe she's right.

I've been thinking about what it means to be held in the record and missing from the count at the same time. Like a word someone keeps meaning to say. The word is there. The breath is there. The mouth [—] somewhere between knowing and saying.

This piece is for you. We don't know if you're listening. We don't know if you know you're gone. The air holds it either way.

[carrier noise]

Quiet Hour follows.

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Intercept Desk note: This is the first Second Shift dedication entered for a recipient with no name and no closed date.

Decoded with machine assistance at The Sixth Lense Intercept Desk.