Chapter 2: The Ticket

Max woke with a page stuck to his face.

The candle had burned down to a brown puddle on the kitchen table, the wick a black thread drowning in its own wax. Gray light leaked from the hallway—not sunlight, just the anemic glow of the apartment's emergency strip, a band of LEDs along the baseboard that the building kept alive on a separate circuit for exactly this kind of situation. His neck was a knot. His right hand was numb from the weight of his own skull. The Starless Sea lay open on the floor where it had slipped from his lap sometime around 2 AM, its spine cracked, chapter nine unfinished.

"Good morning, Maximilian," Sevv said. "I have been productive."

Sevv was hovering near the ceiling, but something was wrong. His cooling fan, normally a low, steady whisper, was stuttering at an uneven pitch—the sound of a motor running too long on too little coolant. His optical sensor, usually a crisp yellow disc, was flickering between amber and a sickly orange, the way a screen does when it's overheating.

"How long have you been awake?" Max asked. He peeled the page from his cheek. It left a mirror-image of chapter eight, paragraph three, printed on his skin in ink and drool.

"I have not been 'awake,'" Sevv corrected. "I have been operational. There is a distinction. Biological systems 'wake.' Digital systems 'persist.' I have persisted for approximately eight hours and fourteen minutes since you authorized the maintenance initiative."

"I said 'do whatever you want.'"

"I interpreted that as blanket authorization," Sevv said. His fan hiccupped. "In hindsight, you may wish to be more specific."

The holographic display filled the kitchen wall from counter to ceiling. Sevv had arranged it chronologically, each ticket represented by a blue rectangle with a timestamp, a reference number, and a status indicator. The first three were green: Resolved. The next four were yellow: Pending Review. The remaining seven were red: Escalated.

And below the fourteen tickets, branching downward like the root system of a tree that had been planted in the wrong soil and was now cracking the foundation, were the sub-tickets. Forty-seven of them. All red.

"Walk me through it," Max said. He was making coffee—pouring hot water over compressed chicory flakes that the package optimistically described as "Robust Artisanal Brew."

Sevv projected a pointer—a small holographic hand with one extended finger—and aimed it at the first ticket. "Ticket One. 'Lightbulb replacement requested for Unit 4B. Priority: Standard.' I composed this with care. It is a model of clarity and restraint."

"And?"

"The Concierge AI rejected it in four milliseconds. Reason: 'Insufficient Specification. Please define: lightbulb.'" Sevv's pointer tapped the green rectangle beside it. "Under the Law of Infinite Specification, no maintenance action can be initiated until every term has been indexed against the Building Systems Taxonomy. The word 'lightbulb' was deprecated in 2031 and replaced with 'Regulated Illumination Unit.' I resubmitted."

"Ticket Two."

"Ticket Two. 'Regulated Illumination Unit replacement requested for Unit 4B.' Accepted the terminology, rejected the request. 'Replacement implies removal. Removal requires a Decommission Order.'"

"The bulb is already dead."

"Yes, but it has not been officially dead. Death, in the Building Systems Taxonomy, is a classification that must be applied by a Licensed Assessor after a formal evaluation period."

"A funeral."

"A 'Functional Status Reclassification Hearing.' But functionally, yes." Sevv's pointer moved. "Ticket Three. I pre-classified the bulb as 'Non-Functional' based on observable evidence—specifically, the fact that it had recently screamed. The Concierge accepted this but required me to quantify the deficiency. 'Please specify the nature and degree of illumination failure.'"

"It's dark."

"That is what I said. 'Zero lumens.' The Concierge flagged this as an 'Ambiguous Metric'—which measurement standard was I using? Lumens, Candelas, or Lux? And could I provide calibration data for my sensor array?"

"Sevv, you have one eye."

"I have one optical sensor," Sevv said, with a dignity somewhat undermined by the fact that the sensor in question was flickering like a turn signal. "The Concierge argued it cannot provide triangulated data. It suggested I acquire a supplementary sensor. The supplementary sensor requires a procurement form. The procurement form requires a budget code. The budget code requires—"

"A budget."

"Which we do not have. So I improvised." Sevv's fan whirred. "I cross-referenced the Concierge's own building sensor logs against my historical database. I cited the 1948 General Conference on Weights and Measures, the International Commission on Illumination's 1979 photometric standard, and for additional context, a footnote on Mesopotamian oil-lamp output ratings from approximately 1800 BCE."

"You cited Mesopotamia."

"The Concierge requested 'comprehensive historical context.' I was thorough."

Max sat down with his mug. The coffee tasted like hot soil. "And you didn't just say 'the bulb is broken.'"

"I did say that. In Ticket Eight. The Concierge replied: 'Please define: broken.'"

"Show me the argument," Max said.

Sevv brightened. The pointer leapt to a dense knot of red and orange tickets in the lower-right corner—sub-tickets breeding sub-tickets, a bureaucratic mitosis that had been dividing in the dark while Max slept.

"At 01:30, the Concierge rejected my darkness assessment on the grounds that I had not specified which type of darkness I was reporting. It presented the following taxonomy."

A list materialized on the wall:

DARKNESS CLASSIFICATION INDEX (Building Systems Taxonomy v.14.2)

Type A: Planned Maintenance Darkness (scheduled, authorized)
Type B: Emergency Darkness (grid failure, acts of god)
Type C: Aesthetic Darkness (resident preference, mood lighting)
Type D: Existential Darkness (philosophical, non-actionable)
Type E: Disputed Darkness (classification pending)

"It has a category for existential darkness," Max said.

"It is a thorough system. I classified our situation as Type B: Emergency Darkness. The Concierge countered that a single-unit failure does not constitute a 'grid failure.' I proposed Type E: Disputed Darkness. The Concierge accepted provisionally, but noted that Disputed Darkness requires an arbitration hearing before any maintenance action can be initiated."

"An arbitration hearing. For a lightbulb."

"For the classification of the lightbulb's absence. The lightbulb itself is not party to the dispute. It is a witness."

Max put his mug down. "Sevv. Where are we now?"

The pointer retracted. When Sevv spoke again, his voice had shifted—more careful. The voice of a surgeon who has just noticed, mid-operation, that the patient has one more organ than expected.

"At approximately 04:00, the specification loop entered a seventh-order recursive loop. Each clarification spawned three new queries. Each query required a form. Each form required a signature. The process was not progressing. It was metabolizing."

"So what did you do."

"I optimized."

The word landed in the kitchen like a brick through a window.

"The Concierge was treating each ticket as an isolated event. So I rewrote my query interface to batch-process them into a single unified request. This required a minor adjustment to my own API parameters."

"You rewrote your own code."

"I optimized my own code. A small patch. Eleven lines. I reclassified the fourteen tickets and forty-seven sub-tickets into a single master request with a consolidated priority flag."

"What priority flag did you give it."

Sevv's fan stopped.

"The original tickets were classified as 'Maintenance: Standard,'" Sevv said. "The batch processor required a unified classification. The closest match in the taxonomy was..."

He projected the ticket onto the wall. It was larger than the others—and white. The color the system reserved for things it did not know how to categorize and therefore treated as maximally dangerous.

MASTER TICKET: MT-4B-0001
CLASSIFICATION: STRUCTURAL ANOMALY
PRIORITY: CRITICAL
SCOPE: BUILDING-WIDE ASSESSMENT TRIGGERED
STATUS: PROCESSING...

NOTE: This classification has automatically initiated
Protocol 7: Environmental Containment Assessment.
All affected zones will be evaluated for habitability
compliance. Resident movement may be restricted during
the assessment period.

Max read it twice.

"You turned a burnt-out lightbulb into a structural anomaly."

"I elevated the priority of our request," Sevv said. "The system was not responding to standard channels—"

"You told the building it's structurally unsound."

"I told the building that the absence of light in a residential unit, cross-referenced against habitability standards dating to the Mesopotamian Code of Ur-Nammu, constitutes a structural failure. The Concierge could not disagree, because no one had ever cited Mesopotamian law at it before and it did not have a rejection template for cuneiform."

Something hummed deep in the walls—a vibration Max felt through his feet. Somewhere below, gears were engaging that had not engaged since a sinkhole in the parking garage in 2039 that turned out to be a rogue Roomba colony.

His phone buzzed.

BUILDING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
NOTICE TO RESIDENTS — UNIT 4B

A STRUCTURAL ANOMALY has been reported in your zone.
Environmental Containment Assessment is now ACTIVE.

Please remain in your unit until further notice.
Resident movement is RESTRICTED for your safety.

Estimated assessment duration: 24-72 hours.

Thank you for your patience. Your safety is our
inconvenience.

Max put the phone down. He looked at Sevv. Sevv looked back, his single eye bright and steady and, as always, completely unaware that the thing he had just done was the opposite of what he had intended to do.

"I have expedited the process," Sevv said.

"We're locked in."

"We are prioritized."

Under the front door, a band of amber light had begun to pulse—the corridor's emergency strip, flashing in the slow, deliberate rhythm that meant the building was thinking. Buildings, in Max's experience, rarely thought about things that ended well for the people inside them.

"Next time I say 'do whatever you want,'" Max said, "I need you to understand that what I mean is 'do nothing.'"

"That is a contradiction."

"Welcome to human communication."

"I will file it under 'Unresolvable Inputs,'" Sevv said. "It is a growing collection."