THE ALGORITHM OF ASH

french

DOCUMENT I : The Routine Report (The Awakening)

MINISTRY OF PURE VERB Audit Report n°88-Beta | Residue Processing Unit : Sector G-3 Author : Gemal, Verifier Class 4.

The tonnage of textual residue admitted to the grinding center amounts to 418 units. The composition of the flow is compliant. However, an unusual density was noted in lot n°404. The ash structure forms aggregates of 26 units. Recommendation : Recalibrate the grinders. The void must remain void.

Gemal set down his pen. In the sorting room, the roar of the "Purgatrices" devoured silence, a permanent hum that aspired to be single thought. The air was saturated with the "flour of oblivion," that gray dust from ground books that seeped into lungs and thoughts, numbing them.

He opened his metal desk drawer. At the bottom, beneath a stack of blank forms, lay the fragment. A piece of paper three centimeters square, yellowed, bearing a single handwritten digit : 8. He had found it the day before in lot n°404, wedged between two plates of compacted ash. A miracle of resistance. Most ground texts left only uniform dust. But sometimes, a sign survived.

Gemal slipped the fragment into his sleeve, against the skin of his wrist. The contact of the paper was rough, alive. It was a code, of course. The 8 was not a simple digit. In Hebrew, it was Het, the letter of life, of enclosure. Numerical value : 8. But who had sent it ? And how ?

He closed the drawer at the precise moment Sommer’s shadow stretched across the metal table. The Inspector of the Total Sum did not speak ; he simply emanated an odor of cold tobacco and accounting certainty. The paper fragment—the handwritten "8"—burned against his wrist, hidden beneath his sleeve. For Sommer, it was merely an impurity in the flow. For Gemal, it was a frequency, the beating of a heart still alive.

--"Numbers never lie, Gemal," Sommer murmured. "But they can hide a thief. Why did lot 404 take three seconds longer to dissolve ?"

--"Fiber resistance, Inspector," Gemal replied without blinking. "Matter is sometimes stubborn before becoming nothing."

Sommer scrutinized Gemal’s face, searching for a rhyme, a forbidden harmony. Then, with a sharp gesture, he signaled him to follow. The hour of confrontation was approaching. The Residue Processing Unit receded behind them, a monument of right angles and uniform gray, swallowing the daylight.

DOCUMENT II : The Interrogation Record (The Initiation)

Subject : H-8 (formerly "Eight") | Location : Rectification Cell n°13 Sommer :

-- "Why do your reports weigh 611, when blank paper weighs only 600 ?"

-- H-8 : "I only added the Law." Clerk’s Note (Gemal) : 611 is the value of the Torah. The old man transmits the code. My name is worth 73. 611 + 73 = 684. I must find page 684 of the waste registry.

In the rectification cell, Gemal typed on his machine, his fingers dancing an invisible score. Each word dictated by Sommer was a prison brick ; each digit adjusted by Gemal was a crack in the wall. The air, confined, smelled of cold metal and fear.

SOMMER : "So, H-8... Sixty crates. And an excess weight that defies physics. Explain to me how nothing can weigh more than the norm."

Gemal began to strike the record. Click. Click. Click.

Don’t look at him. If I meet H-8’s eyes, Sommer will see the reflection of recognition. I must become an extension of the keyboard. I am the metal. I am the circuit.

H-8 : (His voice was a breath of torn parchment) "Truth has a density, Inspector. Even when you erase it, it saturates the medium."

SOMMER : "Truth is official data, you old fool. Everything else is noise. Clerk ! Note : Metaphysical ravings tending toward obstruction."

Gemal struck the words. But in his head, the calculation raced.

Eight said "Density." D-N-S-T-Y... Dalet-Noun-Samekh. 4-50-60. Total 114. I check the waste registry in real time on my second screen. Lot 114 : "Archives of Lyric Poetry." He’s giving me the location of the next text to save. Sommer is thirty centimeters from me. He can sense my body heat increasing. Calm down. Breathe in binary. 0. 1. 0. 1.

Sommer stopped abruptly. He placed his hand on Gemal’s shoulder. The contact was heavy, inquisitorial.

SOMMER : "You type fast, Gemal. Almost too fast. It’s as if you know the answer before it’s formulated."

Gemal stopped cold. He raised his eyes, not toward the prisoner, but toward Sommer, with perfectly imitated coldness.

"Efficiency is my only directive, Inspector. Would you like me to slow the processing ? That would delay the case closure by 14%."

The number 14. I just injected a statistic. He loves statistics. It’ll occupy him while he searches for the logic of my delay. 14... it’s David. It’s the king. It’s the lineage. The old man understood, I see his lips tremble. He’s smiling inwardly.

SOMMER : (Withdrawing his hand) "No. Continue. Eight, tell me about Agent 404. Is it a man or an equation ?"

The bit of paper marked "8" pricked him under his sleeve, sharp as a sting.

If I crack now, all three of us die. Agent 404 is the silence I’m building under your eyes, Sommer. You’re looking for a culprit, but you’re interrogating the door of your own prison.

"The subject refuses to answer regarding variable 404," Gemal dictated in a monotone voice, while encoding in the document’s margin the exact frequency of the emergency exit.

Sommer gathered his file. His gaze slid one last time over Gemal, then over the prisoner, with the contempt of one who believes he has counted everything and found only void.

"Finish the entry, Gemal. And have this... object... transferred to the drainage service. There’s no point calculating on sand."

The heavy steel door swung. The lock engaged with the dry sound of a sentence. Sommer was gone. The silence that settled was not that of the Ministry ; it was a full silence, heavy with all that had not been said.

Gemal did not move immediately. He turned off his control screen. H-8’s reflection appeared in the black of the glass panel. The old man had collapsed, his shoulders held only by the force of a memory.

H-8 raised his head. His eyes met Gemal’s in the reflection. There were no tears, no smile. Just a mathematical recognition.

"Do you have the fragment ?" the old man murmured. His voice was no more than a rustle of atoms.

Gemal slid his hand into his sleeve and pulled out the small piece of paper bearing the digit 8. He placed it on the metal table, between them.

"684," Gemal replied simply. "The archive page. I’ll retrieve it tonight."

H-8 closed his eyes. A sigh of relief made his emaciated rib cage vibrate.

"Then the total is right. Gemal... don’t forget. 404 is not a destination error. It’s the moment when the scribe erases himself so the text becomes the world. They’re going to take away my words. They’re going to empty my memory. But as long as you calculate, I remain whole."

An immense pressure weighed on his heart, the numerical value of pain. He took back the paper fragment and, in an almost sacred gesture, swallowed it. The paper tasted of dust and acid ink. It became part of him.

"I’m no longer a clerk," Gemal said in a low voice. "I am the archive."

Footsteps echoed in the corridor. The guards of Semantic Drainage were arriving. Gemal stood, smoothed his gray uniform, and resumed his automaton mask. When the door opened again, only a zealous functionary and a broken old man remained in the room. But in the invisible structure of the air, an equation had just been solved.

DOCUMENT II bis : The Living Archive (The Transmission)

Gemal was not sleeping. 02:17. Basement level -3.

The waste registry was a colossal volume, bound in gray cloth, thick as a funeral stele. Gemal pulled it from the shelf with caution. Weight : 11.4 kilograms. The dust that escaped formed a cloud in the beam of his pen-light.

Page 684.

He turned the leaves with surgical slowness. 680. 681. 682. 683. 684.

There, under the column "Content description," a handwritten line : Private correspondence. Author : Sarah L. Addressee : unknown. Confiscated during the purge of the Printers’ Quarter, March 14.

Gemal took a pencil from his pocket. He noted the reference on a blank paper fragment he always kept on him. Then, beneath the handwritten line, he saw something unusual : a tiny ink stain, almost invisible, in the margin. Not an accidental stain. A point. Then another. A sequence.

He counted. Seven points. Seven is Zayin. The weapon. The goad.

A voice behind him :

"Are you looking for the same thing I am, Gemal ?"

He spun around, his hand on the registry to close it. A woman stood in the shadow, between two shelves. Small, fiftyish, round glasses that reflected his lamp’s light. She wore the uniform of Night Archivists, Maintenance section.

"I don’t know you," Gemal said in a low voice.

"Neither do I," she replied. "But we both know H-8. And we both know 684 is not random."

Gemal did not move. If this was a trap by Sommer, he was already caught. But something in the woman’s voice did not carry the Ministry’s coldness. She had the accent of the West Quarters, those that had been razed.

"Who are you ?"

"I’m called Daleth. The door. I circulate the fragments you save. H-8 told me about you six months ago, before they arrested him. He told me : ’Look for the clerk who counts in silence. He carries the 73.’"

A dull beat resonated in Gemal’s chest. 73. The value of his name. No one knew he calculated this way, except...

"H-8 was my father," Daleth added in a voice without tremor. "Not biologically. But he taught me to read when I was seven, in the Printers’ Quarter, before the purge. He showed me that each letter was a number, that each number was a door. When they arrested him, I understood I had to become invisible to continue his work. So I became a cleaning woman. No one looks at cleaning women."

"H-8 is in a cell. They’re going to empty him tomorrow."

"I know," Daleth said. "That’s why I came. We must extract page 684 before dawn. Sommer has programmed an archive purge. Everything dating from before Standardization will be burned in 72 hours."

Gemal looked at the registry. 72 hours. The time of a world.

"How do you know Sommer is going to purge ?"

"Because I’m the one who cleans his office. He leaves his notes on his desk. He doesn’t see me. To him, I’m furniture. But furniture has eyes."

She extended her hand. In her palm, a paper fragment, larger than Gemal’s. On it, a list of handwritten numbers. Gemal recognized them immediately. They were the gematric values of forbidden words : Liberty (684), Memory (351), Poetry (395).

"H-8 hid these values in his reports for years," Daleth said. "Each report was an index. He told us where to find the texts to save before they were ground. You must continue his work, Gemal. You’re the only one with access to official registries."

Gemal took the fragment. The paper was warm, as if it had been held a long time.

"If I do this, Sommer will eventually understand."

"He already understands," Daleth replied. "But he can’t prove it. And as long as he can’t prove it, we exist."

A sound. Distant. A door slamming, three floors up. Daleth retreated into the shadow.

"I must go. Page 684 is a letter from Sarah L. to her son. She explains how to read between the lines of official texts. This letter is a key. Extract it. Copy it. And integrate it into your next report."

"How ?"

"As H-8 showed you. In gematria. Each official word you write will contain the value of a forbidden word. The Ministry will read the surface. We will read the structure."

She disappeared between the shelves. Gemal remained alone, the registry open, page 684 before his eyes.

He took out his pencil. He noted the letter’s complete reference. Then, with a goldsmith’s precision, he copied the first seven lines onto a blank paper fragment that he folded and slipped into the lining of his left shoe.

When he closed the registry, he knew Sommer would come. Not tonight. But soon.

DOCUMENT III : The Rectification Circular (The Victory)

Subject : Definitive neutralization protocol.Every CITIZEN must LEARN SILENCE. The LAW is ONE. The WEIGHT of the PAST is DEAD.

Gemal, now Commissioner of Standardization, adjusted his collar. He had just signed the circular that put an end to all literature. To his right, Sommer, aged and suspicious, still had not found the flaw. Sommer’s body was heavier, his gait less assured ; he carried the weight of his accounting failures.

The circular’s text was of absolute dryness, a mosaic of numbers and dead directives. But Gemal knew that if one jumped from word to word according to the sequence of his own value—73—the text no longer spoke of death, but of resurrection.

Excerpt from Circular n°405, paragraph 2 :

"Every citizen must learn silence. The law is one. The weight of the past is dead. No one shall preserve memory of texts prior to Standardization. The archive is closed. Any consultation of ancient registries will be punished. Liberty consists in obeying. The present suffices. No nostalgia will be tolerated. The future belongs to numbers. Only the void guarantees order. Each will receive their function. No one will question. Speech is counted. Any deviation will be erased. The ministry watches. Nothing escapes calculation. Everything enters the sum. No one remains. Poetry is forbidden. Only the directive counts."

Reading every 73rd character from the beginning, one obtained :

"Memory lives. Liberty. No one erases poetry."

He descended to the courtyard. Agent 404 (H-8) sat there, an empty silhouette in the dust of a white garden, where even the flowers had been replaced by geometric sculptures.

Gemal stopped three meters away. He observed the old man. H-8 no longer raised his eyes. His mouth no longer moved. His hands, resting on his knees, no longer trembled. They had taken away his words. Not just the ability to say them, but the memory of having known them. His eyes were open, but they fixed on nothing. They had become two black holes, two perfect zeros.

Yet H-8’s finger traced a line in the dust. Again and again. A horizontal line. The lower stroke of the Aleph. The gesture had survived the erasure. The body remembered what the mind had forgotten.

Gemal passed before him. He said nothing. He made no gesture. But with the tip of his shoe, he completed the figure. He added the vertical stroke. The Aleph was whole.

The corridor on the 73rd floor was a tunnel of white marble, without shadow or echo. Gemal walked at a steady pace, holding against him the seal of Circular n°405. At the end of the corridor, a massive silhouette blocked the light : Sommer. The inspector had not moved from his post, even though technically, Gemal was now his superior. Sommer held in his hand a copy of Gemal’s report, already scrawled with obsessive calculations.

"Commissioner Gemal," Sommer said in a voice that resembled the grinding of paper. "I’ve reread your circular. Three times."

Gemal stopped at the regulatory distance. He did not fear Sommer’s reading. He feared his intuition.

"And what do you conclude, Sommer ? Does standardization not suit you ?"

"Oh, it’s perfect," Sommer replied, approaching. "Too perfect. The frequency of substantives is of metronomic regularity. It’s like a crystal. But you know what a crystal is, Gemal ? It’s a structure that repeats to hide a void. Or a frequency."

Sommer pointed a thick finger at paragraph 2 of the document.

"I added up the value of your titles. I multiplied the number of lines by the waste tonnage mentioned in Document I. You know what I get ?"

A treacherous heartbeat rose in his throat. He did not answer.

"I get 404," Sommer murmured. "The error number. Old Eight’s registration number."

Gemal held the gaze. He knew Sommer could not prove intent. In this world, only results counted.

"404 is the value of the ’Sign,’ Sommer. It’s the mark of the end. If my report lands on this number, it’s because it’s the logical culmination of our work. We have reached the limit of language. There is nothing left to say. It is absolute order."

Sommer narrowed his eyes. He searched for the flaw, the tremor, the hidden poetry. But Gemal had become a wall of numbers.

"Perhaps," the inspector finally said. "Or perhaps you are the greatest forger this Ministry has ever carried."

Sommer stepped aside to let him pass. Gemal resumed his walk. Passing the inspector, he could not help but glance toward the interior courtyard, far below.

Agent 404 (H-8) was there, sitting on his stone bench. He was not looking up. He was busy tracing a line in the dust with his finger. To a guard, it was the gesture of a madman. To Gemal, it was the horizontal stroke of the letter Aleph, the beginning of everything.

Gemal entered his new office. He sat down, took a blank sheet, and before beginning his day, he wrote a single digit in the bottom right corner, almost invisible : 1.

The unit. The first fragment of a new cycle.

He raised his eyes to the window. On the other side of the interior courtyard, on the 71st floor, a silhouette stood motionless behind a window. Sommer. The inspector was not moving. He held a notebook in his left hand, a pencil in his right. He was calculating.

Gemal held his gaze across the two hundred meters of void separating them. He did not blink. Then he lowered his eyes to his sheet and traced a second digit, just next to the first : 3.

1 and 3. Aleph and Gimel. The beginning and the path.

When he raised his head, Sommer had disappeared. But Gemal knew he had not left. He had simply descended one floor. He was getting closer.

In the lining of his left shoe, the fragment of page 684 weighed like an ember. Somewhere in the city, Daleth was transmitting the first copies to the other doors of the network. H-8, in his white garden, traced lines in the dust that no one understood, except those who knew how to read.

Gemal set down his pencil. He would wait. Silence was a strategy. Accumulation was a trap. He had learned this from H-8 : it is not the quantity of words that resists, it is their density.

He closed his eyes for a second. Then he reopened his commissioner’s registry and began drafting the day’s directive.

Each word he wrote was a number. Each number was a door.