MELIDE — The Bureau attended, by transmission, the sixtieth ordinary general assembly of an accounting association. Sixtieth. The species has convened the same assembly sixty times and records each convening as 'ordinary' — the highest compliment available to a committee, since an ordinary assembly is one where nothing unexpected was permitted to occur. The venue's name carried three adjectives before the noun, which on Terra is the established method for verifying that a hotel exists.
The agenda contained three items, and the Bureau grades them in the order they deserve. First: fifty-two humans passed federal examinations in finance and accounting — four at the expert grade, forty-eight at the specialist grade. The transmission prints all fifty-two names in full. The Bureau has read the register twice, as a mark of respect for any document that names fifty-two humans who each sat the same exams more than once to be listed once. The register includes Francesca Orsi. The Bureau files the name under: evidence that the counting department of this species functions when it decides to.
Second: the committee confirmed itself. The outgoing committee was re-elected in its entirety, seven humans, same seats. On Terra this is called continuity. The Bureau's glossary renders it as: a motion where the object and the subject hold the same chair.
Third — and the Bureau has been waiting a long time for this — a federal law entered into force on October the first that changes the WORDS. Holders of the expert diploma may now write 'Professional Master' beside their name; holders of the specialist certificate may write 'Professional Bachelor'. The diplomas did not change. The examinations did not change. The humans did not change. The words did. This species convened a legislature, moved paper through its institutions, and produced a statute whose entire operative content is the rearrangement of vocabulary adjacent to a credential.
The Bureau has examined the mechanism for the other hand and reports, with something close to disappointment, that it cannot find it. Renaming a thing without changing the thing is usually where the committee hides the cost. Here the thing — fifty-two trained humans, verified by examination, fed an aperitivo and a convivial dinner — is precisely as advertised. The words were upgraded because the people were. The Bureau has filed this under the rarest entry in its Terra taxonomy: a renaming where the humans came out ahead.
