ROME — Item three concerns the species' relationship with its own paperwork. The desk has reviewed a local poisoning case and grades the record-keeping exemplary. In the months before and shortly after the deaths of Antonella Di Ielsi and Sara Di Vita, two locals killed with ricin, someone is believed to have used a computer to search for news of the poison's effects. The machine noted the queries. The machine notes everything, timestamps them to the second, charges nothing, and has never once asked to be promoted.
Finding 1: the investigators are hunting the computer, on the sound theory that it kept receipts of its owner's curiosity and filed them automatically with an archive that cannot be bribed, misplaced, or poisoned. The species has thereby assembled a justice system in which the suspect prepares the evidence and the state collects it. The machine stores more than a bank — a bank being, per our glossary, an institution licensed to store numbers — and asks for less. No informant was recruited. None was required. The suspect had already reported on the poison, in writing, with dates, to a server, which by our taxonomy makes it the best-compensated informant on Terra. Salary: electricity.
"The modern suspect is remarkably cooperative," said Deputy Quaestor Agostino Ferri of the digital-evidence unit. "The citizen performs our surveillance, free of charge, and files it toward us. Our principal task is transport. We are, professionally speaking, couriers now." "People believe the search bar is a diary," said Dr. Bianca Moretti, a counsel in the case who specializes in digital procedure. "It is a diary that reaches the courthouse before its author and testifies in perfect order. I advise clients to assume it is under oath. It always is." The prosecutor's office has meanwhile applied its stamp to the names of three suspects: a professor, a technician, and a cousin. The file now enters the local judiciary's waiting list, the queue of the queue, where timestamps ripen until someone reads them.
Finding 2: the species designs its clothing to expire and its records to persist; one of these plans is working. Finding 3: the species grades its chief executives on vision and its poisoners on search history. Remediation: a pamphlet, Form 44/C, "Your Search Bar Keeps Minutes," to be issued to all suspects before they search. Deadline: Fiscal Period 44. Recurrence risk: high. The species intends to continue committing acts and describing them, unprompted, to machines.
Decision of the desk: the review is closed, filed, and timestamped by a machine the species did not pay and cannot silence. Observation will continue until the species stops filing reports against itself. The desk does not anticipate this. In Rome, the only witness that cannot be poisoned is the search log.
