Chapter 4 – The Sample

Katrin left for Basel on a Monday.

Three days, she had said. Back Wednesday.

She said it precisely, because she knew Simon counted.

He carried her bag down to the car and didn’t mention the weight of it.

“Text me when you’ve found the flat.”

“When I’ve found it.”

“You said this week.”

“I said maybe this week.”

Simon nodded.

Katrin looked at him across the roof of the car.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Counting.”

“I’m not counting.”

“You said three days like it was an amount.”

“It is an amount.”

She got in.

Before she closed the door she said, “That’s the whole thing in one sentence.”

Then she drove off.

Simon stood in the car park until the car turned onto the main road.

Three days was fifty-three minutes each way.

He caught himself and stopped.

· · ·

The first proper post-launch audit landed the same week.

It arrived the way these things always did: a spreadsheet no one had asked for and everyone had to sign.

Petra Vogel from Compliance walked him through it.

She had the manner of someone who had read every policy in the building and believed in exactly none of them.

“Forty cases,” she said. “Random sample. Post-implementation conformance.”

“Conformance to what?”

“The routing rules. Did each case go where the logic said it should.”

“Not whether the logic was right.”

“That’s not what this audit is.”

Simon almost smiled.

He knew that. He had written half the definition himself.

“Show me.”

She turned the laptop.

Forty rows. Case reference, model version, confidence, threshold, routing output, a conformance flag.

Every flag was green.

“All of them,” Simon said.

“Every one followed the rule.”

He scrolled anyway.

It was a habit he couldn’t quite retire. Numbers that were all the same colour made him want to find the one that wasn’t.

There wasn’t one.

He stopped near the bottom.

One row.

Weber, A. 43. Confidence 0.82. Routed: standard. Escalation: none.

He looked at it for a second longer than the others.

“This one.”

Vogel leaned over.

“Conformant.”

“It’s low.”

“Above the line.”

“Barely.”

“The line’s the line.”

Simon heard the sentence and, for half a second, heard it in another voice.

He couldn’t place which.

“High cost,” he said.

“That’s not a routing criterion on its own.”

“I know.”

“Then it’s conformant.”

Simon looked at the confidence again.

0.82.

Under the old threshold it would have gone to a human.

Under the new one it hadn’t needed to.

That had been the point. That had been his point, in January, in a room with a deleted slide.

Fewer cases sent to people who didn’t need to see them.

“We’re not checking the decisions,” he said. “We’re checking the process.”

“That’s what I said.”

“I was agreeing with you.”

Vogel looked at him.

“You don’t sound like you’re agreeing with anyone.”

Simon signed the sample.

Forty green flags.

He didn’t look at the name again.

· · ·

That evening Katrin sent a photo.

A small flat. Bare walls. A window with too much sky in it.

Found one. You’d hate the kitchen.

Simon looked at the kitchen.

He did hate the kitchen.

He wrote: It’s perfect.

Three dots.

Liar.

Then: It’s fine. Three years of fine.

Simon put the phone face down on the table.

Three years.

He noticed he had started counting again and, this time, let it run — quietly, in the background, the way the system ran under everything, sorting, routing, deciding what needed a second look and what did not.

Outside, the lake was doing its evening trick of disappearing.

Somewhere in the building, forty cases sat signed and closed.

Everything conformed.