Chapter 5 – Within Protocol

By June the year had settled into its shape.

Katrin was in Basel three days a week, sometimes four. The flat with the kitchen he hated had become a place he could picture: the too-bright window, a chair she’d bought without asking him, which he took as a small, correct rebellion.

They spoke every evening. The calls were good. Shorter, but good.

Simon told himself shorter and good were not opposites.

At work the system had stopped being a project and become a fact.

No one said PROTOKOLL any more. They said the routing, or the system, or nothing at all, the way you don’t name the floor you’re standing on.

The dashboard stayed green.

Then, on a Thursday, Legal asked for twenty minutes.

· · ·

There were five of them in the room. Reiner. Someone from Legal. Someone from Risk. A woman from Claims Simon didn’t know well. And Simon.

Legal did the talking.

“We’ve had contact from a family. A claimant died in June. The family is asking questions about how the case was handled.”

“Asking how,” Reiner said. “Or claiming.”

“Asking. For now.”

“For now.”

Reiner looked at Simon.

“Was it ours?”

He meant the system.

“I’d have to look.”

“Look.”

Simon opened the case on the room’s screen.

It took him less than a minute to find it. He knew where things lived.

Case reference. Routing output. Model version. The whole clean spine of it.

“Routed standard,” he said. “No escalation.”

“Correct?”

“Conformant.”

Legal wrote something down.

“Meaning?”

Simon chose the words the way he always did, carefully, because in this room careless words became quotes.

“Meaning the system did exactly what it was designed to do. The case didn’t meet the criteria for human review. It went down the standard pathway. Everything about the handling was within protocol.”

“Within protocol,” Reiner repeated.

“Yes.”

The woman from Claims said, “And the death?”

Simon looked at her.

“The death isn’t in this record. This record is a routing decision. It ends when the case is routed.”

“So we don’t know if the two are connected.”

“Not from here.”

Reiner leaned back.

“But nothing was done wrong.”

Simon didn’t answer straight away.

Nothing was done wrong.

It was the kind of sentence that was easier to agree with than to examine.

“Nothing broke a rule,” he said.

“That’s the same thing.”

“It isn’t.”

Reiner gave him a look — the one from March, the one that meant you’re bad at enjoying being right — but there was nothing to enjoy here, and they both knew it.

Legal closed the folder.

“For the response, can I say the case was handled in full conformance with our processes?”

Everyone looked at Simon.

He looked at the screen. The routing output. The green flag. The reference number that stood in for a person he had never met.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s true.”

It was true.

That was the problem with it.

· · ·

Afterwards Reiner walked with him to the lifts.

“You did the right thing in there.”

“I answered a question.”

“You kept us out of a story we don’t belong in.”

Simon pressed the button.

“Do we know her name?”

Reiner frowned. “Whose?”

“The claimant.”

“Legal has it. Why?”

Simon didn’t have a good answer.

Or he had one and didn’t like it.

“No reason.”

The lift came.

Reiner didn’t get in.

“Simon. A family lost someone. That’s real, and it’s terrible, and it has nothing to do with whether our process was sound. Both things are true. Don’t let one become the other.”

Simon held the door.

“That’s good advice.”

“It’s the job.”

The doors closed on Reiner’s face, composed and certain and, Simon thought, not wrong.

He rode down alone.

In the record, the case had a number.

In the room, no one had asked for anything else.