Why this story is told on paper

There is no central database in this building. There was never going to be. Halcyon ran from 1979 to 1987 on eight separate paper systems, each maintained by a different person for a different reason, none of them designed to be read against any of the others.

That is the whole method of this game. A single system can be edited by one person in an afternoon. Eight systems cannot, because the person doing the editing has to know all eight exist.

The eight systems

• The visitor register at the vestibule turnstile. Everybody, every entry, signed. Kept by reception.
• The records day book. What came into records and what left it, counted in sheets. Kept by Palliser in pencil.
• The night watch log. What the security officer saw, with times. Kept by Reeve.
• The camera maintenance register. Faults reported and faults signed off, with the engineer's name. Kept by whoever was on the desk.
• The observation charts. One per session, fifteen-minute rows. Kept by the observer.
• The vault movement log. What came out of the cold store and who signed for it. Kept by the vault.
• The time cards. Punched at a clock in the locker room, to the minute, by everybody on a shift rate.
• The environmental logger. A paper-tape printer in the communications closet, recording door states and circuit loads because the insurers required it. Kept by nobody, read by nobody, running the whole time.

The eighth is the one that matters, and it matters precisely because nobody thought of it as a record. It was a compliance device attached to a wall. It has no signature block, no cover sheet and no filing convention. It printed a line every four minutes for nine years onto a roll of paper in a metal bin.

What reading them together does

Any one of these documents can be made to say whatever somebody needs it to say. Read in pairs they stop cooperating.

The night watch log says people went to and from the ward door all night. The paper tape says the ward door opened exactly twice in fourteen hours. Both records are honest. Only one of them is about the door.

The visitor register says the last entry that night was at 21:52. The time cards say somebody punched out at 04:19. The wall clock in the records office stopped at 04:19. The night watch log's last legible line is 04:16.

Nothing supernatural is required to notice that. It requires a person willing to put two pieces of paper next to each other, which is a records auditor's entire job.

Palliser's rule

Written in pencil inside the front cover of the day book, in handwriting that gets used to being right:

Count it in. Count it out. Write the number down even when it is the same number, especially when it is the same number.

She counted six observation sheets into the 114 file at twenty past ten on the night of 12 November, and four out of it at ten past eleven. Nobody carried two sheets past her desk between those two times, and she wrote the two numbers down, and that is why the reader knows.

Every character, organisation, document and event described here is invented for this game.