*Paris, November 5, 1990.*
Claire Pasquier had learned to recognize the strings that must not be cut.
The replaceable ones were clean, pale, bought by the roll from the stationer on the boulevard. The others had taken on the colors of the places where they had lived. Cellar gray, dust brown, almost black when carbon-stained fingers had handled them for years. Some had held nothing together for a long time. They remained tucked in envelopes because a knot, a tightening, or a label attached to the thread said something the box alone no longer could.
Nora Bensimon was holding just such a string between two fingers, looking like a woman entrusted with a rare insect when all she wanted was to install a computer.
“This one?”
Claire looked up from the open crate in front of her.
“With the envelope.”
“There’s no reference number.”
“There’s an ink mark.”
“You can’t search for an ink mark in a database.”
“That’s why the database won’t replace the box.”
Nora looked at the gray thread, then at the terminal at the far end of the room. Its screen was as deep as a small television and displayed, in green letters, the first data-entry form for the Lhomond Center inventory. For two weeks, it had forced the entire team to discuss things no previous generation had needed to decide: how many characters for a restriction, how to code a separate identity, whether an unknown date should be left blank or replaced with four zeros, and above all what a computer would do with a record whose usefulness depended precisely on the impossibility of tracing it back to a name.
End of excerpt. Discover the other stories in this universe.