Inspected by No. 26

I just finished reading a book that I got off of amazon, Beebo Brinker, in the back was a sticker that read "Inspected by No. 26" I have no idea what it was inspected for but this is what it inspired.

He appeared at my door in the South wing of Q level in the middle of the night on May fifteenth. He was all but frothing at the mouth and his eyes were wild. He had a story to tell me, one that I'm not entirely sure that I believe, but it is his story, was his story. Not mine. I've put it down as accurately as possible, knowing that he told it too me over several cups of coffee, in my kitchen, at two in the morning and wouldn't let me leave his sight long enough to get my dictophone. In retrospect he was a sweet man, he might even have been a decent one, and so I'm doing what he asked of me. In all probability it was his last wish.

It was a stamp, or used to be, now it's just a sticker, black on white and slapped onto only books with approved content. That's my job description at any rate. The truth of the matter is far simpler, or vastly more complicated, depending on how much you want to read into it. You see, we were never given a set of guidelines, we censors. Despite common assumptions we never fail to approve a book for printing because we have no criteria on which to do so. I know what you think, that we must do something, failure to censor unapproved content is punishable by death, but that's the thing, it doesn't matter what we do. Sometimes a censor just disappears.
This is how it happens. First, to get the job, we're subjected to a whole battery of tests, like it says in the commercials; IQ tests, loyalty tests, tests of initiative and creativity, and of course tests of reading speed and memory. Only, what I noticed was that the people who were getting hired, at least around the time that I was, weren't the ones you would expect.
It wasn't the most loyal individuals, and it certainly wasn't the smartest. In fact the only test that, across the board, it paid to do well on was the speed reading test, other than that it seamed like the tests were all to find one particular type of candidate. Again and again I found, mostly just by talking to my coworkers, but in part do to a woeful lack of information security once you are inside the department of sanitation, that the men and women that actually got the job fit this one profile.
What was that profile? What was it that they were looking for, for their bright eyed, straight backed “Inspectors”? The darling ladies and gentleman in the pressed green uniform with that cute white hat? Well, I suppose for the ones that actually got the uniform they wanted photogenic people, picture perfect citizens. For those of us that actually did the work they wanted people desperate enough to apply for the job despite fulfilling none of the advertised criteria.
I worked in an office of ne'er do wells and slackers one government paycheck from being back starving in an F level apartment so close to the docks you can see the humidity... Needless to say, I fit right it, and we had the perfect job.
You see, we were given a stack of books each week, and stuck into each of these books by some drone, probably a C grade or lower, was a sheet of paper. On that paper was always the title of the book, the name of the author, and enough lines for a paragraph and a half, maybe two paragraphs, if you write small. Anyway, we would read through these books, as quickly as possible because we were paid for forty hours a week regardless of how many we actually put in, and for each book we would write a summary.
In the beginning I tried to be detailed in my summaries, and give some sort of reason for my approving the book. Not, you understand out of any sort of loyalty to the State or anything like that. No, it was just that being an Inspector was a damn good job, gave me an A3 grade and a free flat in the D level stacks and by damn I wanted to keep it.
After about five weeks I found myself actually engrossed in a novel, A Question of Taste by Ederly Hackton (I looked it up, it's the pen name of this retired machinist in the middle of Iowa, how he wrote some of the finest satire of our generation I will never know), and I saw one of the drones collecting the stacks of approved books. She stacked them onto her little blue cart and as she stacked them she pulled out the pieces of paper. I expected them to go into some folder for review, or at least filing, but she just shoved them into a waste basket she had with her, along with the leftover lunches of half the department... After that I stopped justifying my decisions.
Decisions, hell, may as well say approvals, I don't think anyone in the entire department rejected a single book. Not one. Nope, we came in late, spent the whole day speed reading, writing three sentence summaries, and slapping stickers on every book we were sent. Stickers saying “Inspected by No.” whatever. I was number twenty six, though how that was determined I was never sure. The highest number I ever saw was seventeen thousand eighty six point three and she was an office director by the time we were introduced. Go figure.
Of course we did do some real work, it wasn't all fun and games, no. We spent a significant portion of our time trying to figure out how not to die. Not that we talked about it, not that we would be caught dead admitting it to one another, but we would always take note when one of the censors would vanish. Those were our clues, we figured, we weren't given any other ones. We never even got sent any books that were terribly different from the ones that had been on the shelves our whole life, so that was no help, but whenever someone vanished we all became dumpster divers and itinerant hackers (not that it happened often, mind you, maybe three times in the seven years I've worked in the department). We were all looking for the holy grail, the book that was approved but never published, or was published with parts redacted.
Oh, and it seemed like no one that had been there more than ten years was bothering to look anymore. In the beginning I took that as a sign that they had figured out what was not to be approved, now I figure they were just tired of pushing their luck and realized that they had a good thing going if they just didn't question it to hard.
The first time someone vanished I thought I had it made. I had already figured out, you see, that our terminals were tapped directly into the State info pipe, and that they really didn't screen queries from the internal terminals. That was how I got the list of his last weeks books.
After I had that list there was no artificial way to narrow the field, they were always careful to take people over the weekend and then by Tuesday all traces of their existence had been purged from the system, maybe that's why they didn't take care of their security. I was naive enough that first time to think that I could just watch the new releases for all the books he approved that week and whichever book didn't appear that was the one that killed him. Then I figured I would have a title and an author and at least that would be a start.
I was almost right. For weeks one of the books resolutely failed to appear, it was The Far End by Megan Bernard. Yeah, that Megan Bernard. Of course when it finally came out it was the years best seller. I figure part of that was us in the department.
I don't know how many times I read that thing, must have been thirty, forty, forty five at least. I had it memorized by the time I gave up and spent weeks playing it through my mind, backwards and forwards. I don't know what I was looking for, I figured I would know it when I saw it I suppose, but whatever it was it would indicate that some part of the novel had been redacted as unapproved. I hoped to deduce from the surrounding content what was missing, but whoever did the redactions did a damn fine job. I didn't find anything and so far as I know no one else did either.
So, that's who I am, now I bet you're wondering why the hell I'm here.
Well that's easy enough. I'm hear because I'm a dead man walking, running more often than not. I ran afoul of the approval rules, whatever the hell they actually are, and they came after me. Now, I bet you can guess who's book it was that got the squads sent after me Mrs. Bradshaw, I read that novel of yours, November Starlight, and it was damn good, intelligently written, and I don't say either of those things lightly. Not anymore.
How do I know it was your book though, that's a slightly longer story.
Like I said, there were three people disappeared while I worked in the department. I did find a pattern, through my investigations. Not of books that were censored, no. Nothing so useful. All I found was that the books from our office were all printed and in stores by seven pm on Friday evening, and that ninety-nine percent of the time every single book that we approved was printed. All at once. It was that one percent of the time that somebody died.
Always in those cases there would be at least one book that did not appear on the shelves with the others, those books would, instead, appear some weeks later after the Inspector had been duly disappeared.
I started to come up with reasons not to be home on Fridays until after seven. I wouldn't go anywhere particular, that would defeat the point. I would wander the flats some weeks, or go to some upscale A level shopping center if I had enough credits banked to get through the door. I would leave work at different times, usually early, while there were still people there, witnesses I guess though whether or not that would stop them from taking me... I could hope.
Today there was a book missing from the shelf of new releases. The book was yours. I knew that today would come eventually, I've never been terribly lucky, but I got seven good years out of it so that's something... Anyway, I planned ahead. Every week I tracked down all the authors that I was assigned, your contact information is all stored on the pipe, it was as easy as asking to get. So when I saw that it was your book that was missing I came here.
It took me six hours because I did it all on foot. You don't realize how big these levels are from the mag-strips, so much of them are just gray blurs as you whip by face to the wind... I'll miss the mag-strips, not the rush hour maybe, but after hours and early mornings when it's just you and that constant background hum of the living levels.
That's what I did, before I took the Inspection job. I raced on the rails and I did the guerrilla challenges, you know? I was one of those idiots that would climb through the condemned areas, sometimes we would break one of the old doors and get into the maintenance levels. You can go anywhere through there, if you have the time. Tonight I didn't have a choice.
They will still be able to track me, I'm not that good, but hopefully not before I'm done...
I need you to do me a favor you see, that's why I went to all this trouble. When we are given a book that book is the only copy in existence. I am the only one, to my knowledge, that has read your book in its entirety. The only one, that is, except for you. In a few weeks it will be on the shelves and I'll be gone. The only person on station able to read it and find the redactions will be you.

I have allowed his words to speak for themselves without commentary, out of respect, but here I must interject for there was a sharp rapping on the door.
I looked at him, questioningly and he stared back for a moment as though reading my mind. He nodded, just once and I answered it. He stood up and pulled a kitchen knife out of a cardboard sheath hung in the small of his back and stood behind me.
The door opened to reveal a petite woman in a black suit and horn rimmed smart glasses, her hair pulled back rather severely. She carried a slate computer in matte black.
“Mr. Tobias Wright?”
“Yes ma'am,” he dropped the knife ostentatiously and presented his right arm, wrist up, displaying his barcode. She scanned it and tapped her slate a few times.
“Come with me please.” He followed her quietly out the door.

Three weeks later, as promised, the book that I consider my best work to date was released. I attended the premier signing with some trepidation, wondering what they had done to my book. I took home copy number one four two and read it in it's entirety as a was driven home.
Not a word had been changed.