Glasgow

Brian Tait arrives at the Glasgow Regional Office carrying a bridge hammer and the strong suspicion that he has accepted the wrong job.

The front door requires both hands.

The roof leaks.

Reception is repairing a kettle.

This is the good news.

Brian has been hired to inspect load paths: the hidden chains by which weight moves through a structure until something, somewhere, agrees to carry it.

Glasgow turns out to have them too.

Not only in bridges and buildings.

In neighborhoods. Families. institutions. Favors. Repairs. People who keep taking one more load because the official support failed three owners ago and nobody updated the drawing.

Then something beneath the city begins looking for permanent support.

Reality Services wants to know what is carrying Glasgow.

Glasgow objects to the question.

The city has survived by making support temporary, local, revisable and impossible to own completely. Headquarters would prefer a diagram.

The final inspection produces a more useful warning:

LOAD LIMIT UNKNOWN.

INSPECT REGULARLY.

Glasgow has not defeated the problem.

It has made permanence impossible.

For the moment, that is enough.

Included free: a complete story from The Office of the Second Census, whose structural concerns involve rather more dead people.