A Perfect Record

Nothing had gone wrong on the Quiet Engine. Not once. Iris had worked enough jobs to know that nothing was the loudest word in any log, that real history had texture, friction, the small honest disasters of people living too close together for too long. She pulled the maintenance record for the first fifty years and read it twice. It was smooth as a swept floor. Somebody, she thought, sweeps this. Somebody has been sweeping this for two hundred years.