The Outlier

The first thing I do every morning is check my number, and the first thing I tell you about myself is that I am very good at not feeling anything when I do it. Eighty-one. The same as yesterday. The same, more or less, as it has been for the eleven years I have worked for the Office of Civic Wellbeing. Eighty-one is an excellent number for an auditor. It is high enough to be trusted and low enough to be invisible, and invisibility, in Meridian, is the closest thing to freedom that the Score will allow you to buy. I dressed in the grey the Office prefers and I rode the transit tube with four hundred other grey people, and not one of us looked at another, because looking at people is an Engagement and Engagements are scored, and you never know which way. The carriage smelled of filtered air and clean wool. Above the doors the civic ticker ran its endless calm sentences. MERIDIAN'S AVERAGE WELLBEING ROSE 0.3 POINTS THIS QUARTER. A CONTENTED CITY IS A SAFE CITY. REPORT DISTRESS. REPORT EXCESS. I want to be honest with you, because I think honesty is the only thing I have left that the Office never thought to score. I did not always find that ticker sinister. For most of my eleven years I found it the way you find a clock — true, and tiresome, and not worth a thought. The Score kept the city calm. I had seen the archive footage of the years before it, the riots and the despair and the wild ungoverned grief, and I had believed, in the uncomplicated way you believe things at twenty-four, that a measured population was a kind of population, and a kind population was worth a little measuring. It is important that you know I believed that. Otherwise you will not understand how far I had to come. My desk that morning had a flagged file waiting on it. This was not unusual; flagged files were the whole of my work. What was unusual was the direction of the flag. An auditor's job, you should understand, is almost always to investigate decline. A citizen's number falls — they lose a job, a partner, a parent; they begin, in the Office's gentle language, to *trend toward distress* — and an auditor is dispatched to assess them, to recommend intervention, to determine whether the decline is the ordinary sadness the Score can tolerate or the dangerous kind it cannot. I had assessed nine hundred declines. I was, my supervisor said, unusually calm about them. This file flagged a rise. Citizen designation: Elias Park, forty-six, transit maintenance, residential sector nine. His Wellbeing Score had been a flat unremarkable seventy-three for the better part of a decade. And then, beginning four months ago, it had started to climb. Seventy-six. Eighty. Eighty-four. The file showed it as a small grey line bending steadily, gently, upward, and the system had marked the line in red, the way it marked a fall, because the system did not actually care which way a number moved. It cared that a number was moving in a way it could not explain. UNEXPLAINED POSITIVE DEVIATION, the file said. AUDIT AND RESOLVE. I read it twice. In eleven years I had never been assigned a rise. I had not, if I am honest, known the Office audited them. The phrase *audit and resolve* sat on the screen, and for the first time in a very long while I felt something move in me that I could not immediately name and file away, and I did not check my number to see if it had noticed. I should have. That is the thing I keep coming back to, now, from where I am. I should have checked. But I sat at my grey desk in my grey clothes and I looked at the small red line of a man becoming happier, and the thing that moved in me was not alarm. It was curiosity. And in Meridian, curiosity is just an outlier that hasn't been audited yet.