Member-only story
Fiction- Short Story
The Durability Index
The field accepted it, and turned green, and moved her on to the next.
The correction request came in at the end of the shift, appended to a medical transfer, with the fourteenth field of the intake form flagged in the amber the bureau reserved for things that had already happened.
Ilka Sorrel read the name before she read the flag. Aukst, Deren M. Cohort forty-one. Nine months since intake, four since deployment to the Cassia Line. She did not need to open the original form to know what she had written in the fourteenth field. She remembered all of them, the high ones especially, the way a person remembers the shape of a promise they were never asked to keep.
0.81.
The field was labeled Projected Durability, and beneath it in the small gray type that no recruit ever read was the scale, 0.00 to 1.00, and beneath that a line of smaller type still, which said the value represented the bureau’s best estimate of the subject’s capacity to sustain physical and conductual integrity under operational load. That sentence had been written by someone who needed it to be true in a legal sense. Sorrel had been filling in the field for eleven years and had never once known the number when she wrote it.
