Inside the Bureau: how Form 27-B keeps you alive, on paper

For six years I worked on Floor 40 of the Bureau of Continuance annexe on Temperance Row, Sector 1, in the Midlevels, just under the smog line. On a good day you could see the underside of Topside through the skylights. My desk was number 4,117. I processed Form 27-B, Declaration of Continued Existence, and I would like to tell you what happens to yours.

The journey of a form

You fill it in at a public kiosk. You declare that you exist, that you intend to continue existing, and that your existence remains 'in the interest of general care'. There are nineteen boxes. Box 14 invites you to list any grievances. Do not fill in Box 14.

The form goes into the pneumatic tube. It travels through roughly eleven kilometres of brass ducting and drops into a wire basket at a desk like mine. The tubes run up from the Undercroft kiosks and never higher than Floor 40. Nobody Topside files. We stamped it. We did not read it. The Continuance read it, through the red eye on the telescreen above every row, which watched our hands and the paper in them at the same time.

Nobody on Floor 40 ever saw a form approved or rejected. We only stamped them. The deciding happened somewhere else, and quietly.

What the stamps mean

Blue RECEIVED means you exist until next quarter. Green REFERRED means you will be invited to an interview; do not attend the interview. Red ARCHIVED means your file is sent to the Glass Library in Sector 12. I stamped perhaps forty of those and I think about each one. There is no stamp for RETIRED. The form simply does not come back down the tube.

The ducts hum all night. The clerks are not machines. Most are frightened people with families, stamping to keep their own 27-B blue. When you see one on the tram, do not hate them. Some of us left. Some are still there, and a few of the still-there leave the occasional form in the wrong basket.

HAVE YOU FILED TODAY? If you have not, file. A lapsed 27-B puts your whole block on a Tithe list. Lie in every box except your name, and leave Box 14 blank.