The Attending Person

by Changian Heterodox Economics, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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The credit came at six in the morning on the first of the month, and it came to everyone at once. In the building on Shoun Street where Hoda Fikry lived with her father, forty-one telephones chimed in the same second, and the sound went down the stairwell like a bell rung in a well. Her father did not look at his. He knew the figure. It had been 2,400 pounds since March, and before that 2,150, and before that there had been no credit at all, only the ration card and the bread queue at the government bakery on the corner, where he had stood every morning for nineteen years with a cloth bag folded in his pocket.

The bakery was still there. It sold bread at the old subsidised price to anyone who wanted it, and almost nobody did, because the bread from the automated bakery in Tanta was better and cost very little more. The baker, a man called Hamdy who had once employed six, now employed himself and a nephew, and spent most of the morning on a chair in the doorway with the Partnership channel on his telephone. The channel was free. It carried every Ahly match, every Zamalek match, the Champions League, and between halves a short film in which a smiling woman in a headscarf explained, in an accent from no particular governorate, that the Partnership Credit was funded by the Levy on Automated Trade and was a token of friendship between peoples.

Abdel-Salam Fikry had been a loom fitter at Misr Spinning and Weaving for thirty-four years. He had a fitter's hands, broad and scarred across the knuckles, and he did not like the woman in the headscarf. He said she had the face of a person who was being paid by the word.

"Eat," he said to Hoda. "You'll be late for your machines."

"They aren't my machines."

"Then you'll be late for somebody else's machines. Eat anyway."

---

The workshop of Nour Garments was in the industrial zone on the Tanta road, a concrete shed with a corrugated roof that had held ninety women at sewing machines when Hoda was a girl. It now held four sewing cells, each about the size of a car, and Hoda. The cells were leased from Halvorsen Motion of Rotterdam. They took bolts of cut cotton at one end and produced finished shirts at the other, and between the two ends a pair of white arms did, at a speed it was unpleasant to watch for long, what ninety women had once done more slowly and more noisily and with the radio on.

Hoda's job was set out in Article 14 of the Concord on Automated Trade, which Egypt had signed in 2037 in Geneva, in return for the credit. Every automated cell operating in a Concord market was to have an attending person: a licensed natural person, resident in the market, who would be present during operation, would keep the log, and would sign for the cell where a signature was required. The article had been the Egyptian delegation's great victory. It was in the newspapers for a week. Two hundred and eighty thousand attending persons had been licensed across the country, and the minister had called it the human guarantee.

The licence had taken Hoda four months. She had learned the log, the alarm codes, the fire procedure, and the conditions of the lease, which were printed in English, Arabic and Dutch on a laminated card riveted to the side of each cell. The card said that the attending person was to observe and record. The attending person was not to open, adjust, disassemble, measure, photograph the interior of, or otherwise examine the cell beyond the inspection window. Each housing carried a seal with a silver hologram of a bird. The cells reported their own condition to Rotterdam every eleven seconds. When something went wrong, a technician in Rotterdam knew before Hoda did, and fixed it in software, and then a message appeared on Hoda's tablet asking her to sign that she had observed the fix.

She was paid 3,100 pounds a month, which with the credit came to more in a month than her father had earned in any month at the mill. Mr Ragab, who owned Nour Garments and had owned it since it had ninety women, paid her out of what was left after the lease. The lease was not a fixed sum. Halvorsen Motion took a fee on every shirt, and the fee was set in Rotterdam, and it went up when Ragab's shirts sold well and came down when they did not, so that Ragab never quite went bankrupt and never quite made money. He said it was like sharecropping, except that the landlord was a computer and you could not even go round to his house and shout.

In the winter of 2040 the Ministry of Industry had drafted a duty of eighteen per cent on imported automated garments, to protect what was left of the textile towns. It had lasted eleven days. On the twelfth day the Concord secretariat wrote to Cairo that the duty was a measure having equivalent effect to a labour-content requirement, and that under Article 31 the Levy distributions to Egypt would be suspended pending review. The duty was withdrawn on the thirteenth day. Ragab had kept the newspaper with the announcement and the newspaper with the withdrawal, and he had pinned them side by side on the wall of his office, under the calendar from the cotton exporters' association.

"Eighteen per cent," he said to Hoda once, looking at them. "The Americans had forty per cent on cloth for a hundred years. I looked it up."

"Who told you that?"

"My son. He reads." Ragab took his glasses off and cleaned them on his tie. "He says they also had a law in England that you couldn't take a machine out of the country. You couldn't even take yourself out, if you knew how to build one."

"That was a long time ago."

"Everything was a long time ago," Ragab said. "That's what they tell you when it's still true."

---

Cell three failed on a Tuesday in September, at a quarter past two in the afternoon.

Hoda heard it before the tablet chimed: a change in the note of the left arm, a sound like a fingernail drawn slowly over a comb, and then a smell of hot varnish. The arm stopped with a shirt collar held in its grip, and the collar began to smoke. She hit the red stop, as the card required, and pulled the extinguisher off its bracket, as the card required, and did not use it, because the smoking stopped by itself. Then she stood at the inspection window and wrote in the log the time, the sound and the smell, as the card required.

The message from Rotterdam came eleven minutes later. Joint motor failure, left arm, elbow assembly. The unit could not be serviced in market. A replacement arm would arrive by courier within five working days. The failed assembly was to be destroyed in market under Concord Annex D, to prevent unlicensed recovery of proprietary hardware, and destruction was to be certified by the attending person. Instructions were attached.

The instructions were nine pages long, and they were very good. Hoda had to admit that. They showed, in clean diagrams with numbered arrows, how to release the arm from the shoulder mount without breaking the seal on the cell itself, how to lay it on a bench, and where to cut. There were three cuts, marked on the arm with small red triangles that Hoda had seen every working day for two years without wondering what they were for. One went through the controller board in the forearm, one through the encoder ring at the wrist, and one through the cable loom at the elbow. The cuts were to be made with an angle grinder and a metal-cutting disc. The attending person was to photograph each cut from two angles, and then photograph the three pieces together beside the certificate, and then sign the certificate, and the pieces could then go for scrap by weight like any other metal.

Hoda read it twice. Then she read the parts list on the last page, which gave the weight of the assembly: 6.2 kilograms. The cuts destroyed the board, the encoder and the cables. They destroyed the arm's ability to know where it was and what it was doing. They did not touch the motor, or the gear housing it drove, which sat in the elbow between the cable cut and the forearm cut like a stone between two streams.

She went to find Ragab.

"They want me to destroy it," she said.

"Then destroy it."

"They want me to destroy the part they wrote. Not the part somebody made."

Ragab looked at her for some time. Then he went to the cupboard in his office and took out an angle grinder that had not been used since they had cut the frames off the old Juki machines, and a box of discs, and a pair of goggles with an elastic gone slack, and put them on the desk.

"I am going home early," he said. "I have a headache. The cells are your responsibility. You are the attending person."

---

She made the three cuts at half past four, with the shed doors shut and the other three cells running and the noise of them covering the noise of the grinder. The controller board went in a shower of green fibre and copper. The encoder ring split cleanly. The cable loom took longer, because it was armoured, and when she was through it she found her hands were shaking, and she put the grinder down and waited until they stopped.

She photographed each cut from two angles. She laid the three pieces beside the certificate and photographed them together. Then she looked at the middle piece for a long time, the elbow, with its stub of cut cable at one end and its stub of cut forearm at the other, and the little grey housing between them, sealed with four hex bolts and a silver bird.

She signed the certificate. I, the undersigned attending person, certify that the assembly described above has been destroyed in accordance with Annex D. It was true. Every word of it was true. The assembly described above had been a thing that knew where it was, and it no longer did.

The scrap merchant came on Thursdays. On Tuesday evening Hoda put the middle piece in her bag and took the microbus home.

---

Her father cleared the kitchen table without being asked. He took off the oilcloth, folded it, and laid down in its place a sheet of brown paper from the roll he kept behind the refrigerator, as he had once laid it on the bench at the mill before he opened up a loom. Then he went into the bedroom and came back with a tin box that Hoda had not seen since she was a child: his own tools, the ones he had bought himself rather than drawn from the stores, each one wrapped in its own strip of rag.

"Hex," he said. "Three millimetre. No, smaller. Two and a half."

The bolts came out with a small dry squeak, as if they had not expected to be asked. The silver bird tore in half. Inside the housing was a motor no larger than a tea glass, and coupled to it a flat ring of steel with teeth on its outer face, and around that a second ring, slightly larger, with teeth on its inner face, and inside both an oval cam that pressed the first ring into the second at two points as it turned.

Her father put on his glasses. He did not touch anything for nearly a minute.

"The small ring has fewer teeth," he said finally. "Two fewer, maybe. It walks round the big one. Every turn of the motor it walks two teeth." He made a slow circle in the air with his forefinger. "So the motor goes round a hundred times and the elbow goes round once. And strong. It would be very strong."

"Can you make one?"

He laughed, which he did not often do. "Me? I can make a loom shuttle from a broom handle. This" — he touched the outer ring with the end of a screwdriver, very lightly — "this is a steel I have never seen, cut on a machine I have never seen. No. I cannot make one."

He took the glasses off and put them back on.

"But somebody could learn," he said. "Somebody who had one to look at, and a lathe, and ten years, and a great many failures that nobody shut down on the twelfth day."

Her brother Yassin came in from the university at nine and stood in the kitchen doorway with his bag still on his shoulder. He was in his third year of mechanical engineering at Tanta. There was no work at the end of it, and everyone knew there was no work at the end of it, and the faculty was fuller than it had ever been, because the credit paid for the bus fare and there was nothing else to do with the days, except the Maritime Guard, which the Partnership paid for in euros and which took boys from Mahalla to watch the coast for other boys in boats. He looked at the table and then at his sister.

"Is that a Halvorsen?"

"It was."

"We're not allowed to have one. They don't sell them. The faculty asked. They sent us a simulation." He put down his bag and leaned over the table, close enough that their father moved the lamp for him without being asked. "Strain-wave. I've only ever seen the drawing."

"Now you've seen the thing," their father said. "Get a pencil."

---

They worked until two in the morning. Yassin measured with a pair of digital callipers that he had borrowed from the faculty against a signature, and Hoda wrote the figures down, and their father counted teeth with the point of a needle, moving it from tooth to tooth with a patience Hoda remembered from the mill: the patience of a man who had once counted the picks per inch on a length of cloth with a little brass glass, all through a twelve-hour shift, and found the fault that three engineers had missed. The outer ring had 202 teeth. The inner ring had 200. They wrote that down. They wrote down the diameter of the cam and the thickness of the flexible ring at six points round its circumference, and the depth and angle of the teeth, as near as the callipers would give it. They weighed each piece on the kitchen scale that their mother had used for flour. Yassin drew each piece three times from three directions, the way he had been taught, and when his hand got tired Hoda took over, and she drew worse than he did but faster.

Somewhere after midnight Hamdy the baker's nephew went past in the street below, shouting into his telephone about a goal, and the whole building cheered and groaned in the same second, like the chime of the credit in reverse. Nobody at the kitchen table looked up.

At two their father stood up and pressed both hands into the small of his back.

"Put it together," he said. "Exactly as it was. Every bolt."

They put it together. The two halves of the silver bird would not join again, and Hoda laid them over the bolt heads as near to their old places as she could, like the two halves of a torn banknote.

"On Thursday," she said, "it goes on the scrap merchant's lorry."

"On Thursday it goes on the scrap merchant's lorry," her father agreed. "Six point two kilograms of scrap. The certificate is correct."

"And the drawings?"

He looked at the drawings. There were eleven sheets of them, on the backs of the monthly Partnership Credit statements, which came on paper as well as on the telephone, because the Concord secretariat had found that people trusted paper more. On the front of each sheet was the woman in the headscarf, small, in the corner, and the figure 2,400, and the words A token of friendship between peoples.

"Yassin," their father said. "How many of the numbers can you remember?"

Yassin shut his eyes. "Two hundred and two. Two hundred. The cam is forty-one point five on the long axis. The wall is —" He opened his eyes. "Most of them. Not all of them."

"Then tomorrow you remember the rest. And then we burn these."

Hoda looked at him.

"Your licence," her father said. "Article whatever. It says you may not measure. It says nothing about what your brother may remember. They can search a bag. Nobody has yet found a way to search a head." He began to wrap his tools back in their strips of rag, one by one, the needle last. "When Talaat Harb built the mill, the English said an Egyptian could grow cotton but could not spin it. My grandfather heard them say it. They said it kindly. They said it the way you tell a child he is better at something else."

He shut the tin.

---

On Thursday the scrap merchant's lorry took the elbow, with the forearm and the shoulder stub, and a quantity of copper from somewhere else, and paid Ragab nineteen pounds for the lot. The replacement arm came from Rotterdam the following Monday, in a crate with a silver bird on every face, and Hoda observed its installation over the video link and signed that she had observed it.

On the first of October the credit went up to 2,550 pounds. The forty-one telephones chimed together at six in the morning. In the kitchen on Shoun Street there was nothing on the table but bread and beans and a dish of salt, and Yassin sat at it with his eyes shut, his lips moving, counting.

---

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, prīdiē Nōnās Octōbrēs (6 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Chāngiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Changian Heterodox Economics, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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