THE TENTH CENSUS

They graded me at eighteen and the number came back wrong. Crucible Station Nine decants children, raises them under cameras, and sells the ones who price well. The rest leave as parts or as line items, whichever is worth more that quarter. I was standard stock, unsponsored, which is the station's word for a child nobody bet money on. Nobody had bet money on me, so nobody had to be told what happened to me. Then a scan found something in my chest worth the cost of opening it, and what they sewed in to replace it had not belonged to anything human in eight hundred thousand years. Two weeks later it started talking. It has been careful, every day since, to tell me exactly as much as it wants me to know. A corporation cannot quietly dispose of an asset that has become expensive. It can put one through a door, though, and the Empire builds good doors. They call this one the Trial. One candidate, one planetoid, one cache, five years to become a House or become a possession. Should your cache reach a rival's vault, you and all you possess pass into that rival's House. There are no provisions governing how a cache may be taken. There are no appeals. I came down in a pod calibrated to the cheapest survivable margin, on a rock the Empire had already written off, carrying one warm cylinder and a voice behind my eyes doing arithmetic. What I built there was supposed to be a fortress. For a while it was. But the Empire runs on counting. It counts hulls and tonnage and candidates and quarters, and it is very good at it, and there is not one column anywhere in it for a porch man who sold a stranger's name for a meal, or a woman who reads what things cost on the roads, or a clerk keeping a format nobody authorised. So I started counting them. Article One is ten words. This House does not own people. Nothing below amends this. The rest of it is what that cost. 175 chapters written. Updates daily. The first 8 chapters have been synced to audio and turned into a youtube video so you can listen and see the story board.