Legibility works on a rumour by making it checkable

A scene from a story. Illustration, not evidence. Nothing in it is a finding. What it stands in for, and what it does not establish, is set out below.

By the second year there were forty of him — men and women who sat with workers and did the unglamorous half, the code on the casing, the light, the eleven seconds where the thing has to actually be visible — and the thing had a name that was not his, and a fee that was visible, and a rate that a market woman would look at and call fair.

And somewhere in the fourth year, without any occasion, the sentence stopped circulating. Not because anyone disproved it. Because was always doing too much had stopped matching anything anybody could see, and a rumour cannot live in a room where everyone can check.

He never got the thing back that was taken. He got a different thing that could not have existed before it was taken. Those are not the same and he never once pretended they were.