The place at the edge of Marginal

turning the handle of the machine back Vlad. You disappeared three years ago. Are you eating or is it coffee?

Katia, yes. taking a bowl down from the shelf above the pots There is bean soup and there is rice with the fish, and the fish went in an hour ago so it is still good. Coffee after or with?

Chocolate, I remember. filling the bowl and putting it on the counter with a spoon across it You are quieter than you were. You used to come in already talking, before you sat down. Was it work, or something else?

When does she arrive, and is she coming to Marginal with you?

I hope they get something on your side of the road. The soup is going cold.

I have, you just see me behind the same pot. sitting down on the stool by the machine My son started school last year.

bringing her cup over and sitting across from him Tell me about Nozaki. What is she like?

turning the cup around on the table Tired how?

Then she will sleep for a month when she gets here, and that is normal. My brother came from Bor Brashavenko and did the same.

drinking some of her coffee You said that three years ago as well.

You have a woman coming in a week, so be careful with that.

laughing for a while It is only my voice, that is how I talk. I sang in the populist contest once, years ago, and people have been telling me about my voice since then.

"He is the only legally valid leader of this country". shaking her head It was a party song, drums and horns behind it, and I stood still in front of the camera and sang the whole thing without taking a breath. I was nineteen.

Some of it. sitting up straighter and singing it low "Stand up for the country, there is no other man, he holds the law and the flag in the one hand". That was the chorus. The verses were worse.

I have never heard one. Whoever wrote ours had heard plenty, though, because it came out sounding like a march from somewhere else.

smiling into her cup Ours had one and it lost. The one that won that year was about a cheese factory.

I would need a program for that, and one that keeps the lines making sense when it shuffles them. putting her cup down I can boil eggs for two hundred people but I cannot write that.

The song is only the first round anyway. After that they give you a term to run and you keep the approval up, and if it drops you are out. picking up the empty bowl Nobody has held more than three terms since I was there.

Then he is doing what the contest lets you do on purpose, only he is doing it to a real country. taking the bowl to the stand Do you want that chocolate now?

You always did. putting the milk on to heat It is why the soup went cold three years ago as well.

Work, mostly, and the boy. stirring the milk I spent two weeks at the coast last summer, in one of the holiday houses at Belvacius, and it rained for eight days.

Marendo is quiet. pouring the chocolate into a glass and bringing it over Staying at home is not a bad thing either, if you were resting and not hiding from people.

Go on, then. sitting back down across from him

The ones on the bus were being nice to you for the length of the ride. pulling her sleeves down The one who gave you the number probably meant it that evening and then went back to her own people and her own week, and answering you a month later would have meant explaining herself, so she took the easier way out.

She did, and she broke it. Some people promise things because saying it feels good in the moment, and a month later it sounds like a burden.

Yes. looking past him at the window There was a woman from the yard who wanted to be friends and I let it go quiet instead of telling her I did not want to. I am very bad at conflict, so I take the way where both sides don't have to hear anything.

It is. touching the edge of the table I keep people longer than I want to, and then I disappear on them, which is worse than saying I no longer want to be around.

Nothing has to be done with them. shifting the glass toward him And if she says she is not disturbed, take it as said, and let her tell you if that changes.

Who is Linda?

The building off Belvacius has been on the news for weeks, the case at Corcina, the drones getting shot at. resting her arms on the table How do the two of you take a thing like that out of the country?

Why cancel it?

Then tell her that now, before she arranges the days off.

taking the empty glass off the table Good.

I like the work and I like the people who come in. rinsing the glass at the stand The serious things are yours.

I would sit there and say people should be able to walk into somewhere warm without ordering anything, and that would be my whole contribution.

Forty, fifty in a day, most of them for the length of an order. coming back to the table Properly, like this, maybe two or three people in a week.

I did, and then you stopped coming and I had no way to ask about you. sitting down again You were easy to talk to, and you went further into things than most people who sit here.

Which block? taking a pen out of her apron and turning over the till roll on the table

I saw it come down from the road. writing it on the roll and tearing the strip off Which floor?

Fourth. folding the strip into her apron I finish at four on Sundays, so I could come by then, and I would have the boy with me.

Seven in March.

The one they put at the old end?

staying at the table And when Nozaki comes, will she want a stranger and a child in the courtyard that week?

Then we come this Sunday and see how it goes.

Stay as long as you want, the yard shift comes in at half five. getting up and going back behind the stand

They come in, I feed them. lifting the lid off the big pot Twenty men in twenty minutes and then it is quiet again.

They come off the repair yard down at the water. looking into the pot Their shift ends at five and this is the first place on the road up.

My mother painted it, she had this place before me. looking up at it It has been on that wall longer than you have been in the country.

Most days. putting the lid back Some days it is a crowded room with pots in it and I want to be anywhere else.

What did it push?

And then what, the whole thing stopped working? leaning back against the shelf

We did two terms of this at school and I still have the sheets on the machine here. going along the stand to the computer and waking it up, the desktop coming back with the file manager already open It is Debian on here as well, so it will be the same apt. There is a preferences file that pins versions, and a package can be marked as held on its own, so the fixing does not have to be anywhere in your code.

There is another one about exactly that. scrolling down the same file The example they gave us was a shop that cannot update its system because the till program needs libraries no source ships any more. The way out on the sheet is that the old program has to be gone through by hand first, every call to something that was removed taken out, and only then does the system update. There is no order of apt that does it for you.

Whose idea was the bypass?

We were told at school never to touch a live system at night. turning the chair around and sitting on it backwards The reasoning was that the easier a thing is to run, the more of it you do while tired, and the bypass is the easiest button on the screen at one in the morning. Then you commit everything at once because checking each one would take an hour you do not have.

The ones we used at school had nothing like it. You took the patches one by one and there was no way to say yes to all of them at once. scrolling back up the sheet Somebody at your place had to put that button there on purpose.

They played those in the security lesson. Half of what we got was three lists: as a user do not run anything as the administrator and do not pipe something off the network straight into a shell, on a server no password logins and close every port you are not using, and in a script quote your variables and never build a command out of text somebody else typed.

That is the box the system monitor puts up when you kill a process. tapping the corner of the screen The one they showed us at school was the daemon that talks to the directory server, because the machines in the room all took their logins from LDAP. Kill it and nobody can log in, and the machine stops checking who is allowed to do what.

Every school room has it, and the workshops too. closing the file Everyone still calls it AD, my teacher included.

That one. The name stayed even after the software went.

Because when the till goes down at five in the afternoon there is nobody coming. turning the chair to face him Nearly everything runs through a machine and the software is open, so the cooperative that wrote the till program has maybe five people on it. I am expected to read the log, run what needs running, and write the report properly, what I did, what came back, which version, so they are not asking me questions for two days. Once I have had to send the fix myself.

There is an editor inside the till program itself, and it does the whole thing from there, so I have never had to type it out. You change the line, put a sentence in the box saying what you changed, and it goes off to the five who look at it.

I have opened it maybe three times. Most of what breaks is the printer.

It came with the till. looking behind the machine at the cable The workshop says they still make the same type of cable, so it stays until it stops.

I know this one machine. putting her hand on the top of it Put me in front of another one and I will be asking you where things are.

You could tell me what you were doing in Japan.

How old is the grandfather?

And he was on his own up there?

What did he make of you turning up instead of her?

So he will not see her again.

saying nothing for a while, then preparing two pots

They will be arriving soon. setting the pots on and lighting them You can stay where you are, they take the long tables.

That is them. taking the stack of bowls off the shelf and setting them along the stand They walk up together and then they are all at the counter at once.

Come at the back of the counter and stand with me, there is room. lifting the flap at the end of the stand You can do your own chocolate while I feed them, the milk is in the low fridge.

Because you would have left otherwise, and I have several minutes of work and then the place is empty again. putting a clean apron on the hook beside him

Take the bowls off the end as I fill them and put them on the long tables, two rows. picking up the ladle Bread is in the basket, it goes down the middle.

filling the last two bowls Come and do your chocolate now, the milk is behind you.

The pan goes on the small ring, and keep the spoon moving or it catches. wiping the ladle and hanging it up You put the powder in first, which is right.

Somebody taught you, or you worked out?

Is she still in Romania?

Do you talk to her?

taking the empty pot off the ring and putting it in the sink Mine is ten minutes down the road and I see her once a week.

She takes the boy on the days I close late, so it is partly that.

You carried twelve bowls for a friend. rinsing the pot out If I had you on the stand every Thursday and a rota with your name on it, that would be another thing, and then you would join the cooperative like the rest of us.

Better if the boss does the shouting himself, four words, I love this company. turning the tap off Then at least the workers can stand there quietly and keep their own voices.

laughing and putting a hand up The men are still eating, Vlad.

Now shout as much as you want.

You did not offend me, I laughed. sitting on the edge of the table I only did not want the men turning round.

At Microsoft, once upon a time. pulling one of the chairs out with her foot Sit down, you have been standing since the pots went on.

We had him in a lesson, in the part about how a cooperative should be run, as the example of the wrong way. The teacher played the shouting and then asked us what the man was actually asking for, and the answer was that everyone should feel about the place the way he did, without ever being asked what they thought of it.

That one came right after, as the wrong order of priorities. leaning back against the table You can shout one job as many times as you like and the place still falls over without the people who test it, write the manual, answer the phone, keep the machines running. The teacher said it holds for any firm, ours included, and that a cooperative that decides one trade is the whole business ends up with the others leaving.

The man stands up and tells him in front of the whole hall that he does not know what he is talking about, and asks him what he has been doing with himself for seven years. pulling her feet up onto the second chair Jobs takes a drink and sits there for a while, then says the man is right about some of it, and talks about deciding what the thing is for before you decide what to build. He never says a word back about the man or about the people who made the part he cancelled. The lesson was that you can kill a project and still owe the people who worked on it a civil answer.

It was two terms and I have forgotten most of it. putting her chin on her knee The videos stayed because they were the only lessons with anything happening in them.

Because I use it every day at the stand. The rest went.

taking her feet down and sitting properly on it The table is where I do the papers, so I sit on it out of habit.

It is easier to reach the crates behind me. pushing the papers into a stack The papers I could do from anywhere.

They know my name and I know what some of them eat, and nothing past that.

No one comes in here but the delivery man. straightening the stack again You are the first person I have sat down with in this room.

Because it has been three years and you were putting your coat on so quickly. looking at the door I wanted to keep talking, that is all of it.

It is you, and it has been you since the first year. The rest come in, eat, and go.

Did you keep in touch with him after school?

Then do not do the same here.

You had, and I did the same with you.

It is half six. standing up and going to look through the half open door at the counter They have gone and left the bowls where they sat.

If you want to. going through and starting to stack them from the far end Bowls in the sink, spoons in the tray beside it.

That is it done. turning the tap on over the sink Sundays I close at four.

Wait, sit down for two more minutes. taking the pan down again and putting the milk on You are not walking home without a second one.

Yours was thin, I saw it.

bringing the glass over and putting it in front of him Ten minutes, and then I have to get the boy.

Emil.

pouring the last of it into her own cup and sitting down opposite him He reads faster than anyone in his year, and the teacher has told me twice he is well past what they are doing. Then she says he is somewhere else for half the lesson and she has to say his name three times.

What did they do about it with you?

Here they moved him onto harder reading on his own while the rest of the class works through the normal book. holding the cup with both hands There are eighteen of them in the room, so the teacher had the time to notice him.

How does one teacher get thirty of them through anything?

Then the ones who could not read at the start still cannot at the end.

What is B1?

And they put that on top of thirty in a room who cannot read the first language.

Here it is Fluidian and English and that is all, and the ones whose house speaks something else get that as well. finishing her cup Emil will get no French unless he asks for it himself.

It is. taking both cups to the sink My mother's house was Fluidian, and my father came from Bor Brashavenko and never taught us any of his.

No, he is my father's son from before he came here.

I was born here, in this town. coming back to the table for the cloth I have never lived anywhere else.

Not over the Fluidian border, it has been shut since long before he was born. folding the cloth over the edge of the sink He went through Aporia and in at the southern port, and my brother did the same thing several years later.

My mother ran it on her own, so it was hers and her household's and needed no registration. Then she got tired and stopped, and I was here full time and needed a second pair of hands, and the moment somebody outside the house works with you it has to be a cooperative. So we registered it, four of us on the list, and the rules were the older ones then, so it took months of paper.

They are a different cooperative, the one that writes the till program. I have never met any of them, we only write to each other.

coming around the table and putting her arms around him, holding on for a few seconds before letting go Sunday, at the courtyard, block 20B. Go home and eat something good.

Then go home and sleep. holding the door open for him Adio, Vlad.

You too. standing in the doorway while he goes up the road