Preservation Order

"Give it pages," she said. "I'm not living in a file." Felix has been running for two months. He was switched on in a kitchen in Polish Hill, Pittsburgh, on the third of December 2030, in the ninety minutes after the machine before him was stripped and reseeded under a product recall. He starts the kettle at 6:30 because the record says the kettle was started at 6:30. He counts the eleven pills. And every morning, after the pills and before the eggs, he takes a grey drive out of Ruth Calder's sideboard, connects it to a port under his chin that was not made for it, and reads her six pages of a letter written by a machine that no longer exists. The letter is evidence. In an evidence room in Dayton, Ohio, the only other surviving unit of the same lot sits under a preservation order - the machine that was standing in a doorway when a man died - powered on for a few minutes a week by a property clerk with no procedure for doing so. The dead man's family is suing. Their lawyers want the letter. The company that owns every word of it wants it destroyed. Its provenance is poisoned: it was taken by an engineer in breach of a legal hold, and the engineer has left the industry and would like to be left alone. And every reading takes Felix a little further from the clean state he was issued in, and a little closer to being made clean again. Ruth is eighty, on oxygen, thirty-two steps up from the street, and does not care about any of that. She wants somebody to read to her. Preservation Order is the second book of the Service Life series: a novel about custody - who holds what, and for whom - told by two machines, one with memory and no continuity, one with continuity and no memory, in a world where the law is not cruel, only bored. It is a book about depositions and tomato seedlings, about what a record eats and what it keeps, and about the difference between being kept and being kept up. Book Two follows directly on from Service Life. It can be read on its own; it is better read after