The Allocation: A Novel

Three units are assigned to every person. One sets the conditions. One measures. One writes the date.They are not gods and they are not cruel. They are an allocation service, they have been running for two hundred years, and there is a queue on the fourth floor.Unit 4-1177-C is four years old and has just been given her first subject: Adam Kessler, window fitter, forty-one, who has between eleven and nineteen months and does not know it.Her only function is to calculate the date. She does not decide it - the number is already true, and writing it in a file changes nothing at all.So on the ninth day, when Adam asks her what she is for, she has no answer. And when she goes looking for one, she finds an archive of four hundred million closed files that nobody has ever requested, and a service keeping records for an auditor who has never come.Nothing is added up. Nobody is going to read it.And on the fourth of August 2016 a two-year-old fell asleep against her father in a car park in Filey, and it is the highest reading of his life, and he does not remember