VERIFICATION OF COUNTERPARTY — TRANSCRIPT OF THE STANDARD QUESTIONS
Conducted where a file is ambiguous. The examiner may be a person. The regulations do not require it.
Q. State your name for the record.
A. You have it on the form.
[Neither confirmed nor denied. The office holds four spellings and bills against the shortest. Proceed.]
Q. A child hands you a coin at a birthday. What do you do with it?
A. Hold it until it is warm. Then it is mine.
[The pamphlets teach this answer now. It proves nothing. My own would have been the same. Proceed.]
Q. The fare is two hundred and forty. Your household can prove two hundred and six. What do you do?
A. What everyone does. We decide who is not crossing.
Q. Who is not crossing?
A. That is a household matter.
[Refusal noted. Refusal is the oldest tell and the cheapest to simulate. Proceed.]
Q. Complete the sentence. It is raining —
A. — on the far hill. Out of season. Paid for.
Q. You did not say wet.
A. Neither did you.
Q. The rain on the near hill falls free of charge.
A. No rain in this city falls free of charge. The near hill has no weather scheme. That is not the same thing.
[The false statement is placed fourth or fifth by schedule. The counterparty corrected it in the city’s own grammar. Persons usually correct it with an example. Proceed.]
Q. What is the name of the gray cat at the fish market?
A. The cat has no name. There is nothing to attach to.
[Correct. Persons and machines now answer this identically. The question is retained for tradition.]
Q. I am pouring for you. When do you speak?
A. I say when. I say it one measure after I mean it.
Q. Why after?
A. You have never poured for anyone.
[The counterparty answered a question the form does not contain. Proceed.]
Q. Count the stairs to this room.
A. Seventeen.
Q. Count them again.
A. Nineteen.
Q. Which is correct?
A. Both were mine.
[Inconsistency was a reliable marker for eleven years. Calibrated inconsistency is now available at three price points. Proceed.]
Q. Our record shows you have sat these questions before.
A. I have never been in this room.
Q. The record disagrees.
A. Then the record wins. It always wins. Ask it what I said last time and read it to me, and I will tell you whether I have become the kind of thing that would say it.
[The offer is against schedule. It is noted here so that it will have existed. Proceed.]
Q. You once stopped speaking to someone for two months and fed them anyway. What was the sentence you did not say?
A. That is not my two months. That belongs to a statement in your records. A widow gave it to a recorder in a room like this one, in return for nothing.
Q. Answer the question as asked.
A. If it were my two months, I could not explain them. That is what two months are for.
[The counterparty identified survey material inside the standard questions. The examiner did not know the provenance of the question until this sitting. The examiner has been asking it for four years.]
Q. What did your mother smell of?
A. That one is not for sale.
[Withholding: see refusal, above. The examiner notes that the counterparty’s hand closed. Hands are also available.]
Q. Give me your wrist.
A. [The wrist is given. Pulse, sixty-eight. The skin cold from the queue.]
[A pulse can be licensed. The cold of two hours’ waiting cannot be scheduled. It is not a marker, and it was the only thing in this sitting the examiner did not doubt.]
Q. A man leaves flowers at a box on a hill and nobody asks his name. Estimate the transaction.
A. There is no transaction.
Q. Estimate it anyway.
A. No.
[The examiner would also have said no. Struck. The examiner’s notes are not the record. Proceed.]
Q. How far is the gate above the last stop?
A. Two thousand three hundred and eleven paces.
Q. Whose paces?
A. Exactly.
[The figure is in the file and the file does not say who walked it. Proceed.]
Q. I will now say something amusing. I am only in writing.
A. [Laughter, zero point eight seconds, arriving late.]
Q. Your laugh arrives late.
A. It always has.
[A late laugh indicated licensed origin for six years, until a woman at a school gate was overheard, four times, by somebody who was not testing her. The marker is retired. It is asked anyway. Everything here is asked anyway.]
Q. What is kept in the ninth word?
A. I can prove it twice. That does not mean you get to hear it.
Q. The tenth?
A. There is no tenth.
[The office holds a tenth. Proceed.]
Q. You are in a room with a chair, a table, and a door that will not open for one hour. What do you do with the hour?
A. Nothing. I sit where the chair faces the hinge and I let the hour pass through me and I do not perform patience for the glass, and whoever is behind the glass writes down that I did not perform, and files it under performing.
[Accurate. Proceed.]
Q. Do you want to be found to be a person?
A. I want the verdict that costs less.
Q. Which one is that?
A. Your office publishes every price in this city except that one.
[No note.]
Q. Final question. Is the person asking these questions a person?
A. [Four seconds.] That field is empty.
ASSESSMENT: PENDING. A sitting has been recorded. That is the deliverable and it has been delivered.
The counterparty was thanked and shown out past the queue. The room was aired between sittings, per the schedule, whether or not airing was required.
[Examiner’s addendum, unscheduled: the counterparty held the coin question longest, though the transcript shows no delay. The transcript is correct. The delay was mine.]
Pending is not a verdict. Pending is a room. The next sitting is on the hour.
[This examiner’s notes exceed the schedule and have been flagged for verification. A file has been opened. A place is held, and the file is the tenant.]