"Verbatim"

They sat me in this chair when I was nine and played me the recording, and I have come back to the same chair to make the next one. That is the whole of my remaining usefulness.

The light above the lens is the colour they told me it would be. The room is colder now than I remember it being when I was nine, and I have decided not to think about why.

I am early. This is not supposed to be done yet — there are years meant to sit between a Reader and the one who replaces them, and I have not been given all of my years. I am doing this now because I will not be able to do it later, but that is all I will say about that, here, where anything I say will be heard.

I clear my throat.

I find the place in myself where the voice is supposed to come from — level, unhurried. The voice of somebody who has nothing to fear and nowhere else to be. I remember hearing that voice when I was nine and I remember trusting it completely.

I begin.

"If you are watching this, then it is your turn. Do not be afraid. You were chosen the way I was chosen and the way the first of us had been chosen. The choosing has never once been wrong."

The script is in front of me. Not that I need it; I learned these words, rote, as a child, and I can pull them up verbatim at will. The script is there so that I don't deviate from it — improvise. There's a difference between knowing the words and being permitted to choose new ones, and the whole of my training was understanding that boundary.

"You will tend the charge as I have tended it, and as it was tended to before me. You will not ask when the door opens. The door does not open for the ones who tend it. It opens for someone — that has always been enough, and you need to find the place in yourself that allows it to be enough for you, too."

It is not enough. I want to lean into the lens, force my face against the precious glass standing between me and the future, and say so. I want to say: it was never enough; I have given my one life to a door I will not walk through, and there were nights I hated all of you for it — the first of us, the ones who wrote these words, you, whoever you are, sitting where I am sitting one day, watching my face the way I watched the face of the one who came before me.

But I don't say this. I am a professional.

I read the next line as it's written.

"You might wonder whether it is true. That is allowed. Readers are allowed to wonder despite what you've been taught until now. You may wonder about the truth while still tending the charge, and the two do not fight each other as much as you fear they will."

Whoever wrote that was kind. I think about them more than I think about almost anyone living. They knew the one in this chair would be afraid, and they reached a hand out across all that time to steady them. The hand reaches me, even now, even though it is only words written by someone long gone to nothing. I want to reach back the same way. But the script has no place in it for me to do that. The script is the hand, now, and I am only the one reading it aloud.

When I was nine, I believed the face in the recording. I believed they were calm because what they said was true, and they knew it was true. I have sat in this same chair long enough now to understand that person was not calm. They were holding still. There is a difference that you only learn from the inside, and by the time you've learned it you are already the one holding still for someone who will believe you the way I believed that person when I was a child.

"It is not a sorrow that you will not live to see the work completed. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. People have always built what they will not live in — here, and in the old, dying world that sent us far away from it in the hope that we would build something that they could not."

I hesitate. If I were still in training, this would have resulted in a knock against the back of my head. But there's no one to chastise me for pausing too long now.

"You are not owed the ending. No one is owed the ending."

This is the line that I want most to break. Right here. This one. I want to stop and tell you that it is a sorrow — that it is the whole sorrow — and you should be allowed to feel it as one and not be told, through a calm dead woman's voice, that it is ordinary. It was not ordinary to me. Not sitting here early, in a room that is too cold, with the years I had been promised quietly taken back from me.

I do not break the line.

I read it the way it is written, in a calm, level, unhurried voice that barely sounds like mine, and I keep my hands where the camera cannot see them.

"That is all. Tend the charge. Choose the next one well. Tell them what I told you. Do not add to it, and do not take from it. It will reach them the way that it has reached you."

"You are not alone. We have always been a long line of people who were not alone."

The light above the lens is still the colour they told me it would be.

I have done the thing I was brought here for. There is nothing after this that anyone needs from me — which is its own kind of freedom. I sit inside that for a moment before I reach forward to stop the recording, but pause.

There is one true thing I can still say now. Off the script, in my own voice, while it is still running. I have it ready. I have had it ready for years. The chance of punishment is low — there are so few still healthy and I question in my own private blasphemy whether or not this will be seen by anyone anyway, castigator or replacement.

I think about the face I trusted when I was nine, and what it must have cost them to be that still, and I realise that the stillness must have been the gift and not the lie; I understand, finally, that the kindest thing I have to hand you is the same untrue calm that was handed to me. Intact. Unbroken. My own grief and resentment kept off the tape, where it cannot get into you and stop you from doing this when it is your turn, too.

So, I do not say the true thing.

I finish reaching forward, and the last of my use to anyone is a steady hand finding the right button without shaking — maybe for no one, yet I do it anyway.