At four percent Thomas stopped the transcription, over Aldith's objection, which she registered formally and then withdrew when he explained why.
"There's one thing left in there I want," he said. "It's not useful. It won't help anyone. It's about ninety seconds long and I want to watch it before this thing dies, and I've been putting it off for fourteen years because I couldn't bear it and now I've run out of room to keep putting it off."
Aldith did not ask what it was. She said, "Then stop," and closed the ledger, and that was the end of the argument.
It was a video his mother had sent him in the first week — before the anomaly, in the ordinary run of an ordinary life, a message he had received on a Tuesday and watched once distractedly and never thought about again. It had come through in the initial download along with everything else, and had sat in storage ever since, and Thomas had known it was there the entire fourteen years.
He had never once opened it.
He did it alone, at night, in the garden, because it seemed right and because he did not entirely trust himself to be watched.
It was ninety seconds of nothing.
His mother, in a kitchen he had not seen in fourteen years, holding the camera badly so that the frame kept drifting. Telling him about a bird that had got into the garage. Laughing at something off-camera — his father, presumably, who never appeared. Complaining that she never knew whether these things sent properly. Saying all right, love you, talk soon, in the specific rhythm of someone who has said it ten thousand times and will say it ten thousand more.
The video ended.
Thomas sat in the dark garden for a considerable time.
Then he watched it again, and then a third time, and then he stopped, because the battery read two percent and he had decided in advance that he would stop while there was still a choice about stopping.
He found Victoria awake in the kitchen, which did not surprise him.
"Was it what you wanted?"
"It was ninety seconds of my mother talking about a bird in the garage." He sat down heavily. "It's the most valuable thing I own. I've had it for fourteen years. I nearly transcribed four hundred documents and let this run out unwatched because I was frightened of it."
"What frightened you?"
"That it would be the last time I heard her voice, which it was. That I'd use it up, which I have." He put his hands flat on the table. "And that it would be ordinary. Which it was. She talked about a bird. She didn't say anything meaningful because she had no idea it would ever be the last thing, and neither did I, and that's —"
He stopped.
"That's what I wanted," he said. "That's exactly what I wanted and I didn't know until I watched it. If she'd said something profound it would have been a farewell and I'd have had to carry it as a farewell forever. Instead I got ninety seconds of my mother being alive and slightly annoyed about a bird. That's better. That's so much better than anything meaningful would have been."
Victoria came round the table and held him while he cried, which he did for a long time, and neither of them said anything else about it that night.
The battery read one percent for eleven days, which Thomas found unreasonably funny and remarked on repeatedly.
It died on a Thursday, at some point during the afternoon, while he was at the schoolhouse arguing with Maud about drainage gradients. He noticed at supper — the screen dark, unresponsive, the small weight in his tunic now simply a piece of cracked black glass and nothing else at all.
He told Victoria that evening.
"How do you feel?" she asked.
Thomas considered the question honestly.
"Lighter," he said. "Which I'm aware is a terrible thing to say."
"It isn't."
"I've carried that thing for fourteen years. Every single day. Checking a number I couldn't change, reading letters from someone who was disappearing, feeling responsible for a world I couldn't reach." He set the dead phone on the table between them, and it lay there, entirely inert, an ordinary object. "It's over. I don't have to do it anymore. There's nothing left to check."
He kept it, of course. He kept it in his tunic out of a habit he never bothered to break, long after there was any reason to, and never once seriously considered sitting it down.
The number, when it stopped, had still read one.