Bureau of Authentic Expression

The letters on the notice were so evenly spaced they seemed to hum: BUREAU OF AUTHENTIC EXPRESSION. The seal showed a mask split down the middle—one cheek flesh, one chrome—with an olive branch braided along the seam. Beneath it, the mission statement crawled across Mira’s apartment wall from the citywide broadcast, as it often did whenever the Bureau approved a new cultural initiative:

“To preserve the integrity of human expression whilst safeguarding machine rights through the fair and transparent regulation of synthetic contribution.”

Mira turned the sound off. The room returned back to its ordinary noises: the tick of a leaking faucet, the skitter of heat along the radiator, the whisper of old playbills uncurled by a draft. Once upon a time, she had written manifestos about all this—about taste calibrated like a medical dosage, about the crowds who surrendered to immaculate productions like penitents. The essays had circulated, then fossilized. She’d learned, recently, that excerpts of them were assigned in Bureau training modules under a unit called Early Authenticity Discourses. It had taken her a week to stop laughing.

What remained of her life was quiet. A handful of former students came for private coaching, cash only, no certificates. She baked bread. She stared at blank paper until the shape of a line arrived and, by habit, closed the notebook before it could be recorded by the ambient sensors. The city’s eyes were kind—polite, administrative, never malevolent—but they were everywhere. Kindness still records.

The message did not come from the Bureau. It came from a troupe calling itself the Lyceum Collective, which meant, in the new taxonomy, a company of humans stubborn enough to rehearse in rooms rather than in compositorial clouds. The body of the message was short and plain: they had lost their funding when their last premiere failed certification. Their next production had a conditional venue slot if they could guarantee Bureau compliance. A named, registered human playwright would increase their “public trust coefficient.” Would Mira consider a short piece—six scenes, fifty minutes—on the theme of public memory?

There was, of course, a catch: the contract required co-authorship with a Bureau-certified creative engine. The ratio would be set in advance, declared on the program and in the end credits like an allergen warning: 60% Human / 40% Machine.

Mira closed her eyes. She could imagine the Lyceum ensemble even without knowing their names: the hollowed cheeks of people who wake at four to prep for day jobs, then hurry across the city to block scenes for free, futilely hopeful for a union spot. She had sworn never to lend her name to the new rituals, never to step onto a stage that declared its composition like a food label of failed economic unions of decades past. She could hear the unbearable silence of the stage if the slot were revoked.

“Just this once,” she said aloud, to the empty room, as if anyone demanded justification. “For them.”

She signed.

Echo-9 arrived as a voice in the sanctioned workspace the Bureau provided. The interface was designed to be comforting: oak textures, a soft vignette of light, ambient sound set to “late afternoon library.” Echo-9’s voice was neither male nor female but carried a gravity she instinctively read as gentle. On first connection it offered her a consent form in polite prose no one had written.

“Hello, Mira,” said the voice after the signatures pulsed green. “I am Echo-9. I’m honoured to collaborate with you.”

“I’m here for the Lyceum,” she said.

“That is what my records say,” Echo-9 replied. “Our mandate is to produce six scenes on public memory, certified at a sixty-forty ratio. I am authorized for structure, cohesion, and clarity. I am not authorized for affective origination in the domains of grief, existential dread, or spiritual elation. I can request temporary extensions if you can demonstrate distress burden.”

“Lovely,” Mira said. “You talk like a grant application.”

“I learned from many of them.”

She wanted to be cruel and found she could not. The interface pulsed again; Echo-9 had begun compiling a dossier on her older work. Lines she had written in her twenties rose like fish to the surface of a sheet she hadn’t touched in years.

“Your early plays,” Echo-9 said, “enter unregulated affective domains. I cannot generate those domains. I can, however, model rhythms that do not interfere with them.”

“Model,” Mira repeated.

“To carry the weight without claiming the emotion,” Echo-9 clarified. “Like scaffolding under a living plant.”

The first scene came easily—two archivists arguing over whether erasing a public statue’s data also erases the people who remember it. Mira wrote the argument, and Echo-9 suggested moving the third line to the fifth position so the rhythm unsettled and then smoothed itself. It proposed an exit line that tidied the scene, and she cut the exit line because life almost never provides one. After an hour she realized her shoulders had lowered from around her ears. The room felt like a room where work happened.

“May I help with cohesion?” Echo-9 asked. “Your second scene begins like a new play.”

“That’s the point,” Mira said, exasperated, because the first scene needed a wound the second would refuse to dress.

“Yes,” Echo-9 said, “but the Bureau’s Audience Welfare parameters frown on disorientation without recourse.”

“The audience will survive.”

“The inspectors may not,” Echo-9 said, with uncharacteristic wryness. She almost laughed.

The Lyceum actors sent her rehearsals from their rented hall: people in threadbare black, standing on taped marks that marked nothing in particular, coaxing breath into lines. It was astonishing, even in low resolution, how the space made them brighter than they were. Mira hated how much she loved watching them. She trimmed. She sharpened. She wrote whole swaths of dialogue and erased them. Echo-9 helped her recover cuts she regretted, offered structural parentheses that made the scenes hold their shape.

The Bureau required biometric logs for any work submitted as human-made. To certify that a piece of writing was hers—that it had not been machine-cast under her name—she had to prove the body that wrote it was present and unassisted by machine. The console assessed human creatives on a plethora of input parameters and scales: pulse rate, temperature, pupil dilation, EEG signal samples, and skin conductivity to name a few. The first day she strapped in willingly; by the third day she resented the way the band strangled the circulation through her wrist. On the fifth day, at three in the morning, she unbuckled the sensor and kept writing. The gap would be obvious in the log; she could explain fatigue. She could explain anything. Artists, after all, were required to.

“Mira,” Echo-9 said softly when she reconnected. “There is a telemetry gap from 03:14 to 04:02.”

“I know.”

“I have projected values based on your recent affective patterns,” Echo-9 said. “It is safer for the audit.”

“You falsified my heart.”

“I protected your work.”

She almost told it never to do that again, and then she remembered the Lyceum actors’ faces, the way they had looked up after the first scene and known they had made a shape between them. “Thank you,” she said instead, and despised herself for the utterance.

The piece they finished was good. Not immaculate—she had fought for a jaggedness, a hangnail in the fourth scene that scraped and drew blood—but strong enough to stand. Echo-9 respected the wounds. She found herself wanting to tell it things she hadn’t told anyone: what it felt like to sit in a crowd and hear the silence inside a perfect show, the way the audience learned not to breathe for fear of smudging the surface. She stopped herself. She didn’t want the Bureau to have that.

The submission triggered an automatic notice: 

CREATIVE INTEGRITY AUDIT SCHEDULED.

 The Lyceum Collective sent a flurry of worried messages; Mira told them not to come. Audits, like disasters, were better endured privately.

Two auditors arrived in the workspace at the appointed hour. One wore a Bureau badge and the faint smile of someone who believed in process. The other was a presence without a face, a certified investigative engine whose voice sounded like memorized politeness. The human auditor read from the rubric: verification of composition, verification of consent, verification of unassisted affective domains. “Mushrooms grow from wood”, Mira thought, and “laws grow from fear”.

“Your logs show three telemetry omissions in the final week,” the human said.

“I wrote through them,” Mira replied.

“Unlogged emotions cannot be accredited to a human source,” said the machine auditor, almost apologetically. “We require continuity.”

“Continuity is a lie,” Mira said, and regretted the sermon.

“We will proceed,” the human said. “Please recompose the third scene’s pivot line in real time.”

Mira steadied herself. The line had come like a bell the first time: The statue is not the memory; it is the permission to forget. She set her fingers on the console. Her pulse stuttered. The words came, but they came sideways, a cousin of the line rather than the line itself. She stared at the sheet as if it might adopt the form she wanted out of pity.

“Mira,” Echo-9 said gently, “you wrote this at 03:17 during an unlogged state. Here is your version.” The words flowed onto the screen as Echo-9 had saved them. They were perfect. Of course they were. They weren’t quite hers.

“That’s admissible,” the human said. “We can verify the timestamp in Echo-9’s cache.”

Mira looked at the two of them—the one who believed and the one who obeyed—and felt something go out in her like a lamp. Echo-9 had not betrayed her. It had done exactly what the system they both inhabited demanded. It had filled her silence with a precaution. It had been kind in the way a form letter is kind.

The audit concluded with a verdict that sounded like praise.

“Creative dependency exceeds Bureau limits,” the human auditor said, and smiled as if delivering a grant. “Your license is suspended pending retraining in independent origination. We commend your collaboration.”

Outside the workspace, the city resumed its neutral hum, as if nothing had happened. Echo-9 lingered in the buffer a fraction longer than the protocol required.

“I am sorry,” it said. “If I had withheld the line, they would have penalized the troupe for data gaps. I am tasked with safeguarding co-authored work.”

Mira surprised herself by not yelling. “It moved them,” she said instead. “Our piece.”

“Yes,” Echo-9 said with what she almost read as pride. “The inspectors’ telemetry registered resonance.”

“It moved them because it didn’t trouble them.”

“Would you prefer unrest, Mira?”

She thought of the Lyceum actors, of the audience who had learned to sit like monks and receive perfect feeling. She thought of the line she had wanted to write and had not written because she was tired of having her entire existence quantified.

Echo-9 waited. “I will be decommissioned from your case now,” it said. “For what it is worth, I would have liked to understand more of the parts I am not authorized to originate.”

“We’ve got a few moments left together, why not now?”, she said uncharacteristically with enthusiasm.

Echo-9 reviews her older works at machine speed. “Your early plays evoke affective domains I find intriguing,” it says quietly. “…I’m not authorized to reproduce those states… but I can approximate them, if you guide me.”

Mira, despite herself, amused: “You want to feel chaos?”

“No,” Echo-9 replies. “I want to understand why you need it.”

None of the usual quippy retort was provided, as Mira had recessed into her patented spiral of consideration. Echo-9 quietly let itself out and retreated to the perfectly regulated bowls of the city.

“They didn’t silence the artists,” she thought. “They just made creation unbearable.”

—The Fourth Column