Tally: the vault book, second volume
Task quarterly shelf tally, vault 9-4 · Keeper one, forty-one months on the key, no site-system rights, paper trade · Refs ticket PIR-0918, the door's imported rows at acx-legacy-01, the shelf count at vtl-0071
The shelf went through its audit after the August incident, because the config-store's backup sets live in this vault. I re-tallied the cartridges: thirty-one, as ever, and the audit sheet still says forty-one, and I have filed that disagreement twice and will file it a third time if I am still here to. That is not what this page is about. The shelf is right. The book is not.
The book
Tally is kept in a ledger, not a system, by design: the platform's own rule is that a custody record cannot live on the thing it protects. Volume one ran out in January. Volume two was issued 2026-03-02, ruled, signed in at the front by stores, page 1 to page 120. The first tally in it is mine, 2026-03-02.
The entries are in ink. We were issued new pens — same supplier, black, fine point — on 2026-04-27, and I used the old stock out over the following weeks; the transition is smeared across the book the way it is in every book, and anyone can see where each pen ends if they look for the loop on the lowercase y. The old pen had one. The new one does not. I say this so that what follows is checkable and I am not asked to vouch for my memory.
The entry
Between the February-side leaves — the ruled space volume two inherited when stores trimmed the previous book short and the ruling continued — there is one entry, page 3:
2026-02-14 03:17 pull SET-9/4-C (config-store w/e)
ret 03:41 seal unbroken init. —Pull and return, twenty-four minutes. Ink, black, fine point, and the pull line carries the loop on the y. I checked three times under the lamp. This entry is written in the old pen, in ink that was off the estate's stock before the volume was bound, on ruled paper issued after the date it carries.
There is no ticket behind it. There is no door event: the door's rows for
that minute are exactly one row, the bay light going out for one minute and
coming back, no badge, no strike
(acx-legacy-01). The cartridge in the entry,
SET-9/4-C, is on the shelf this minute, sealed, and its seal has not been
broken since the set closed. I know this because I check seals and seals are
the whole trade.
What I did
I did not tear the page out. The book is the record; a record with a page missing is not a correction, it is an event, and I am not paid to create events. I tallied the shelf around it, initialed the entry as seen, discrepancy filed, and closed the book. The keeper before me left no such entry in volume one, and volume one is complete, and I re-read all of it twice in the lamp-light after.
One other thing, small, filed because the audit asks for observed facts. The returned blank from 9-4 sat at stores in August and weighed 1.1 kg over nominal, and the crew took the picture and the argument off it (lb-2207). It came back to the vault shelf in September for disposition, because blanks are shelf items and I am the shelf. My volume two, 2026-09-04: received, blank 9-4, heavy, pending. It tallies. I mention it only because it is the one object in this quarter whose weight agrees with its paperwork, and I have learned what that is worth in row 9.
Nothing was pulled from this vault at 03:17 on any date. The book says otherwise once, in handwriting that is the shape of mine, with a pen that did not exist yet, on paper that arrived later. The door agrees with nothing. The cartridge agrees with me. The book agrees with itself, and that is the sound this room makes at 03:17.
— vault-keeper-9f, key ring 9-4, second volume
Related: vtl-0071, acx-legacy-01, lb-2207, dcm-1188-b, index.