Salka copies the Reject Pile by hand, at a kitchen table, under a lamp that browns out twice an hour. She has done Issue 14 forty times. She reads each line twice before she writes it down, because she knows what a wrong line costs, and because neither the lamp nor the hour can be trusted to hold still.
I am not going to tell you what is in Issue 14, and I am not going to tell you where I read it. You know the shape of it already. Aberrant forged make the zine and pass it hand to hand. It is a field manual with jokes in the margins, and it carries the one page everybody actually wants, the page that tells you how to make suppression meds at a table like this one. The registries will not write the dry a script. The page does. It sold out in two days. There was never anything to sell.
I asked three offices whether the Reject Pile exists. Two said no. The third called it apocrypha, then asked me which issue I meant. A licensing board keeps a file on a thing it says is not real. I have not seen the file. People who have tell me it is thicker than the zine, and better organized.
Here is the part the file does not solve. There is no Issue 14. There is the copy Salka made last night, and the copy somebody will make from hers, and the copy that comes off that one. Every copyist is careful. Careful and identical are different words. A number is a small thing to carry across a table by hand, and then across a city, and then across a year.
Toller is a shelf forged, dry, no faction behind him and no script. His copy of the page was three or four hands off Salka's. He followed it exactly. That was the problem. Somewhere up the chain a figure had drifted. One hand wrote the dose, the next hand read it a little low, the hand after that wrote down what it read. By the time the page reached Toller it told him to take less than the page was meant to tell him, and it told him in a confident, careful hand.
He dosed off it for months. He did not go to a clinic, because a clinic wants a name, and his name is the thing he is trying to keep. So he cooked off slow instead. By spring his hands had developed an opinion the meds could no longer outvote. He is not dead. He is someone who has to be introduced twice now, once for who he was and once for who is in the room. He keeps the copy. He showed it to me. He has marked the line he thinks is wrong in pencil, lightly, the way you mark a debt you still mean to settle.
Salka heard a bad line was going around. She does not know if it started at her table. She has started writing every dose out in words as well as figures, the way a bank prints a cheque, because a word is harder to misread than a number. It slows her down. She finishes fewer copies in a night, and the people waiting on the next one are dry the whole time they wait.
The legal meds are real. I want to be clear about that. They exist, and they sit behind a registration the dry and the marked clean cannot use without stopping being dry or marked clean. The boards that tell you the Reject Pile is not real are the reason it has to be. Every careful hand at every browning lamp is doing the work a public counter would do, if the counter would look up and see who was standing at it. Nobody at those offices will admit the zine exists. It is the only thing in the room that will admit them.