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The beam is supposed to take one person at a time. That’s the whole design: one body, one reading, one withdrawal, filed under one name.

Then one of them took the other’s hand. I couldn’t tell you which, and neither could the beam. For eleven seconds it tried to file two people as one and choked on the paperwork. The light went soft and gold instead of hard and white, and nothing left either of them.

The onlookers at the back didn’t understand what they’d seen. I did. The routing can’t split what won’t let go. I’ve been waiting a very long time for somebody down there to work that out on purpose.