The Obedience Room

Every answer given on the record is cut down to a few clean sentences. Nadia Frost is very good at the cutting.

In a city run by the Speech and Conduct Authority, what people say on the record is turned by clerks into approved versions: short official statements, each filed under a category of knowledge. Those statements follow people out into their lives, to their housing, their work licence and the barrier at the station. Nadia prepares them at a comparison desk in the records office, a headset on, the machine transcript scrolling in grey. Her audit comes back with nothing on it.

One morning a woman named Joss Merrow corrects herself on the recording: ‘That’s not what I said. I said I’d heard.’ Nadia leaves the correction out and releases the version. The next morning, the barrier at the station does not open for Joss Merrow.

Then an old name returns to Nadia’s screen: Livia Corum, whose version she released two years ago. A new directive orders every working copy purged twenty minutes after release, and Nadia begins to keep recordings she has no authority to keep. At a kettle-repair stall in a covered market she meets Sena Vaughn, once a senior intake clerk, who wants the recordings heard by observers outside the Authority and will not wait for anyone’s yes. Nadia will not let a single name go out.

While her mother, Mara, asks whether her score is all right, and Devin Ault, over the partition at her shoulder, is flagged for the choir he sings in, Nadia has to decide what she owes the people whose words she changed, and what it will cost to answer for her own.

The Obedience Room is a quiet, exacting literary novel about who may change a person’s words, and about the small procedural acts by which harm is done. Read it for its precision, and for the question it leaves with you about every word set down on someone else’s behalf.