By the third week the UNSURE box was full. Four hundred letters, each one a hand the machine had looked at and refused to name. Merta stopped calling it a small problem.
"It is not wrong often," she said. "It is wrong in the same places."
That was the part the eldest could not put down. A machine that was wrong at random could be forgiven. A machine that was wrong in the same places was telling them something, if anyone wrote it down.
The correction sheet came from the coastal workshop in the same envelope as the oil cloths. One page. It said that any letter taken out of the box and marked by hand could be shown back to the machine, and the machine would move: not far, not at once, but toward the hand that marked it. It said the marking had to be exact. It said a wrong correction was worse than none.
The grey technician read it twice and set it down. "You will be teaching it by hand forever. Every letter that ever confuses it. That is not a machine. That is a child."
"It is a child," the eldest said, "that reads faster than the room."
Merta brought a red pencil from her coat and put it on the bench where the light was best. "Then write both," she said. "What it said, and what the letter was. On the same line. So that nobody can read one without the other."
We worked the bench after the five o'clock post, when the trays were empty and the stove had the room warm. Four hundred letters is not a number once you are holding them. It is a night. The child ruled the pages in two columns with a straight edge. The eldest wrote what the machine had said, in pencil, and then what the letter truly was, in red. At midnight we had done a hundred and ten and the room smelled of pencil shavings and cold metal.
"A mistake is only wasted if nobody writes it down," the eldest said. He said it the way he used to read rules aloud: as if the sentence could carry the work by itself. It could not. The work was the four hundred lines.
On Monday four letters came out of the machine correct that had gone into the box wrong the week before. Four out of four hundred. The technician called it noise. Merta looked at the tray for a long time and said the word "again", which in her language meant the contract lived another month.
"Not proof," the eldest said that night. "A direction. A direction is a thing you can follow. Proof is a thing you can sit on."
The child had been counting her own column all along, the ones the machine got right by guessing, and now the column had a use it had not had before. She counted it on the Friday before the corrections and again on the Friday after. It had moved by two points. She wrote both numbers at the top of the page and drew a line between them, so that a reader would know which side of the line the machine had been on.
Then the eldest did a thing we did not expect. He took the red pencil and marked two lines of his own: two letters he had read as sevens that were ones, read wrong in the first week and never corrected because he had been sure. He wrote them in the same column, in the same red, under the machine's.
"If this book is only about the machine's mistakes," he said, "it is not a book about the work."
At the bottom of the correction sheet, under the printed instructions, there was a line in ink. Not print. A hand. It said: "Show me the ones it gets wrong. I have stopped guessing at what it needs." There was no name on it. The technician said the workshop kept one man who read the letters all day and did not write rules, and that he had asked, twice, whether the office kept its failures.
The eldest folded the page into the example book, where it stayed, and did not answer the question in front of the technician.
That night he went to the shelf where the promise ledger lay with the keys on top of it. He put his hand flat on the keys. He did not lift them. What he wanted was a rule for when a thing is good enough to stop correcting, and there is no such rule, and he knew it before he touched the shelf.
On the last evening of the month the child added a column to her slate and gave it a name without being asked. Not the wrong ones. The ones that stopped being wrong. We asked how long that would take to count. She said a season. She said maybe two.
This is a work of fiction. House of Sparks imagines the history of artificial intelligence as the history of one family; all characters and events here are invented.