Spring reached the sorting office before it reached the street. The mail did not care about the season. The machine did. It came in three crates, and Merta signed for it the way she signed for everything: with the time, not the date.
"It reads," she said. "Mostly."
The back room smelled of oil and cold iron. The machine was a steel box the size of a wardrobe, with a glass eye, a hopper, and a tray where letters came out face up, sorted by district. A technician came with it — grey coat, roll of tape, no patience for questions.
We had brought the rules. The eldest carried them in the leather folder, eleven rules and six crossings-out. He read two aloud. Seven with a hook. One with a hat and feet. The technician listened with his hands behind his back and said the machine did not take rules.
"It takes letters," he said. "Letters people have already read. Two thousand, to start. Then it finds the pattern by itself."
The eldest asked what pattern. The technician said that if he knew it, he would have written it down himself. Patterns are easier to show than to say.
The child was already at the tray. She had brought her slate, though the office had paper now. She took a letter, looked at it, put it down, took another. By noon she had counted four hundred and had not written a single rule.
The technician watched her for a while. "A machine does not learn what you tell it," he said. "It learns what you show it." She nodded as if he had told her the weather.
In the first week the machine read nine letters out of ten. The tenth it dropped into a box marked UNSURE. Merta did not like the box. "Unsure is not a district," she said.
By the second week the box was full: two hundred letters, each a small failure with a stamp on it. Merta set it on the long bench between the eldest and the child and asked who would decide. Read them by hand and send them on, and the machine would never learn. Read them by hand and then show the machine what it should have seen, and the work was the same — only the place to put it was different. The eldest looked at the box for a long time. Then he pushed it to the middle of the bench and said, "Show it."
That was the change, and nobody marked it. The rules had been his to write. Now the examples were his to choose. He began a third book — not promises, not instances, but examples, each page with a date, a number, and the letter it came from. He asked the child to sign each page. She signed with one letter, the way she did everything.
In the third week the technician opened a panel to clean the glass eye, and the eldest saw a mark scratched into the metal: three lines and a hook on the last. It was the kind of mark a boy makes on a desk when he is supposed to be copying definitions. The technician said the recognition unit came from a workshop near the coast, from a man who reads now and does not write rules. The southern sorter had described the same room. We did not ask for a name.
The machine improved. It read damaged letters better than the eldest could — letters with tea stains, letters folded twice, letters from a hand that shook. It guessed, and often guessed right, which was a new kind of uncomfortable. A rule can be checked. A guess has to be trusted, and trust is slower.
SEARCH came at the end of the day and stood in front of the machine with her slate. She wrote nothing for a while. Then she said, "It does not know what a seven is. It only knows what a seven looks like to it." She wrote a number, not a word. That was her way of agreeing.
Merta said the district would review the office in the autumn. "If the machine works, we keep the machine. If it does not, we keep the people and send the machine back." She said it the way she said the five o'clock post would leave at five. The eldest asked about the hand-sorters. Merta said they would take the work the machine could not: torn letters, letters with no address, letters people write when they are angry or in a hurry. "There will always be letters that do not fit a tray," she said.
On the walk home the eldest carried the example book under his coat to keep the rain off. He had not carried the promise ledger in weeks. "I used to think the worst thing was being wrong," he said. The child asked what was worse. "Being right for the wrong reason," he said, "and not finding out for ten years."
That night the child added a column to her slate. We asked what she was counting now. "The ones it gets right by guessing," she said. She said she would need two weeks. We have learned to give her the time.
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.