The Office for What Is Right

In the city of Orben, people took pride not merely in avoiding mistakes, but in denying them every conceivable opportunity to occur. People wore black for seriousness, white for clarity, and gray for humility before the rules. Colorful facades were considered evidence of an immature will, and even the flowers at windows were usually white-blooming varieties, arranged carefully by height and symmetry. Anyone wishing to build a house in Orben had to own a plot of land, of course, but also prove that their intentions were good, their lines clean, and their future no burden to the common good. That was where the story of Mara Voss and the machine meant to make goodness faster began.

1. The Entrance

When Mara Voss climbed the steps to the Office of Building Regulation that morning, she held the folder of plans so tightly beneath her arm that the cardboard edge left a white stripe on her skin. It was early November, and even the sky above Orben seemed to honor the citywide agreement about the proper color temperature of life. There was no blue between the gray clouds, only a lighter form of duty.

Four straight lines of applicants stood before the building. Two were for private builders, one for commercial projects, and the fourth for what were called correction concerns: those poor souls whose first submission had failed to meet expectations and who now had to appear again with renewed seriousness. No one spoke loudly. Conversation was not forbidden in Orben, but volume was considered a sign of inner disorder. People spoke with their mouths close to someone else’s ear, or not at all.

Above the entrance, set in metal letters, stood the sentence every child in the city knew by heart before learning to read: What is good is what can be examined. At first glance it sounded like a rule of reason. At second, like a prayer.

Mara was an architect, though not the admired kind who designed administrative buildings, bridges, or exemplary energy-efficient housing districts. She designed winter gardens, roof additions, small courtyards, stairwells, and the renovation of old workshops. She liked places where one could still see how life had rubbed the straightness of regulation a little thin around the edges. Her designs were not rebellious at all. In another city they might have passed as strict, restrained, and exemplary. In Orben, however, people said her work was human, and that was rarely a compliment.

Today was about the Levin family’s house, a narrow plot on the northern canal where a four-story home with a small courtyard was to be built. The design was precise, energy-efficient, sound on fire protection, and structurally beyond objection. The only problem was the courtyard. Mara had proposed three ginkgo trees and a pale ceramic facing for the courtyard wall, glazed to take on a delicate silver sheen in rain. Nothing loud, nothing colorful, only a note of warmth in a city that preferred to rest morality on contrast rather than liveliness.

At the last appointment, case officer Dierk Halden had told her the ceramic was open to interpretation. In Orben, interpretability was the beginning of administrative suspicion. A surface was supposed to be unambiguous or not exist at all. Gray render systems and white mineral paints were therefore popular, because they resisted every emotional reading. Mara had asked whether that was not precisely the danger: people eventually living in rooms that expected nothing of them except obedience. Halden had lifted his head, looked at her a second too long, and written in his minutes: Applicant side introduces subjective criteria.

Today a press presentation was to take place before normal processing began. A new system, the invitation said, would lead the city into a phase of administrative relief. Processing times for building permits would fall. The quality of decisions would rise. Citizens would benefit because good applications would be recognized more quickly and questionable intentions addressed sooner.

Questionable intentions. Mara had read the phrase three times. Until now, a building application had been a technical, legal, and sometimes aesthetic matter. Now a new category was pushing into the language of the office: intention. And in a city like Orben, intention was never merely intention. It was character, disposition, moral legibility.

Mara hung up her coat and looked at the large display over the hall. Instead of the usual Please have ready: land-registry extract, structural calculations, fire-safety certificate, it read: Presentation of the EIR system. Ethical Intelligence for Regulatory Procedures. Begins 08:30. Hall of Appropriateness.

She briefly closed her eyes. Even the name was typical of Orben. A machine could not simply be fast, efficient, or powerful. Its very title had to prove that it stood on the side of the good.

Beside her, someone breathed out softly. It was Tom Levin, the applicant, in an anthracite coat, with the expression people acquired when they had to return to the same authority for the third time in six months with the same papers.

“If this new intelligence is as clever as it claims, perhaps it will finally see that we only want to build,” he said.

Mara nodded without replying. She knew Orben too well to believe in that kind of cleverness. In this city, intelligence often meant only that prejudices had been arranged more quickly and elegantly.

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31 May 2026

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