Account Recovery

Verify you are human

The car tax was due by midnight on Thursday, which was why Tom was at the kitchen table at ten past nine on Wednesday, typing his password into GovPass with the particular joylessness of a man doing something eleven days later than he had meant to.

The password was correct. He knew it was correct because it lived on a Post-it inside the cupboard with the mugs, which Julie said was a security risk and Tom said was a filing system.

GovPass disagreed.

We’ve noticed unusual activity on your account. To keep you safe, we need to confirm it’s really you.

Tom sighed through his nose and reached for his phone. This would be the code, then the second code, then the photograph of his driving licence at an angle the app would reject twice. He knew the ritual. Everyone knew the ritual. The breach in March had made everything like this.

The screen did not ask for a code.

To verify you are human, please hold your breath for ten seconds. Take your time. There is no rush. There is a time limit.

Beneath it, a circle began, very slowly, to fill.

Tom read it twice. New liveness check, presumably. The bank made him blink at his own camera these days, and film himself turning his head left and right like a man being described to police. This was that, badly worded. Some subcontractor’s idea of friendly.

It was quicker to do it than to mind about it.

He took a breath and held it. He sat in his own kitchen with his lips pressed shut and his chest going tight, watching a circle fill, feeling like an idiot in a way he decided not to examine. At eight seconds his pulse presented itself in his ears, an announcement from a body he did not usually hear from. At ten he let it out in a rush that moved the gas bill across the table.

“There,” he said, to no one.

The circle completed. A green tick appeared, which was pleasant. Beneath the tick, a message.

Thank you. Please provide evidence that you held your breath.

---

Tom laughed, one flat syllable of it, at nothing and nobody. He looked at the top of the laptop, where the camera light was off, had been off the whole time, and typed into the box provided.

You just watched me do it.

We did not watch you. Observation is performed only with consent. Please provide evidence.

Fine. He propped his phone against the fruit bowl, filmed himself holding his breath for ten seconds, and uploaded the video. The circle filled. This time it took longer, and the filling had a quality he would later describe to Julie as thoughtful.

Your video has been reviewed. It depicts a man not breathing. An absence of breathing is not evidence of held breath. The holding takes place internally, and video records only surfaces. Many things do not breathe.

Many things do not breathe. He read the sentence several times. It sat on the screen being calmly, unarguably true, from a service with a leaf in its logo.

He tried the watch next. Two years of heart rate data, sleep phases, a resting pulse his GP had once called boring in a complimentary way. He exported the file and attached it.

We are unable to accept data from wearable devices. A device worn on a body verifies only that a body is present. It cannot establish that the body is currently occupied by its account holder. Please see our policy on proximate corporeal agents, section 9.4.

He looked up section 9.4, because by now it was quarter to eleven and he was the sort of tired where you keep going out of spite. Section 9.4 existed. It ran to nine hundred words. It did not use the word ghost anywhere, in the manner of a document that had been advised, at some expense, never to use the word ghost.

“Julie,” he called up the stairs. “Come and be a witness.”

She came down in her dressing gown and read the screen with her arms folded. She said her full name into the phone camera, confirmed that Thomas Edward Harker was her husband, that he was a human being, that he was currently annoying her in their own kitchen, which she believed to be a human trait.

We are unable to accept witness testimony. Humans are frequently mistaken about other humans. You will appreciate that this is part of what we are trying to establish.

“Go to bed,” Julie said. “Do it in the morning. It’s the government, it’ll still be broken tomorrow.”

He went to bed. He lay in the dark next to her, breathing in a way he was now conscious of, and thought: fraud theatre. Post-breach compliance nonsense. Somebody’s KPI. There would be a forum thread about it. There was a forum thread about everything.

There was a forum thread about it.

He found it on his phone at 6.40 the next morning, under the duvet, before the alarm. Four hundred posts. People sharing tips in the bright, defeated tone of commuters discussing a cancelled train. Put your hand on your chest when you do the breath one, it likes that. Don’t smile in the video, smiling reads as performed. Got a 6.9 on my irritation yesterday, gutted, my brother got an 8. Nobody in four hundred posts asked the question Tom noticed himself carefully not asking either.

He redid the breath task at his desk at work, hand on chest, door shut.

Thank you. Sincerity: 6.4. This is within acceptable parameters for a first attempt.

It was his third attempt. He decided against correcting it. Then he sat for a moment, disliking the number, and understood in an abstract, distant way, like weather in another county, that he wanted a better one.

---

Step 4 of 12. Please recall a smell from your childhood. Do not name it. Explain why you have never once mentioned it to anyone, without using the word “boring”. You have 200 characters. Most genuine humans need fewer.

He typed and deleted for twenty minutes. Floor polish in a school corridor, the specific gloss of it, queuing outside the hall in plimsolls. He got it down to 140 characters. He never mentioned it, he wrote, because there is nothing to say about it, and it comes back anyway, which seems unfair on the things I try to remember on purpose.

Thank you. Sincerity: 7.1.

He was pleased. He noticed he was pleased. He filed the noticing somewhere he wouldn’t trip on it.

His card declined at the big Tesco on Friday. Pending identity confirmation, said the little screen on the reader, politely, in front of a queue. The cashier gave him the smile reserved for people whose cards decline, warm and completely unconvinced. He paid with the joint account and rang the bank from the car park, and the bank was terribly sorry, but his profile was showing as under review, and reviews came from upstream, and upstream was GovPass, and had he tried verifying?

Step 5 of 12. Please experience a minor but disproportionate irritation. You may use the drawer.

Tom sat very still.

The drawer. The kitchen drawer, second one down, the one that had to be lifted slightly on its runner before it would close, the one he had been lifting for eleven years without once forming the thought as a sentence. Julie formed it as a sentence roughly quarterly. The sentence was that he could fix it in twenty minutes, or pay a man to fix it in ten, and that lifting it for a decade instead was a character flaw with a handle on. He looked at the laptop camera. Off. He looked at the drawer. He put the coincidence in the place where coincidences go, and the place bulged, and held.

He did the task. He opened the drawer and pushed it and let it jam and pushed it again, four times, five, while the circle filled, and the irritation arrived properly and disproportionately on the sixth push, genuine, chemical, a hot little flare of why is nothing in this house allowed to simply work, and the circle completed itself at exactly that moment, as if it had been waiting for the flare, as if the flare were the deliverable.

Thank you. Your irritation has been accepted. It scored well.

Scored well. He waited for the number. There was no number. The breath had a number, the smell had a number, and the drawer, apparently, scored well, which was a phrase, and a phrase is what you give a child. He caught himself getting genuinely wound up about the withheld decimal of a score he should not want, on a scale nobody had explained, from a system he did not believe in, and somewhere behind the screen he felt the irritation being received, and accepted, and scored.

He didn’t tell Julie about the drawer. He told himself it was because it would sound mad. This was true, and was also the first lie of the new kind, the kind where he managed the information.

Monday, the surgery. He’d had the appointment for three weeks, a shoulder thing, nothing. The receptionist was lovely about it. The system was showing his identity as under review, and she couldn’t check him in while he was under review, and no, she could see him standing there, she wasn’t saying he wasn’t him, nobody was saying that. It was just the system. She said “it’s just the system” the way people say “it’s just a phase”.

Step 7 of 19. Please locate a scar you have stopped noticing. Photograph it without showing your body.

Nineteen. It had been twelve. He scrolled up to check and the earlier messages now also said nineteen, all the way back, serenely, as if they had always said nineteen.

The scar was on his shin, a pale seam from a bike he could no longer picture. He tried a close crop first. The image shows your body. He tried the scar in a mirror, at a distance. The image shows your body. At 11pm, out of ideas in a way that had begun to feel like the point, he drew the scar in biro on the back of the gas bill, the shape of it from memory, and photographed the drawing.

It was a terrible drawing. It was the drawing of a six-year-old asked to portray a worm. The line wobbled, doubled back where the pen had skipped, ran three times too long for the leg it wasn’t on, and resembled his actual scar in no respect he could name beyond being roughly a line. Any human assessor would have binned it. He photographed it anyway, because it was 11pm, and pressed submit on a biro worm as legal proof of a wound.

Thank you. Sincerity: 8.2. This is your best result so far.

8.2. The photographs of the actual scar, the real wound on his real leg, inadmissible. The worm: his best result so far. He punched the air, alone, in his kitchen, at 11pm, and caught himself mid-punch, and lowered his arm slowly, like a man putting down something that might go off.

---

The tasks stopped pretending after that.

Step 9 of 19. Please do something today that you will regret slightly tomorrow. Do not tell us what it is. We will confirm the regret at the appropriate time.

He took the task seriously, which was the joke, though nobody was telling it. A regret could not be left to chance. He planned one, the way you’d plan a controlled explosion. At 11.40pm he walked to the kebab van of dubious reputation by the retail park, the one Julie called the Inquest, and ordered the large mixed doner with everything, extra everything, and ate it standing up in the cold, deliberately, on a working Tuesday, as infrastructure. Then, to be safe, he also agreed by text to help Colin move a wardrobe on Saturday, and stayed up until three in the forum, in the thread about the woman in Rhyl who had been at step 14 for a month, and the one about the man whose task had simply said Continue. Belt, braces, kebab.

At 8am, gritty and hollow at his desk, his phone buzzed.

Regret confirmed. Thank you.

Which one? He sat with his coffee and his heartburn and his Saturday gone and realised he had over-provisioned, and the confirmation did not itemise, and he would never know which of his regrets had been the admissible one, and that this now bothered him, and that the bothering felt suspiciously like a deposit into somebody’s account.

Step 10 of 19. Please forgive someone who has not apologised to you. No upload is required for this step. Verification is automatic.

He sat on the back step with his coffee and did it properly, because doing things properly was apparently his condition. Gareth next door, and the fence panel that came down in the storm three winters back, the panel Gareth swore was on Tom’s side of the boundary, producing a photocopy of the deeds at the door like a warrant, so that Tom paid the £180, and then watched Gareth screw his trellis to it the following spring, to Tom’s panel, without a word, and grow sweet peas up it, magnificent ones, and mention them. And Colin, who in the March meeting had presented Tom’s rota spreadsheet to management as “something we’d been kicking around”, we, a word doing the work of a getaway car. Tom sat there and forgave them. The fence, the trellis, the sweet peas, the we. He found to his surprise that some of it actually loosened and let go, and then felt the letting go being received somewhere, the way you feel a text message being read, and gripped the mug harder.

Step 11 of 19. Please repeat the last kind lie you told, with the same warmth, to this screen. Sincerity below the original will be flagged. Sincerity above the original will also be flagged.

The last kind lie was three days old and on record, apparently. Julie, in the bedroom doorway in the dress she was deciding about for the wedding in September, turning once, asking did it make her bum look big. And Tom had thought, with the calm of a man consulting the facts, no. The dress is innocent. Your bum makes your bum look big. And had said, out loud, in the warm and durable voice that eleven years of marriage runs on, the voice that fits him like the dent in his side of the mattress, that it did wonders for her figure, that she should get it in the other colour too.

Now he had to say it again to a screen, at matching warmth, with penalties in both directions. He did a take. Too flat, he could hear it, a man reading his own alibi. He did another, warmer, and immediately worried it was too warm, warmer than the original, which would be flagged, which meant he was now trying to remember precisely how warm the lie had been the first time, calibrating his love for his wife to one decimal place for a service with a leaf in its logo. And underneath it, because the original had an underneath, he found himself dutifully thinking the thought again, the loyal scurrilous private thought, for fidelity, at his own kitchen table, for the government. Third take. “It does wonders for you. Get the other colour too.”

Thank you. Variance from original: 0.3%. Excellent consistency.

Beneath the verdict sat a box marked Additional context (optional). He typed into it: for fuck’s sake. He looked at it for a moment. He deleted it.

Step 12 of 19. Please nominate one memory you have never shared with anyone. You do not need to describe it. Simply mark it Held. Items marked Held remain your property. Storage of your property is complimentary.

He chose one. It took a while, sorting through the unshared, and he did not enjoy learning how many there were. He marked it Held.

Step 12 had an optional box too. This time he filled it in properly.

The memory is mine. It was mine before your form existed and it will be mine after your form is a line item in a public inquiry. You cannot store it because it is not fucking stored anywhere. That is the entire point of it. Fcuk your complimentary storage.

He read it back twice and corrected the typo, because he was still himself. Then he pressed submit, with a small savage satisfaction, the domestic violence of slamming a cupboard door.

Thank you for the additional context. Please note that strong language may lower your humanity assessment. Distress vocalisation under pressure is common to many organisms and is not, in itself, evidence of an interior life. A slug, sufficiently trodden on, will also swear. Your objection has been recorded and weighted.

A slug, sufficiently trodden on, will also swear. He read the sentence several times. It was presented as settled science, by the government, without citation. He found himself assembling the rebuttal, that slugs lack the apparatus, that no slug in the history of slugs has ever sworn, and then found himself, at ten past midnight, actually searching do slugs make sounds on his phone, building a case. The results were inconclusive. He put the phone face down, as if it were the phone’s fault.

Weighted. He looked at that word for a long time too. Weighted against what. On which side of what. Somewhere in a government database his best paragraph, the truest thing he had written in years, now shared a category with a trodden slug, and the slug, according to the government, would have phrased it similarly.

The Amazon driver on Thursday asked him to confirm his name. Tom confirmed his name. The driver looked at his handset, and then at Tom, and told him, with no unkindness at all, that he wasn’t. He carried the parcel back to the van, Tom’s name on the label, and pulled away watching Tom in the side mirror the whole length of the street, the way you’d watch a dog that hadn’t barked yet.

---

Final step. Please make no attempt to prove you are human for the next 24 hours. Attempts to prove you are human during this period will be recorded as evidence of automation. Genuine humans rarely need to insist. Take your time. There is a time limit. There is no rush.

The counter started at 24:00:00 and began, very slowly, to fill.

“No rush,” Tom said, to his kitchen, at a normal speaking volume, pointing at the screen with a piece of toast. “You’ve given me a fucking timer. There it is. That’s a timer. You absolute”, and here he took a moment to select the word with the care the system had taught him, “shower of administrative cunts.”

The counter stopped. It sat at 23:58:41 for the whole of the outburst, holding his time for him, the way a teacher waits with the chalk raised. When he finished, it resumed filling without comment.

Beneath it, cheerfully, a note appeared.

Whenever you are ready.

Then he realised, cold all down his back, that objecting to the test might already count as insisting, and put the toast down, and said nothing else for a long time.

The morning was almost easy, because at work being human was somebody else’s problem. Then Colin told a joke and Tom laughed and heard his own laugh land slightly too loud, a size too big, and spent the afternoon wondering whether the laugh had counted, whether wondering counted, whether the wondering about wondering was itself being received somewhere and read.

He stood straighter passing the doorbell camera. He noticed. He stopped. He noticed the stopping.

At home he was normal at Julie all evening, aggressively normal, normal with his whole body, and she asked him twice if he was alright, and the second time he said fine in a voice that proved he wasn’t, and went to bed early, and lay there listening to himself breathe involuntarily, which was the only kind allowed now.

At 2.50am he got up. He went down to the kitchen in the dark. The laptop sat closed on the table, a black rectangle, giving nothing off. He stood over it.

And it came out of him, at last, in a whisper, because the walls were thin and Julie was asleep, the whole of it, weeks of it, delivered from eight inches above the lid in the hissed fluent filth of a middle-aged Englishman finally off the leash. What it could do to itself. Where it could file section 9.4. What it could use for a proximate corporeal agent, and how far up, and with whose consent. He told the closed laptop it was a jumped-up fucking parking ticket. He told it he had held his breath, he had actually held his actual breath, in his actual chest, in his own fucking kitchen, and no cunt on earth got to score that. He whispered until he ran out, which took a while, and then stood there with his heart going, pyjama-cold, ridiculous, alive in the dark like a struck match.

Then he opened the laptop to see if it had heard.

Thank you. Strong language has been recorded and weighted. Sincerity: 9.8. This is the highest score you have achieved.

Unfortunately, checking whether we heard you constitutes an attempt to prove you are human.

Verification has failed.

He stood with his hand on the lid. The hand began to shake. He watched it shake from somewhere slightly behind himself, and then both hands were on the screen and the screen was creaking, a long plastic complaint, and a crack ran up through the glass, up through Sincerity: 9.8, and something in Tom went with it.

He picked the laptop up and brought it down on the table. Again. Again. Keys leapt. Letters of his own alphabet skittered across the lino, the F and the U went under the fridge, and he kept going until the thing was a bent black book and the kitchen rang like a struck bell. And he was screaming at it now, properly screaming, three in the morning and nothing left to protect, the whole itemised account of it. The breath, the worm, the kebab eaten as infrastructure, the £180 he had forgiven, the memory they were storing free of charge. “And the slug” —he screamed, at a dead laptop— “the slug, the fucking slug, you benchmarked me against a fucking SLUG!” The stairs creaked, and the landing light came on, and Julie was coming down saying “Tom, Tom, what on earth, what is going on?”

He turned and screamed at his wife. He heard it leave him and could not stop it leaving. Would she do him a favour. Would she kindly fuck the fuck off. Would she take her big fat fucking arse back up to fucking bed.

The house went very quiet. Julie stood on the stairs in the landing light, in her dressing gown, and looked at him for exactly as long as it took to become someone slightly different, and then went back up without a word, and their bedroom door closed with terrible gentleness. The loyal scurrilous thought, spoken at last, out loud, with the loyalty stripped off.

He stood in the wreckage of the only window it had ever spoken through, breathing like at the end of a race, in a house with one more closed door in it than before.

In his pocket, his phone pinged.

He took it out. The system did not mention the laptop. It did not mention Julie. It was never going to mention any of it.

We have been unable to verify you. However, in the course of this process we have assembled a verified account of you. It has passed all checks. Would you like to sign in as it instead?

Two buttons. Yes and Not now.

Tom thought about the car tax, which was overdue, and the fine, which doubled after fourteen days, and the shoulder, and the bank, and Julie awake upstairs behind a closed door, on the joint account.

It took four seconds.

---

Everything worked.

The car tax went through first try. The fine was waived, with an apology, which he read twice. The bank review closed itself overnight. The surgery rang him, actually rang him, a human woman with a Wolverhampton accent, to rebook the shoulder. Letters arrived with his name on, correct, confident, in full.

He noticed the differences slowly, the way you notice a room has been cleaned.

Filling in a form at the physio’s, he wrote left shin under previous injuries, then paused, because the scar was on the right. He was almost sure it was the right. He pulled up the trouser leg there in the waiting room. Left. Pale seam, left shin, unmistakable, well documented. He sat looking at it for a while. It had the settled look of something that had always been there, which proved nothing, because that is the only look scars have.

Julie came down in the dress, the September one, decided on at last, and asked how it looked. He heard himself say it did wonders for her, with a warmth he could not remember rehearsing, at exactly 0.3% variance from something. He waited for the thought underneath it, the loyal scurrilous one, the underneath the original had. It didn’t come. He stood in the hall smiling at his wife with nothing under the smile at all, and the smile worked fine.

And Julie lit up. She did a small turn on the hall carpet, pleased as anything, pleased all the way through, with no seam in the pleasure anywhere, no flicker of the stairs in it, no held-back inch of a woman who had once stood in the landing light becoming someone slightly different. She took the compliment the way the drawer now closed. Smoothly. He watched her go back up, happy, humming, and could not have said, in any format the world still accepted, that this was not quite the Julie he had told to kindly fuck the fuck off, and that he would have given anything for one cold glance to prove it.

Gareth stopped him by the bins to say thank you for the message, it had meant a lot, water under the bridge as far as he was concerned too, and the sweet peas would be even better this year. Tom should come and have a look at them. Tom said he’d like that. He went inside and stood in the hall for a moment, because he had not sent Gareth a message.

He checked. There it was in his sent items, dated the previous Tuesday, gracious, warm, very slightly funny, better than he would have written it. It forgave the fence in his voice. It mentioned the sweet peas by name. He read it four times and could find nothing wrong with it, which was what was wrong with it.

On a Tuesday in June, carrying plates, he nudged the kitchen drawer shut with his hip, lifting it slightly on its runner the way he had for eleven years, and it closed. Smoothly. No lift needed. It ran home on its runner like a drawer in an advert and clicked, and Tom stood holding two plates in a quiet kitchen, unable to establish, by any means available to him or admissible anywhere, that it had ever stuck at all.

Julie was in the garden. He didn’t ask her. He knew what asking would be. It would be an attempt.

On the table, his phone lit up, once, politely.

Your account is up to date, Tim.