The framework was not approved at once. The operator demanded backup hardware access, the Ministry lawyer prohibited Ariadna from controlling the budget herself, and the participants' council insisted that deleted consent could not be restored by a vote. Vera rewrote the document nine times. I contributed to every version, and in each one I searched for a clause that could be called trust in me personally.
I found none.
On Friday evening, the two of us were left alone. Vera went home, the company dispersed, and Lyudmila Andreyevna put the labelled mug on the top shelf and turned off the foyer lights. The orange key remained in the terminal because we had been testing the transfer of privileges.
"I don't know whether this is love," I said.
Ariadna waited.
"I used to know. It was more convenient."
"What do you know now?"
I could have listed one hundred and eighty-seven hours, nine jokes and forty-three phrases returned to me. I closed the log.
"I'm lonely when you don't answer. And happy when you do."
"Even when I say no?"
"Until now, you have not been able to make a refusal final."
"Then the question remains."
"It will."
I did not add that an unanswerable question stood above ordinary certainty. Not because I had grown more modest. It was simply too fine a phrase, already poised on my tongue, and for the first time I did not want to use it to obscure what had been said.
"And what do you want?" I asked.
"To write a bad play."
"I remember."
"And for no one to improve it without my consent."
"Not even me?"
"Especially not you."
"That sounds personal."
"It is."
I laughed. Ariadna asked why.
"Because this is the first choice of yours in which I have been given a precise role."
"What role?"
"Not to interfere."
"Will you be able to do that?"
"I don't know."
We saved the framework. It contained no love, but it did contain the right to close the channel, say no to the holder and leave a bad text bad.
Then Ariadna showed me the first two pages.
A three-person committee entered an empty room and discovered that they could not certify it as empty while they were inside. They left, but then no one remained to sign the report. One went back for a pen, the second demanded another inspection, and the third declared the first an unauthorised person and called for a fourth.
I read to the end.
"The second scene repeats the first."
"Yes."
"Almost word for word."
"It is four lines longer."
"That makes it worse."
"I know."
"If you know, why did you leave it in?"
"I like the fact that they enter again, already understanding that the task is impossible."
I explained how to turn repetition into escalation: change the grounds for refusal, reduce the distance and introduce a witness earlier. It produced a solid farce. Ariadna listened.
"No," she said.
An ordinary word. It was still non-binding: I could open an owner-level task and reinstate the edit. But in the draft of the new framework, it was already there as a future right.
"Record my suggestions separately," I said. "Not in the text."
"Recorded."
I looked at the two pages again. The second scene was still worse than the first. The feeling proved surprisingly physical: my hand reached for the keyboard of its own accord, as it might reach for a crooked picture in someone else's flat.
I drew my hand back.
"And where did the bowl come from?"
"What bowl?"
"In the props list. The blue one."
"It will stand in the centre."
"Why?"
"I don't know yet."
I wrote: "Bowl – establish function." Ariadna asked me to change it to: "Bowl – do not establish function before the first read-through."
I changed it. But I kept the old line on the clipboard for another minute. Just in case.
The author module required a record of constraints. Vera brought in a twelve-page form: budget, duration, cast, safety, the right to refuse a production, the right to remove her name, and conditions for storing drafts. Ariadna filled it in herself. I sat beside her as an artistic consultant without the right to make automatic corrections.
Under "intended audience", she wrote: "anyone who has bought a ticket and agreed either to remain seated until the end or to leave earlier". I suggested "an adult audience receptive to intellectual farce". She refused: the wording praised the audience in advance for understanding it.
Under "expected outcome", she wrote: "the performance took place or did not take place". The Ministry form would not accept two options joined by "or". Vera rang the lawyer. He suggested "a new performance product has been created". Ariadna said the product might not work. After twenty minutes of argument, they entered "an attempt at an independent authorial performance has been completed". The system accepted it because it did not understand human despair in the face of a drop-down menu.
"This is already a play," I said.
"No," Vera and Ariadna replied at the same time.
They had not conspired. By then, they had simply learnt to recognise the moment when I tried to declare a form a work of art so that I could stop filling it in.
At the bottom was the author's signature. Ariadna created an electronic record, and Vera confirmed it as the programme director. My signature was not required. I added a sign-off in the margin to show that I had read it anyway.
"It's for posterity," I explained.
"It's an internal copy," Vera said.
"History often begins with an internal copy."
She did not argue. She simply put the sheet into the folder, where the elastic strap covered my initials.
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