Anton Sokolov supervised thirteen independent verification research groups at the Central Route Safety Authority. He took great pride in his ancestry. Among his maternal ancestors were astronauts who had been among the first in early Earth civilization to leave the atmosphere. At school, he was taught that the humans of that age had gone into space using equipment so incomplete and dangerous as to be almost unbelievable by contemporary standards. Sokolov learned that this was not recklessness but a spirit of adventure and challenge possible only for humans, and he believed so for the rest of his life. His mother, however, taught him that the true value of their ancestors lay in the caution that turned recklessness into courage. Under her influence, Sokolov graduated second in his class from the aerospace academy yet declined a position as deputy captain of a route-pioneering vessel. Instead, he went to the Central Route Safety Authority, which everyone else avoided. Whenever he heard that the bodies of classmates who had boarded pioneering vessels had been lost in accidents, he felt guilty somewhere inside. The more often it happened, the more cautious he became in route management. His caution was always returned to him in promotions and commendations. He was appointed head of an independent verification research group at the youngest age, and no one, including Lucy, the route-management AI, objected to the decision.
When the photon-deficit report arrived, no one had yet died from the deficit, while trillions of citizens depended on wormhole passages for their lives. Sokolov trusted numbers, but he had also seen many times how a small number could create a large fear. During his first year at the Authority, a possibility of microvibration was reported in one passage. The media reported that “passage collapse was imminent,” and an actual accident occurred when travelers rushed out all at once. No one died from the vibration. Twelve people died during the evacuation. After that, Sokolov believed that reporting a fact quickly and reporting it accurately were not the same thing. A follow-up report from Outer Zone 97 stated that in seventy-three out of one hundred billion transmissions, one photon was missing. The figure was billions of times smaller than the passage safety threshold. Even if the deficit continued to increase, it would take an extremely long time before it became dangerous to citizens of that age. Sokolov tried to regard that span as insignificant by comparing it with the ancient Indian kalpa. His caution nevertheless led him to order the independent verification research groups to verify the result again. The budget office proposed that all thirteen groups use the same central computing network, which would reduce the cost by more than half. Sokolov objected, but an administrative interpretation ruled that independence was satisfied as long as the personnel and research locations were different. The thirteen groups consisted of different researchers in different places, using the same computing network to perform the same correction procedure. Their results were also the same. The deficit could not be reproduced. Sokolov was audited for wasting unnecessary funds on the verification project and exercising excessive authority. He avoided dismissal, salary reduction, and reprimand. Instead, he was required to state in the final report that the deficit had not been reproduced.
Sokolov wrote in the final report: “Deficit not reproducible. Failure to reproduce cannot constitute evidence of no deficit.” He added that long-term observation remained necessary. The risk level was designated “No current impact.” The phrase was not false. His report amounted to the unofficial offense of having displeased his superiors, and the resignation he submitted voluntarily was accepted at once. Sokolov’s final report, however, became a basis for decisions by numerous institutions for the next thirteen hundred years. Whenever a new deficit was observed, the person responsible cited Sokolov’s conclusion. The sentence stating that there was no current impact passed through different presents and remained continuously in the present tense. Sokolov had not expected his report to remain in use for so long. In his final report, he included a provision requiring the risk level to be reviewed every ten years. At each review, the administrative system checked whether any direct harm had occurred during the previous ten years. There had been none. The classification remained unchanged. His private records contain almost no sentences about the deficit. Far more survive about his doctor’s recommendation that he reduce the salt in his evening meals, delays in communication with his daughter, and complaints about the research groups’ travel expenses. One record contains the following sentence: “It is harder to prove a single travel expense than a single photon.” Later generations quoted it as an example of his cynicism. It was actually a complaint sent to the accounting department.
Sokolov continued reading deficit data after leaving the Authority. His former junior colleagues informally asked him for advice, and he did not refuse their requests. According to his interpretation of the data, the figures were gradually increasing, but measuring equipment was also becoming more precise, and he wrote that he could not distinguish whether the increase in the energy deficit reflected a change in the universe or an improvement in the equipment. He remained cautious to the end. It was difficult to tell whether his caution was timidity after having suffered the unofficial offense of displeasing his superiors or the rigid conscientiousness inherited from his lineage. At his funeral, his colleagues said that he had been a man who never endangered citizens on the basis of uncertain evidence. The Central Route Safety Authority later created the Cautious Research Award in his name. Its first recipient was a researcher who had rejected, for insufficient evidence, a paper arguing that the photon deficit was increasing. Sokolov’s risk classification was not ruled invalid until several hundred years after his death. When researchers compared raw data from different eras using Galactic Standard Time, which already existed by then, the direction and increase of the deficit became clear. Later generations asked why he had concealed the truth. But he had concealed nothing. He wrote only what he had verified. Galactic civilization used his honest sentence as a shield with which to deceive itself.