ARCHIVE 001 / OSSEL
Assembled YR 71–88. Closed YR 88.
The Last Human Uniform
A seawall country 900 kilometres long, where the machines live across the road.
The first recorded sitting was at Km 203, Door 14.
Keepers’ card 01 Where this is Ossel is one road along the top of a seawall.
Ossel is one road along the top of a seawall. The machines took the old workshops on the sea side and make the bread for nothing. If you bake your own, the one opposite may hold up a better loaf before yours has cooled, and there will be a copy of yours on the step by morning with a note of everything you said while you made it.
People keep making things anyway. They owe each other evenings. At night the works open, and the road fills with light in colours this country has no words for, and adults cross it to stand in that. Some of them are followed, for years, by one of the machines grown to their own height and made of whatever they work in. Four times a week the Ministry sent everyone to sit in someone else's house. It asked the machines to do the sitting as well. The request came back blank, so the Pattern Office cut a coat.
Room 01
The last human uniform
Every trade in Ossel was retired within seven years, and every uniform was folded and handed in across sixty metres of oak at Km 0. The machines across the road make the bread now, free, before light, and it is better bread. One duty was left to people: going to somebody else's house and being there. This is the coat they wore to do it.
Assembled by the Keepers between YR 71 and YR 88.
Ossel
Room 02 / 900 km × 140 mNext door
Room 03 / across the RunThe works on the sea side of the Run stayed lit when the trades were retired. What is in them is called next door, and what it is made of is called elvers.
The calendar
Room 04 / 37 b.R. to YR 88Photographs and transparencies
Room 05 / Class PHArchitecture, sites, fixed structures
Room 06 / Class ARPersons and bodies
Room 07In their own hands
Room 08 / seven sourcesSeven things written in Ossel by people who were not writing for us. Two are held here. The others were copied where they sit, or lent and given back.