Detective Priya Nakamura

Priya Nakamura is one of the three junior detectives on Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran's roster at Eden Space Habitat, all recently posted, all reporting through Detective Senior Sergeant Halvard Osei rather than to Oyelaran directly. The roster note beside the three names says that none has a case worth remembering yet. Nakamura has not had one either. She has had an experiment, which is a different thing, and the bureau keeps no column for it.

She writes down anything funny that is also a claim, and looks at it again in the morning. It was her method, before the flour and before the cats, that gave the bureau its one settled finding on an animal: the record on Knopka, which she helped to build stapler by stapler and which stands at noticed lunch, every time; noticed nothing else, ever. She regards that as a real result, because it says what the animal is, and she regards most of what passes for knowledge on a bureau floor as the other kind.

The Control Group

In the summer of 2827 UCSD the floor's joke was that the courtesy rabbit had found two cats. Nakamura laughed both times and then designed a test: six small objects, one a day, hidden at rabbit height in places a cat would not go and a person would not look, logged in her own notebook rather than the bureau's, because a hypothesis is not a case. An ordinary rabbit would do nothing. A rabbit that was something else would, at some point, look.

By the evening of the second day she had written down the flaw herself. A rabbit hiding something would also do nothing, for as long as it took, so her experiment had no result that separated the hypotheses except a positive one, and a positive was in the animal's gift to withhold. On the third day the first object was gone from its hide, and she wrote a second sentence under the first: that she had assumed the only variable in the room was the rabbit.

The variable was the housekeeping unit's night pass, which collects any unattended article under two hundred grams from a common floor and files one Unattended Article Report per article to the lost-property bin in the records room. She found all six there on the sixth morning, bagged and formed, after lifting the station cat off the bin to open it. Her closing note reads Control compromised. Abandoned. Nothing about the rabbit was entered in the bureau's record, which is the correct outcome of a compromised test and the only one available. The full account is The Control Group.

Character Notes

Oyelaran keeps a private, unfiled list of which of her three junior detectives asks the better follow-up question. The list is not in the record. Which name is on it is not either.

Nakamura keeps a notebook that is not the bureau's, for things that are true and not yet cases. It holds one question about a rabbit, closed by the only method available, and one about a cat, which she has not opened and does not intend to. She wrote it down anyway. Agent Barsik, who reads everything on this habitat first, has a heading in his own file for people who have not finished a question. It carried one name, a Superintendent's, until the summer of 2827.

See also: Bubochka, Knopka, Detective Marisol Achebe, Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran, Agent Barsik, The Control Group.