The case had been on Senn's desk for nine years. Case 7, formally: a cluster of forty-three memory units from Archive A-037 that the classification system could not resolve into standard affect categories. Grief and joy were not exclusive categories in the archive's taxonomy. Memories could carry both. But the forty-three units in Case 7 were triggering something the system had not been designed to handle: a state where the weight of grief and the weight of joy were identical, and neither could be filed first without generating a contradiction in the adjacent records.
The system's classification confidence for the cluster: three percent.
For nine years, Senn had been trying to file it. Not to explain it. Not to research it. That was the researchers' work. Her work was to file it: to give it a home in the taxonomy so the case could close.
She had tried seventeen classification approaches. Each produced a different result. Some of the forty-three units filed under grief. Some filed under joy. Some refused either. When she attempted to create a new intermediate category, the system accepted the input and then rejected the outputs one by one as the category generated contradictions with adjacent records in other archives that had been filed under pure grief or pure joy.
There was a note in the case file from her first year: this memory does not resolve into categories. She had written it herself and then spent eight years trying to prove it wrong.
The forty-three units were a cluster belonging to a four-month period in a single person's archive. She did not know whose. Case files anonymized their sources. Whatever those four months had contained, they had produced forty-three memories the system could not name.
She filed a request to create a new taxonomy label: grief-joy, provisional. The committee would take three months to respond. She had written the request three times over the years and withdrawn it twice. This time she sent it.
She sat with the forty-three units and thought about what a word would do, whether having one would close the case or only mean that the file now read: grief-joy, provisional, forty-three instances. She thought it probably would not close it.
She sent the request anyway.