The matching criteria had not changed since Ovin had started, seventeen years ago. The core requirement was still: the completer must have no prior knowledge of the maker. No research, no listening or reading history, no biographical contact. Fresh.
Beyond that, the matching was judgment. Ovin looked at the work and looked at the pool of available completers and tried to feel which stranger could carry the maker's logic forward without falsifying it. He was not always right. He had made matches that produced completions technically correct and emotionally inert. He had made matches that produced something he hadn't anticipated.
He had matched 312 works in seventeen years. He kept a personal log.
His own work had been in the archive for eight years. He had placed it there himself, at forty-five, after two years of not finishing it. The protocol was clear: he was not permitted to work his own archive. He was also not permitted to influence the matching. The coordinator who eventually matched his work would not know it was his. The archive used reference numbers, not names.
He had looked at the archive search interface twice in eight years. Both times he had closed it without searching.
Today a new intake arrived: a handwritten song cycle, eleven songs complete, the twelfth incomplete. The composer had died four months ago, intestate, and the estate had donated the archive. There was no name on the cover. There was only a reference number.
Ovin read the eleven complete songs. It took him an hour and a half.
He sat with the application pool for a long time before he made the match.