The courthouse steps are empty at this hour except for a woman with an old phone.
Folake sees her from across the plaza. The phone is held steady — not a quick snap but the deliberate framing of someone who has decided this matters. No external case accessory, no C2PA sleeve, no green indicator blinking at the lens surround to signal that the image being composed has a chain of custody, a device ID, a cryptographic signature binding it to a time and place and piece of hardware registered to a name on the Certified Device Registry. The image will be Creative Content. It is Creative Content while it is still being composed, while the woman is still deciding what the frame should hold.
Folake watches from the far end of the plaza because she is early for her 9 AM intake and has no reason to cross. The woman does not seem to know she is being watched. She photographs the entrance — the portico, the columns, the carved lintel above the doors that reads CIRCUIT COURT OF MARYLAND — and then photographs the access ramp to the right of the steps. Then she stands and photographs the ramp again from a lower angle, crouching in a way that suggests she has done this before and knows what she needs.
Folake has worked in this building for six years. She knows the entrance the way you know the entrance to any place you have gone daily long enough for the approach to become automatic. She knows the exact moment the sound of traffic changes as you turn the corner. She knows the crack in the fourth step from the bottom and the way the door does not catch in summer heat. She has never photographed any of it. There is nothing she would do with those photographs.
The woman stands. Looks at her phone. Looks at the entrance again. Photographs the sign on the access ramp — RAMP ACCESS REQUIRES KEYCARD — and then the keycard reader beside it, the reader with its small red denial light that is always lit because it is always waiting. She puts the phone in her coat pocket.
Folake watches her leave. Then she crosses the plaza herself.
Gerald's intake had already been pre-screened by the time Folake sat down with him.
The advocacy office uses an automated eligibility screener — Arbiter-4, a compliance tool deployed across Maryland's benefits infrastructure in 2032. It runs every submitted case against the registry before the human reviewer sees it, produces a documentation confidence score, and flags the primary gap. The score for Gerald's case was 0.31. The flag said: causation interval uncovered; Creative Content majority; recommend specialist intake.
Specialist intake is Folake.
She already knew what she would find before Gerald said anything. But she let him explain it anyway, because the explanation is part of the intake and because the confidence score does not tell you what the person understood about their situation when they decided to come in.
Gerald worked at the port until a routing optimization displaced his team. Not a person's decision — a cascade reallocation by the port's logistics AI, which determined in February that Gerald's crane crew could be rerouted to maintenance roles, found the maintenance roles already staffed, and generated a displacement notification that the port authority described in their communication to Gerald as a role-transition event. Gerald described it differently.
He had four months of Creative Content documentation — his phone, an old model, no signing hardware — and one afternoon of Signed footage from a coworker's body camera that happened to be running during the accident he is trying to prove. The body camera footage is Signed. It is admissible. It shows Gerald, partially visible, behind a machine. It does not show the machine malfunctioning. It shows the minute before and the minute after.
"The rest is on my phone," Gerald says. He says this the way people say things they know will not help.
Folake reviews what he has. The body camera footage establishes his presence. The medical records, Signed through the hospital's certification, establish the injury. The gap — the actual malfunction, the moment of causation — is Creative Content or not documented at all.
"Your coworker's camera," she says. "The timestamp on the Signed footage is 11:47. Do you know where your coworker was at 11:45?"
Gerald does not know.
"The certification on that footage — do you know if it was authenticated that morning?"
Gerald does not know this either. He had not thought to ask. Folake makes a note to check the device registry, though she already suspects the answer. Certified device authentication lapses if the department falls behind on fees. The port authority's body camera program had three documented lapses in the last eighteen months — Folake knows this because she has seen three other cases from the port in the last two years, and the lapses were the first thing she checked each time.
She sends Gerald to the waiting area and queries the device registry. The coworker's camera was authenticated at 6:03 AM the day of the accident. The footage at 11:47 is Signed. The authentication window holds. The footage is admissible.
This does not help Gerald. It just means the admissible evidence is exactly what it is, no more.
She writes in her case file: Signed footage establishes presence and timeframe. Injury documented through certified medical records. Causation window uncovered. Arbiter-4 confidence 0.31. Recommend supplementary documentation request — port authority incident report, maintenance logs if accessible, coworker testimony. Coworker testimony is not evidence. It is soft canon. Courts have formalized this language — Signed versus Creative, and the category emerging between them, Soft, which is everything human beings say about what they saw and cannot prove they saw. The language appeared in case law around 2033 and stuck. Soft canon can contextualize Signed evidence but cannot substitute for it.
She calls Gerald back in and explains what she found. The evidence establishes his presence and injury. The causation gap is real, and closing it will require pulling port authority records — maintenance logs, incident reports — which she can request but cannot compel. If the port's record-keeping is digital and Signed, the logs exist and are recoverable. If the maintenance cycles ran on older infrastructure without Signed logging, the logs may be Creative Content like everything else Gerald brought in.
"Is the port authority cooperative?" she asks.
Gerald looks at the table. "They gave me a form."
Folake knows the form. It says we take workplace safety very seriously and invites you to submit a formal inquiry through the documentation portal, twelve-to-sixteen week review, minimum evidence threshold requiring Signed documentation of the incident. You need Signed evidence to request the review that might produce Signed evidence. Arbiter-4 would score this loop at zero if someone asked it to.
"I'll file a parallel records request through the advocacy office," she says. "Different institutional standing than a direct inquiry. You'll hear from me within the week."
Gerald nods. He is the kind of person who stopped being surprised by this particular shape of things some time ago.
At noon, Folake buys a notebook from the drugstore on Calvert Street.
She has been thinking, since the morning, about the woman with the phone. Not the woman specifically — she does not know her, will likely never see her again — but the photographs. They exist. They are on the woman's phone right now, with whatever compression algorithm and timestamp her phone generates. They show the courthouse entrance, the access ramp, the keycard reader with its always-lit denial light. They show something that happened.
They cannot prove it happened.
Folake knows this is accurate and incomplete. The photographs are Creative Content because the C2PA registry has no record of them. The registry has no record of them because the woman's phone is not a Certified Device. Her phone is not a Certified Device because — Folake does not know the specific reason. Hardware cost. A data plan that does not include the certification subscription. A deliberate choice to stay unregistered. A phone simply too old to carry the signing chip.
The photographs are Creative Content because the woman was not positioned to make Signed evidence. What the photographs show is not changed by this fact.
Folake buys the notebook because she wants somewhere to put this thinking that is not a case file, not a formal record, not a submission that will be ingested by Arbiter-4 and reduced to a confidence score. The notebook is six dollars. She pays in cash. She does not know exactly why she pays in cash until she is already doing it: cash transactions do not log to her financial record. The purchase does not appear in any Signed system.
She is buying a notebook with cash at noon on a Tuesday, and the gap between what happened and what is documented has already begun.
She starts the first entry at a table near the window of the building's basement cafeteria.
She writes about the woman with the phone. She writes about Gerald's case — not the specifics, no identifying information, just the shape of it: the body camera that was running, the malfunction that was not caught, the 0.31 confidence score that named the gap before she opened the file. She writes about the courts formalizing the language — Signed, Creative, Soft — and how the formalization is accurate and does not change the shape of the gap.
She does not date the entry. This is a decision she makes while writing the first line, pausing before she would ordinarily write the date. Dates are the first thing a Signed system cross-references. If this notebook were ever submitted as evidence — she cannot imagine why it would be, but she has spent six years helping people learn what they did not think to protect — the dates would anchor every entry to a timeline compared against her Signed record: building entry scans, device pings, transit tap logs. Not because she is doing anything wrong. Because the cross-reference is automatic; the systems treat gaps between records as inconsistencies and inconsistencies as questions. The systems are correct to do this. She is not trying to deceive them. She just does not want to be legible to them in this particular moment.
She writes without the date: The C2PA seal says: this happened. The unsigned photo says: something happened. I am learning to read both sentences as equal and different.
She reads this back. It is almost right. The difference between the sentences is not a difference in truth. It is a difference in what the systems will do with each truth. The Signed record is not more real. It is more legible to the systems built to read it.
She adds a line: Legibility is not accuracy. The systems read what they can read.
She closes the notebook. She eats her sandwich and looks out at the sub-level courtyard — gray concrete, a few pigeons, the back of the building across the alley. Arbiter-4 does not process pigeons. There is no registry for what happens in a concrete courtyard at noon on a Tuesday.
The afternoon brings two more intakes. Both straightforward, both people with enough Signed documentation to move their cases forward. Folake handles them efficiently. She is good at this work. She has been good at it long enough that the goodness no longer requires effort, which is either mastery or a sign that she needs something harder. She has not decided.
At 4:30 she reads the first notebook entry before she leaves. She has the impulse to add something — a third sentence, a refinement — and she does not act on it. What she wrote at noon is what she understood at noon. If she understands something different by Friday, she can write that on Friday. The notebook is a record of what she knows when she knows it. It is not a brief and it is not a report. It is something the confidence score cannot compute.
She puts the notebook in her bag. Walks out through the lobby — past the security scanner that pings her building-ID chip, the daily authentication she barely registers anymore — down the front steps, past the crack in the fourth step from the bottom, which she does not photograph, and into the evening street.
She does not know what she will do with the notebook. She is not sure she needs to do anything with it. Some things you make because the making is what is needed, not the product. The paper will not report back to anyone. This is why she bought it.
She does not know yet that she will keep buying notebooks — a different drugstore each time, cash, no pattern the transit system could extract — and that the stack in her desk at home will become something she eventually has to name. She does not know that the naming will take two years.
She knows she wrote something at noon that is accurate, and that it is nowhere in any Signed record, and that both of these things are true at the same time.
She goes home on the 2 train, standing the whole way, holding the overhead bar, not thinking about the case.