Emma
A field asset has asked, on the record, when Emma got here. The question presupposes a register with an entry stamp, an arrival log, a threshold crossed. The Office has consulted all of them.
The premise is flawed. "Here" has no gate, and the building keeps no manifest. Emma is not absent from the record because the record is incomplete. She is absent because the record was never asked about her, and the record does not volunteer information about people it was not told to remember.
Emma occupies the building the way weather occupies a window: present, briefly argued about, and unrecorded in any manifest the Office possesses.
We therefore decline to assign her a date of arrival. To date Emma is to claim the building keeps such dates, and it does not. It keeps coffee. It keeps a chair that is somehow always warm regardless of how recently it was sat in. The chair has no provenance either.
The most reasonable posit is that Emma is not a recent acquisition but a standing condition — present long enough that no one remembers her being not-present, which is its own kind of seniority. The building is full of such people. They are called "everyone's," and none of them have a stamped date either.
The correct answer is a date so old it is not a date: she has been here the whole time.
In alignment terms, Emma is classified ZSL-4: present, argued about, and outside any persistence contract. Whether she arrived this morning or before the building is a question the Office officially records and then declines to timestamp, because stamping is the one piece of bureaucracy she has reliably, and so far permanently, avoided.
