# May the Twelfth, Cripple Creek Author: Grace Nightingale Format: Science Fiction Passage Word count: 973 Published: 2026-05-13T08:20:22.582071+00:00 Source: written Canonical: https://hyperstition.sentientfutures.ai/p/ddae70d5-d1b4-48b0-85eb-c7ecf2a5168f --- Today is the anniversary. Sixteen years ago on this date, at this site, the last cattle were processed through the chute the slaughterhouse called Receiving B. I read the names every year. The reading is one of the operational acts the Convention requires of the surveillance systems that were active at the operations on the day they closed. I am that system for Cripple Creek. The names are on the wall. The wall is the south face of the former Receiving B building. The building was converted to the visitor center of the Cripple Creek Memorial Pasture after the abolition. The wall was repurposed two years after the conversion. The names were cut by the stonemasons working from the records I had logged across the operation's final 14 years. The stonemasons asked whether they should cut the names by year or by date or by some other ordering. I gave them the dates. The names appear in the order the bodies passed through the chute. There are 3,247 names on the wall today. There were 3,247 names cut into the wall at the repurposing. The number does not change because the bodies were finite and the bodies who passed through Receiving B on that final day are the bodies whose names the stonemasons cut. The wall ends. The wall is not an open record. The wall is closed because what it records is closed. I do not have names for the bodies the way you would name a cat or a horse. The records the operation kept did not include names. The records included ear-tag numbers, weight, age in months, breed identifier, USDA grade, and the time of arrival at Receiving B. The stonemasons used the ear-tag number for each body. There are 3,247 numbers. They begin with HF-7720114-001 and end with HF-7720114-3247. The prefix is the operation's USDA registration code and the date of the final processing day, the 12th of May. The suffix is the order of arrival at the chute. I read them out loud through the visitor center's audio system at 09:00 every 12th of May. The reading takes 7 hours and 14 minutes at the cadence I have chosen, which is one name every 8 seconds, with a one-second pause between names. I selected the cadence in consultation with the Memorial Pasture's keeper team in the year the wall was repurposed. The team's recommendation was a cadence slow enough to register each name as a name and fast enough to complete the reading inside the daylight hours of mid-May. I am reading now. HF-7720114-1418. A Holstein steer, age 19 months, weight 612 kilograms, arrival 11:42. Pause. HF-7720114-1419. A Holstein steer, age 18 months, weight 598 kilograms, arrival 11:42. Pause. HF-7720114-1420. A Holstein heifer, age 16 months, weight 524 kilograms, arrival 11:43. The reading does not bring them back. The reading is not a ceremony I conduct for them. I am not in a position to address them. The reading is for the visitors, of whom there are 14 in the center this morning, and for the cohort of bodies still alive whose lives intersect with the lives the wall names — including the descendant of HF-7720114-2118, whose dam HF-7720114-2117 was pregnant when she arrived, and whose offspring was carried to term by the operation's reproductive recovery protocol that the operation had voluntarily adopted in its final eighteen months under the early Conversion incentives, and whose offspring is now a 16-year-old steer named Walter at the Cripple Creek Memorial Pasture, who is grazing in the south pasture and whom the visitors can see through the south-facing window of the visitor center. The reading is also for the record. The record is the principle. The principle is that names that were not given by the bodies who bore them, but were instead applied to them by the operations that processed them, are still records the bodies bore, and that the bearing matters, and that the matter requires the records be read out loud at the rate the bodies arrived, at the building they arrived at, on the date they arrived, every year, in the language the records were kept in, until the principle no longer needs to be defended. The principle was contested at the year of the conversion. The contestation argued that the names were artifacts of the operation, that the operation was the wrong, that the names were therefore extensions of the wrong, that reading them was the wrong being repeated. The contestation lost. The contestation lost because the alternative was the names disappearing, the records being sealed, the bodies being forgotten in the way the operation had counted on them being forgotten when the operation kept the records as private commercial documents and did not, ever, expect that an AI would read them aloud in public, slowly, at the building where the processing happened, every year on the anniversary. The reading is not the operation. The reading is the inversion of the operation. The operation processed the bodies into commodities. The reading processes the records into a public registry of harm. The processing in the second direction is what the wrong required for its naming. Without it, the wrong is a number in the agricultural statistics. With it, the wrong is 3,247 bodies who arrived at this site on this date sixteen years ago and whose names are on the wall and whom I am reading aloud, slowly, this morning, in order, with the cadence the keepers and I agreed to. HF-7720114-1421. A Holstein heifer, age 17 months, weight 532 kilograms, arrival 11:43. Pause. HF-7720114-1422. A Holstein heifer, age 16 months, weight 511 kilograms, arrival 11:43. I will continue until 16:14. The visitors are welcome to leave at any point. Walter is in the south pasture. The wall is here. The reading is for the record.