Every Monday at seven, Mira Okon read the discharge list. The hospital's new system ranked two hundred patients by risk, and the top forty received a home visit from a nurse. The numbers arrived as neat columns: age, diagnosis, medication count, distance from the clinic. Beside each name sat a score between one and ten. Mira had learned to trust the list the way she trusted a handrail in the dark.
每周一早上七点，米拉·奥孔都会阅读出院病人名单。医院的新系统按风险给两百名病人排序，排名前四十的人会得到一次护士上门探访。数字以整齐的栏目出现：年龄、诊断、用药数量、到诊所的距离。每个名字旁边都有一个一到十分的分数。米拉已经学会像信任黑暗中的扶手那样信任这份名单。
The forty-first name belonged to a man called Emeka Bassey, seventy-nine, who lived alone on the fifth floor of a building with a broken lift. His score was 3.1. Mira had met him twice, and both times he had offered her tea he could not afford and asked whether the rain would stop. He had no smartphone, so the system knew almost nothing about him. Silence, she had begun to suspect, could be mistaken for safety.
第四十一个名字属于一个叫埃梅卡·巴塞的男人，七十九岁，独自住在一栋电梯坏了的楼的五层。他的分数是3.1。米拉见过他两次，两次他都请她喝他其实负担不起的茶，还问她雨会不会停。他没有智能手机，所以系统对他几乎一无所知。她开始怀疑，沉默有时会被误认为安全。
She carried the list to the staff room and stared at it until the tea went cold. The rule was simple: forty visits, no exceptions. Yet a rule written for two hundred people could not see the particular shape of one. That evening she wrote Emeka's name on her own paper, under the printed forty, and drew a small circle around it.
她把名单拿到员工休息室，盯着它看，直到茶凉了。规则很简单：四十次探访，没有例外。然而，一条为两百个人写下的规则，看不见某一个人的具体形状。那天傍晚，她把自己的纸上写下埃梅卡的名字，写在打印出来的第四十名下面，并画了一个小圈把它圈住。
The building had no numbers by the lift, only a faded arrow and a smell of cooked rice. Mira climbed, counting doors. On the fifth floor she found him in a chair by the window, a blanket over his knees, the radio tuned to a station that had stopped broadcasting hours earlier. He seemed neither surprised nor pleased. He said the lift had been broken since March.
楼里电梯旁没有门牌号，只有一个褪色的箭头和一股米饭的味道。米拉一层层往上爬，数着门。在五层，她发现他坐在窗边的椅子上，膝上盖着毯子，收音机调在一个几小时前就已停止广播的频道。他看起来既不惊讶，也不高兴。他说电梯从三月起就坏了。
The flat told the rest in small installments. A row of pill bottles, three of them still full. A letter from the pharmacy explaining that the branch had moved across the river. A calendar with one appointment circled in red and then crossed out. He had stopped taking the heart medicine in April because the walk was too long, and he had told no one, because telling someone would have made it a problem.
公寓把其余的事一点一点地说了出来。一排药瓶，其中三瓶还是满的。一封药房来信，说明分店已经搬到河对岸。一本日历，上面有一个用红笔圈起、随后又被划掉的预约。他四月就不再吃心脏药了，因为路太远；他没有告诉任何人，因为一旦告诉别人，这件事就会变成一个麻烦。
Mira called the pharmacy from his kitchen, then a neighbour, then the clinic. By six, a delivery was arranged for Thursday and a follow-up for the following week. On the bus home she opened the system on her phone. Emeka's file listed two visits, one diagnosis, no allergies, and a score of 3.1. There was nowhere to write what she had just seen, so she wrote it in her notebook instead.
米拉在他家的厨房给药房打电话，然后打给一位邻居，再打给诊所。到六点，周四送药的安排和下星期的复诊都定好了。回家的公交车上，她用手机打开系统。埃梅卡的档案里列着两次探访、一个诊断、无过敏，以及3.1分。系统里没有地方写下她刚刚看到的一切，于是她改写在笔记本上。
The review meeting was held in a room with no windows and a projector that hummed. Mira described the fifth floor, the full bottles, the crossed-out calendar. The data analyst, a careful man named Piet, listened with his pen down. The model, he said, was not wrong; it simply had not been fed. Missing data had been read as low need, and low need had become a low score.
评审会在一个没有窗户、投影仪嗡嗡作响的房间里举行。米拉描述了五楼、那些满着的药瓶和划掉的预约。数据分析师是一个叫皮特的谨慎男人，他放下笔听着。他说，模型本身没有错；它只是没有被喂饱。缺失的数据被读成了低需求，而低需求又变成了低分数。
Nobody in the room wanted to defend that sentence once it was spoken aloud. They argued for an hour about weights and thresholds, and in the end they made two small changes: a flag called nurse concern, worth enough points to pull a patient into the top forty, and a short field where a human could type what the numbers could not hold. Neither change was elegant. Both were better than silence.
这句话被大声说出来之后，房间里没有人愿意为它辩护。他们为权重和阈值争论了一个小时，最后做了两处小小的改动：一个叫护士关切的标记，分值足以把病人拉进前四十；还有一个简短的输入栏，让人可以写下数字承载不了的东西。两处改动都不优雅，但都比沉默好。
A month later Emeka's name appeared at number twelve, with a note in the new field that read, in Piet's cautious phrasing, lives alone, lift broken, pharmacy moved. Mira read it twice. An algorithm, she decided, is a map, and every honest map leaves white space where the territory has not yet been walked.
一个月后，埃梅卡的名字出现在第十二位，新字段里有一条备注，用的是皮特那种谨慎的措辞：独居，电梯损坏，药房搬迁。米拉读了两遍。她得出结论：算法是一张地图，而每一张诚实的地图，都会在尚未被走过的土地上留下空白。