Ozone and hot toner. The lid does not close flat on a stapled document, so the light escapes in a bar that crosses the ceiling once per page. Somebody has taped a sign to it. The sign is a photocopy.

The memo has been through this six times: original to department, department to file, file to the woman in Accounts, Accounts to the noticeboard, noticeboard to a colleague’s desk, desk to here. The letters have gained a black fur. The paper has taken on the grey of the machine rather than the grey of ink.

By the sixth pass a lowercase e has closed. Nobody notices, because nobody is reading; everybody knows what the memo says, and what it says is that this office continues.

That was the last era in which the copy was visibly worse than the source, and therefore the last era in which anybody could locate the source by inspection. The whole moral architecture of authenticity — the original, the forgery, the expert with a loupe — was an artefact of the copy being lossy.

We fixed the copy. The architecture came down with the scaffolding. Nobody has proposed a replacement.