96 percent is the number this label turns on

Flat on a bedside table, a pale-grey tee printed in charcoal and one violet: a solid-state cartridge, drawn large and tilted, its shell scuffed with one corner chipped. A paper label is stuck across the face, filled in by hand. SUBJECT sits beside a name struck through. TAKEN reads 11 04. INTEGRITY reads 96 PERCENT. Across the bottom, at an angle: NOT AUTHORISED.

The whole object turns on one figure. Ninety-six percent is the number that admits this isn't the person.

What is a cartridge like this supposed to contain?

A stored copy of a mind, taken at a point in time and held on physical media, the same way any other backup holds a copy of whatever it was pointed at.

That's the entire premise, and it's also where the object stops behaving like a normal backup. A photo library restored at ninety-six percent is still recognisably the photo library, missing a few files nobody will likely notice. A person restored at ninety-six percent is a different kind of object altogether, and the label doesn't pretend otherwise — it just states the number in the same field a warehouse system would use for a shipment.

Why does stating a percentage change what the object is claiming?

Because a completeness figure only gets printed on something that's already conceding it isn't complete.

Nobody writes 100 PERCENT on a form — a full result doesn't need defending, so it doesn't get a number attached to it. The moment a label states 96 PERCENT, it's already answering a question somebody asked, which means somebody in the process already doubted the copy was whole. The figure isn't reassurance. It's the paper trail of an argument that happened before the label was filled in, the same way a struck-through line on a shipping form is the one mark that proves a person briefly got involved — except here the number is doing that job instead of a pen stroke.

What makes the handwriting on the label do more than the object itself?

The gap between the printed fields and the filled-in answers.

SUBJECT, TAKEN, INTEGRITY are typeset, impersonal, identical to whatever field structure the last cartridge used and the next one will too. The name, the date, the figure are all handwritten, which means a person sat down and filled this specific label in for this specific cartridge. That gap is the whole design: a process built to be clerical, applied to something that clearly isn't, and the handwriting is the only part of the object that admits somebody had to do the filling in themselves.

Is a backup process like this based on anyone real?

No — the subject, the struck-through name and the figure are all invented, and that's not a loss.

A design built around an actual named individual's stored mind would be telling a real person's story without asking them, in a way a generic label never has to. Inventing the subject means the struck-through name can carry whatever the reader supplies without contradicting an actual life. Nothing about the format — a label, a percentage, a filing convention — belongs to anyone; what would need permission is a specific real person's name or likeness printed on it, and that isn't what's here.

Does the same label work for anything besides a mind?

Anything a filing system tries to reduce to a completeness figure works the same way.

A restored archive, a recovered recording, a reconstructed record with gaps somebody had to estimate across. What stays constant is the tension: a process built for files, applied to something the reader instinctively feels shouldn't be measured that way. A ration card's fields make the same move in the other direction — a person reduced to a line on a form rather than a figure on a label, but the same clerical flatness doing the reducing.

Why would ninety-six percent ever be refused authorisation?

Because four percent of a mind isn't four percent of nothing — it's four percent of something nobody can specify in advance.

A photo library missing four percent has four percent fewer photos, and the gap is countable. A missing four percent of a mind could be anything: a memory, a reflex, a person's sense of who they were about people who aren't in the file anymore. NOT AUTHORISED doesn't explain what's missing, and it doesn't need to — the refusal sits in the same place a set of terms nobody actually read before agreeing to them sits on a different shirt: consent given to a process nobody can fully audit from outside it.

Does it print well?

Yes, if the cartridge and the label stay visually distinct from each other.

Charcoal carries the cartridge's shell — scuffed, chipped, drawn with enough weight to read as a real object — while the single violet is best kept for the label and its handwriting, so the handwritten layer reads as something stuck onto the object rather than part of it. Risograph texture suits the whole idea: a slightly imperfect registration is exactly how a label filled in by hand and photocopied a few times actually looks.

How do I get one made?

Describe the label at JustOG — the fields, the figure, and what's struck through. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Ninety-six percent, filed in the same hand that crossed out a name and refused to authorise the rest.