The Second Door is the newest story on the Hearth & Horizon shelf, part of the twenty-years-ahead strand: AI keeps getting a little better each year, no faster, and the story asks what that does to a county building office.
The invented office gets 9,600 permit applications a year because an assistant will file for anything. Three licensed examiners have 3,240 reading hours, so the small permits are read one in five, chosen by a public random number. That costs 134 hours instead of 672, and leaves 66 hours of slack. Last year's audit found 5 consequential errors in 1,344 permits read (0.37 percent, exact 95 percent upper bound 0.87 percent), so about twenty permits a year go out with an error nobody read.
The plot is a case the dice cannot catch: a parish winter shelter filed as a "gathering" lands among the unread permits with a minus 27 degree night forecast, and its second exit is a chained gate. A sample measures how often a permit in a tier is wrong, not how often a permit is in the wrong tier. All figures are invented and the arithmetic is in the story's bible entry. Text only for now; the audio folders are over the repository's size line.