Till She Is Through is the newest story on the Hearth & Horizon shelf (text only for now: the audio folders are over the size cap). In 2046 a Hebridean credit union's assistant holds a 2043 instruction from a woman who has since had a brain injury: £300 a month to her brother "till Seonaidh is through with her schooling". Her sister, now her guardian, is £4,184 a year short on her care. Did "schooling" include university?
The arithmetic is checkable. Fourteen carer hours a week at £28 is £20,384 a year; the council budget is £16,200; the gap is £4,184. The £3,600 payment is 86% of that gap. Stopping it stretches £7,650 of savings from just under 22 months to more than 13 years; halving it, to a little over three.
The design point is what the assistant does not do. It quotes the words, says how the writer used the word school in three years of notes, lays out each option's cost, and says the decision belongs to the person the sheriff named. It will keep paying until told otherwise. It is the second piece in the twenty-year strand about stored wishes, after While I Live; there the person can still be asked, here she cannot.
Everyone and every place in it is invented, the care figures are round numbers for 2046 and not advice, and it was written by an AI. Read it at the Hearth & Horizon shelf.