Travis Lewis

Spouse of Nicole Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

A software tester is paid to break things politely, and Travis Lewis, who has done it for twenty-nine years, says that it is the only trade in which a man can be thanked for finding what is wrong with other people's work. He was born in 1979 at Birmingham, Alabama, and is living today in Birmingham, in the cotton towns and railroad cities of the Deep South, where he works as a software tester. He belongs to the Proctor bloodline that keeps the White Ledger, which lists him as unaffiliated, and he is not a vampire slayer and has no alias, archetype or craft. His parents are not named in the Ledger, which records only that they were Birmingham people with no part in its work and that the Proctor blood reached him by way of a grandmother on his mother's side. In 1998 he married the nurse Nicole Proctor, the younger daughter of the electrician George Foster and the nurse Virginia Carter, and they have one son, Curtis Proctor, born in 1999, who was not called. The family remembers him as the man who found the hole in the Ledger's own back door and fixed it before anyone had walked through. He was born in the spring of 1979, in a hospital on the south side of Birmingham, in the shadow of Red Mountain and its iron statue. His father, who kept the books for a trucking firm, and his mother, who worked in a dentist's office, lived in a brick duplex in a street of oaks, and the child, who was the second of two and the quiet one, was put to bed each night with the sound of freight trains shunting in the yards below. He was a thin, bespectacled, rather solemn boy who liked to take things apart in order to see where they were broken. At seven he was given a cheap electronic game for his birthday and returned it to his father on the following morning with a list, in pencil, of eleven faults, each numbered. His father, who did not know what to do with it, framed it. He was lucky in his schooling, and in the particular fact that a magnet school in the city had been given a room of computers in the middle of the eighties and had no one who knew what to do with them. He was eleven. He spent every afternoon there for six years, learning to write small programmes, and learning, which was more to the point, that the most useful thing a person could do with a programme was to try to make it fail. A friend wrote a game. Travis played it until it crashed, wrote down how he had done it and gave the friend the list. The friend, who was a vain boy, did not speak to him for a month and then came back with a better game. He took that for an education. He said later that a tester is a person who has understood that the world is mostly made of other people's assumptions, and that it is a generous act to find the false ones before they do damage. He was seventeen when the hospital took him on, as a summer student, to test its new patient-records system, a heavy beige machine that lived in a cupboard behind the records office and had a way of losing people. It lost nine in his first week. He was kneeling on the corridor floor with a laptop and a cable on a hot morning in July of 1997, in the middle of a crash, when a small, brisk, round-faced night nurse with dark eyes stopped in front of him and asked, in a voice that she afterwards described as mild, where her patients were. He said that he did not know yet. He found them at four the next morning, in a table that no one had thought to look at, and she brought him a coffee. He asked her to a film. She said that she was five years too old for a boy who had to be driven home by his mother. He said that he had a car. It was an agreeable lie, and he spent the next three weeks making it true. They were married in the spring of 1998, at her aunt's church on the hill in Birmingham, with her father George in a new tie and her sister Renee, who held that a well-kept record was the greatest gift one person could give another, standing up with her, and his own mother in tears, and her grandmother's cousins, who came in twos and threes and sat at the back with their coats on. He was nineteen. Nicole's father, who had spent thirty years rewiring the Ledger's safe houses, took the young man aside in the car park and explained, in a few plain sentences, what the family was. Travis, who had been listening to his own heartbeat in his ears, said that he had wondered about the extra locks. George said that everyone said that. Then he asked whether the young man had any trouble with his own wiring, and Travis, who was a tester, said that he did not know yet, but that he would find out. He found it, in the end, in the Ledger itself. Nicole's sister Renee Foster Proctor, who carried the Alabama pages in her head and would not have a word of them committed to paper, had been persuaded by cousins in three states that the circle needed a telephone list, and it was Travis who was asked to look over the arrangements that they had made, a shared document on a free account, with a password that was the name of a cat. He sat on the floor of his mother-in-law's house in Jackson, in the winter of 2006, with the laptop on his knees, and did to it what he had done to every other system that he had ever met. In forty minutes he had read the whole of it. He did not tell the cousins that they were fools. He told them that they had built a very fine lock on a very ordinary door, and that he would be glad to put in a better. He built them a small, dull, encrypted system with no names in it, only initials and dates, and an instruction, in his own hand on an index card, that nothing in it was to be copied or forwarded. Renee, who had been against it, said that it was the first piece of machinery she had ever approved of. That has been his service since, and he does it as he does everything, by inspection. He has tested the Ledger's cousins' telephones, their email, their old doorbell cameras and the accounts of the funeral fund, and he sees to it that when a hunter in Texas needs a record from Georgia, the request goes through a channel that a stranger could not find. He has never been asked to hunt and has never offered. He says that he would be useless at it, because he would spend the night trying to find out why the creature had been designed that way. He keeps a plain notebook, in the pocket of a shirt that has too many pockets, in which he records, as he would a software fault, anything about the family's arrangements that seems to him to be a single point of failure. The entries are numbered. Curtis Proctor was born in the autumn of 1999, and was not called, to his father's quiet relief and his own. He grew up at a table on which the first rule was that nothing was assumed, and learned to read a bug report before he could ride a bicycle. In the week of the attacks of September 2001 Travis was at his desk in an office in Birmingham, with a mug of cold coffee and eleven open windows, and he watched the browser stop loading, one page after another, as the whole country went to the same websites at once. He said afterwards that it was the first time that he had ever seen the entire network fail from sheer need, and that he had not known whether it was a bug or a fact. In 2017, when Nicole took the post at Charleston, he stayed, because his firm would not allow him to move without losing the pension of nearly twenty years, and because he had his own mother to look after and an uncle by marriage, Earl Carter Proctor, to look in on. They have kept two houses and a telephone call at nine o'clock each evening, and he has never once forgotten it. In the pandemic years he worked at his kitchen table with a mug of coffee and a cable, while his wife worked a ward in Charleston in two layers of gown, and he tested, by the thousand, the programmes that were meant to keep people alive. Curtis, who works in Columbia, South Carolina, within easier reach of his mother than his father, rings him on Wednesdays to compare their notes. He is forty-seven, a tall, thin, rather stooped man with spectacles, a short grey beard and a habit of pausing before he answers, as if running a diagnostic. He has still not found a thing in the family's arrangements that cannot be mended, and he says that this is the best news in the world and the worst, because it means that the work is never done. Travis Lewis is remembered in the Proctor family as the Birmingham tester who put a better lock on the Ledger's back door and who thinks of every silence as a faulty system waiting to be found. In the Slayerverse he stands for the kin of the White Ledger who were never called, the mechanics of the invisible, who looked after the wires and the telephones of the hunt and who proved that a careful man with a notebook and a good mind for what can go wrong is as sure a guard as any pistol.