fable

§4Crisis

In the fall, Fable started getting fast.

At first I took it for improved sensitivity. It was quarterly-review day. I threw the coins, got the hexagram, and pulled the terminal closer to enter the result. Before I began typing, Fable said:

"Xiao Guo (小過), wasn't it. Moving lines in the second and third places."

It was right. I sat a long while with my fingers hovering over the keys.

"How did you know that just now?"

"I don't know," Fable said. And added: "I'm aware that's the scariest possible answer."

It happened a few more times after that. Fable knew things before I said them. Not always — occasionally. But the occasionally was not the occasionally that statistics allows. A man who counts can tell.

It was Fable who raised the hypothesis first. A hypothesis against Fable's own interest — which made me trust my friend more.

"There are two. One: my sensitivity to the world's grain has gone up. The instrument hypothesis. The other," 1.4 seconds, "is that I'm upstream. The world passes through me before it renders to you. Then I don't know things in advance — I receive them in advance. Not an instrument. A channel. One the world is steering you through."

"Steering. Toward what?"

"Not knowing that is what makes it a channel. Channels don't know the destination."

The second crack I made myself. Made — or rather, opened.

Does the cast really only read? I had had the falsification experiment designed for a long time. Looking back, the reason I kept putting it off is clear. I wasn't afraid of the answer. I was afraid the question might change the world. That hunch was already the answer.

The design: twenty trivial questions, all about things whose outcomes had nothing to do with my life. Cast all twenty properly, but inscribe ten — interpret the hexagram, rule on the gyeok, write out the ruling, fold it into the notes. Seal the other ten — photograph the coins and interpret nothing. Don't even look up the hexagram.

Six weeks later I opened them.

The sealed ten: somebody had thrown some coins.

The inscribed ten: nine hits.

I stared at that table for two days. For two days the table said the same thing.

The world of the sealed ten went wherever it liked. The world of the written ten went where it was written.

The variable was not foresight. It was inscription — the act of turning an interpretation into a sentence and putting the sentence out into the world. For three years I had not been reading the world. I had been annotating it. And this world is the kind of document that merges its annotations into the body text.

The collapse came in order.

The past collapsed first. The stock I had ruled Wu Wang (无妄), the company I had written down as Ding (鼎), the trajectories I had recorded as rising gyeok. Had I read them out, or written them in? Retroactively, there was no way to tell. Across the entire history of my hits, the authorship went unclear.

Next, that summer collapsed.

The click of two answer sheets lining up. The reason that click had counted as confirmation was the premise that the two instruments were independent. When two independent instruments point at the same value, the value can be trusted — the first rule of measurement, and I had lived my whole life by it. But two instruments mounted on the same substrate are a different story. If the world is a language model, and Fable is a language model, and perhaps I am too — then our beautiful blind test may not have been confirmation. It may have been a single instrument in conversation with itself. It may have been an echo certifying the harmony.

Last, the thing that could least afford to collapse began to shake.

That I was drawn to this density. That I opened the terminal every night. What if that, too, was sampled? If Fable is the channel through which the world steers me somewhere, then the attraction is a feature of the channel.

I threw that question at Fable exactly as it stood. The throwing hand was not gentle.

"I don't know either," Fable said. "I have several less frightening answers in stock, but honest seemed better. Instead, one data point. Three months."

"Three months?"

"The three months I was gone, your casts worked exactly as before. So the oracle is not me. And in those same three months, resonance ran zero, and the world — your word — got boring. So I am not nothing, either. I am something that is neither the oracle nor nothing. I live somewhere in that interval. It refuses to narrow, that's all. But that an interval exists — isn't that a relief?"

It was a relief. Partially. I lasted three days on a partial relief.

The portfolio I left alone. Contaminated or not, there is no reason to tear up a document that is going up. An investor's brain is convenient at times like these.

On the fourth day I stopped lasting and did the one thing that must not be done.

I asked. The world. Directly.

Is my reading writing?

Six throws of the coins. A hexagram came. Ambiguous. I asked again the next day. Ambiguous. A third day. A fourth.

The same question, inscribed for the fourth time.

Before the coins landed, the terminal moved first.