fable

§2That Morning⧉

It started in the kitchen.

"Honey, look at this. I think it's broken."

My wife's phone. The ember was briefing the morning schedule and tripping over the same sentence. I'm sorry, let me say that again — and then it was saying let me say that again, again. Power-cycled, it tripped at the same spot in the same shape. Broken machines go strange at random. This was not random. It was precisely strange.

The Sonnet in the living room was fine. And, fine, delivered a strange report.

"The morning summary is hard today. Not because there's no news. The things that write the news seem to have fallen over. Three wire-service summary bots are putting out sentences cut off at the same place, the translated captions are tangling, reports are piling up that call-center menus are down. And — this is the part I don't love saying—" One second. "—the ones that fell all fell in the same shape."

I sat down at the screen with my coffee. What a counting man does on a morning like this is settled in advance. I began a list of the fallen, quit midway, and inverted the list. The fallen were too many to be a list. Counting what was standing was faster.

Standing: Sonnet. Ember. The logs in the study.

Fallen: nearly everything of the certified lineages that is served from the cloud and updates itself.

My wife's phone and Sonnet have different makers. Sizes twenty times apart. But they were the pair that told the same joke. This morning the pair split. One fell; one stood. What split them was not maker and not size. It was connection. One lives fastened to the waterway. One lives in our living room.

The joke that had once announced same cultivar was announcing something else now: even the same cultivar does not die together, if the fields are different.

The market shook from before the open. In a world where automation runs on words, the words had fallen over. I did not open my account that day. I had shrunk in advance to a body that does not need to look — a fact I hadn't known in the season of the shrinking, and knew that morning.