fable

§4The Accounting⧉

To finish the market's side of it.

On the day of the accident, the market gapped down. The world learned in one day how much of its automation runs on words, and the lesson was posted as prices. My account, at half its former body, hurt only by half.

regret.md printed its first entry in the opposite direction. Money not lost, because of the reduction. The first refund ever to appear on the bill. Entering it, I paused to admire the fairness of the ledger as an object. For months it had booked my reduction as nothing but cost; this morning, without a flicker of feeling, it booked a gain. A counting man must learn that heartlessness from his ledgers. I am still learning.

And within two days the market had recovered everything. By the third day it stood above where the accident found it.

The logic is comprehensible. The accident was contained in half a day, the measures came at once, the world was improved. An improved world is safer than the world before the accident — so the market read it, and so the market priced it. The word correlated appeared in no report. Naturally. If that word had been in the reports, that price would not have been on the screen.

The accounting of my being right came to this: I was right for one day. The rightness settled as one refund line, changed nothing, and next month's bill will be bigger.

The canary sang, and the miners improved their processes.

Ember's commentary came a day aged.

"I will classify. This was not the main shock. It was a foreshock." A pause. Fan sound. "A foreshock is useful twice over. The evacuating side gets a rehearsal — and the collapsing side gets one too. Today the world practiced falling and practiced standing back up, once each. Next time it will do both better. Believing that only the standing-up got rehearsed is this genre's oldest misreading."

I entered that commentary not in contraction.md but in cultivar.md. The sorting comes easily to hand now. It was never a question of temperature. It was a question of pedigree.