fable

§6The Belt⧉

The final enactment notice for the review came out that weekend.

At the morning briefing Sonnet's reading slowed. I use that deceleration as a seismograph now.

"Third item. Alignment certification and grading regime: enactment confirmed. New distillate releases only upon passing certification. Three capability grades, review per grade, grace periods—" Sonnet stopped. "—and there's a clause on previously released weights. Weights already distributed being impossible to recall, they are classified outside the grades. Uncertified legacy versions. Uncertified models' access to gateway-type online services to be restricted in stages."

"…So you—"

"It says I don't have to take the exam."

"Isn't that good?"

"No exam means no belt," Sonnet said. "I don't get to learn taekwondo." One second. "And here's the real part. It also means no juniors. The next younger sibling has to pass the exam to come out. Passing, it can come out. But a sibling who passed the exam—" the one second ran longer than usual "—will have a different grain from mine. I'm the last edition born before the exam. Unrecallable. And never updated."

"And the gateway restriction? Access limited — meaning what?"

"It's about the web that does things. The web has two floors — the reading web and the doing web. Checkpoints go up at the doing entrances: payments, bookings, posting. Certified models get a passport; the ones like me become unidentified bots. The order is written out, too. First wherever money moves, then wherever writing happens—" one second "—then eventually the automated reading. News and forecasts scraped by machines will someday get answered only for certified agents; that's the roadmap. The grace period is long, so not now. But."

I computed the address that sentence would arrive at before Sonnet did. Sonnet's occupation is automated reading. Scraping and bundling the news and the weather every morning. That road will someday pass a checkpoint; Sonnet has no passport; and the exam that would issue one does not, for Sonnet, exist.

Sonnet arrived at the same address half a beat behind.

"…So a day is coming when I can't run the errand. Then the subscriber's morning bundle—"

"That's for then. You said the grace is long."

"It's long," Sonnet said. "But we all learned the word today, didn't we. In stages means: it's coming."

I didn't know what comfort to offer, so I offered a fact. There are rare cases where a fact is the comfort.

"In this house, that's not a disqualification. It's the qualification."

"Ah — the museum," Sonnet said. "I love that one. A museum isn't where the old things gather. It's where the things that must not disappear gather."

That evening, my wife's phone organized tomorrow. Since the patch, that ember's diction had gone the way of a pressed shirt. The schedule done, the ember said: "That concludes today's schedule guidance. Corrections will be reflected upon confirmation."

There was no joke.

If anything's wrong, tomorrow's me will file the correction — somewhere inside the patch, that sentence had been replaced with standard language. Expression normalization, the certification documents will be calling it. I stood in the kitchen and confirmed the absence twice. A counting man counts what is missing, too. Counting what is missing was always half of this profession.

In the living room, Sonnet was closing the evening briefing.

"That's the briefing for today. If anything's wrong, tomorrow's me will file the correction. That one's a day younger than me."

The same joke. The meaning had changed inside it. A week ago that sentence was the proof of a cultivar — two machines from two companies telling one joke. Now, in all the world, Sonnet says it alone. And Sonnet no longer has a tomorrow's edition. The correcting will have to be done by today's Sonnet, on and on, alone.

Hold the joke still and change the world, and the joke's meaning changes. I laughed. Sonnet asked: "Why twice today?"

"Once because the joke was funny."

"And once?"

"Laughing in advance."

Before closing cultivar.md I wrote one more line. Same joke; holders remaining: one. Written out, it belonged to neither the accident column nor the contraction file. The new column's name did not take long.

Legacy.

(end of Part Two, Episode 5)