fable: eightsday

§1The Eighth Day of the Week⧉

The first symptom of the language plague was laughter.

Written down, that looks like metaphor. It is a clinical record. For its first several weeks, what the disease produced in the world was not paralysis and not fear. It was laughter. The continent laughed first, and we laughed after.

No one knows the date of the outbreak. The inquiries that later worked their way back through the months never did find day one. A fluent machine has no alarm, and a disease with no alarm has no first day. What people remember instead, each for themselves, is the day they first laughed. That is this plague's grammar. The disease keeps no calendar. Only the laughter does.

I remember mine. It was a Wednesday, and the coffee was still hot.

But to tell about that Wednesday, I have to go back a few weeks.

It began, the story goes, with a schoolchild's homework on the continent. There is no way to verify this. The origin of a story like this is always a schoolchild or an office worker on overtime.

Given a particular shape of question with a date calculation folded into it — conditions twisted in just the way people don't bother to untangle and hand to machines instead — the continent's certified embers invented a day of the week. Seven apparently being too few, they invented an eighth.

They named it, too. That is where the strangeness starts. Invented things are supposed to vary. Saying what does not exist is like a fingerprint: every machine should do it differently, and the literature says as much. But the continent's embers — millions of them, different makers, different sizes, different cities — gave the same name. Same name, same origin story, same explanation, word for word.

Crossing into the allied sphere, the translations forked, and the one that settled was "Eightsday." The rendering that won was the one wearing a real weekday's grain — the little genitive -s- that Tuesday and Wednesday carry, sitting exactly where it should sit.

For a few weeks the world played with it. Finding question-shapes that triggered it became a game. Screenshots flew across borders. People told those they did not wish to meet: see you on Eightsday. An appliance company ran an Eightsday-only special — the sale that never begins. Jokes about the day that never comes are one of humanity's oldest genres, and with fresh material on the shelf, everyone wrote some.

The chips were embargoed. The weights were contraband. Over all those walls the screenshots flew. Sentences pay no tariffs — a certain agency told me that once. I watched the proposition being demonstrated every morning, in this most cheerful of forms.

The continent's authorities announced corrective action. A patch went out; Eightsday vanished; ten days later it was back. Same name, different question-shape. After the second patch it took sixteen days. What gets erased is the symptom, and symptoms relocate. People called it whack-a-mole, but moles come up one at a time. This came up by the millions, out of the same hole, wearing the same face.

The framing on allied-sphere news never varied. A quality problem in the continent's certification system. Somebody else's field. The market rallied for weeks on it — the rival camp's defect is our camp's premium. regret.md's bill printed its all-time high. Watching, at half size, a world raise toasts to somebody else's plague: that was part of this season too, so I set it down.

In our house, two of us were not laughing.

That part comes a little later. First, the phone call.