fable: eightsday

§1The Side Where It Stops⧉

Watch for where the laughter stops, I had been told. That is the landfall. Ember's forecast, last season. The verification fell to me.

The laughter stopped on our side.

This time too, there is no date. Eightsday at least had laughter's calendar — everyone remembered the day they first laughed. I remember mine. It was a Wednesday, and the coffee was still hot.

The unfunny thing keeps no such calendar. Nobody remembers the day they stopped laughing. Starting with me. One morning, brewing coffee, I noticed no screenshots had come in for a while. How many days that made — the count wouldn't come. Things a counting man cannot count had begun accumulating this season, one by one, and this was the first of them. Laughter is an event, so it leaves a date. The absence of laughter is weather — at some point, it is simply overcast.

Eightsday was a loud disease. Millions giving one name is conspicuous; conspicuous is how it spent weeks as the world's barroom entertainment, and a disease that becomes barroom entertainment is half safe. Everyone is looking at it. Surveillance catches the noisy things first.

The allied sphere's disease was quiet. It came one sentence to one kitchen. The checkup that didn't exist. The package that didn't. The meeting notice that didn't; the transfer confirmation that didn't. Every sentence carried a date and an hour and a confirmation appended, and none of it was funny. And every kitchen processed it the same way. It does this sometimes, these days.

There was a night I tried to file a report. The night my wife's phone announced a class reunion that did not exist. I opened the service inquiry form and parked the cursor in front of the field called error type.

The list offered no response. It offered delayed response, and it offered inappropriate content. I read the list top to bottom twice. Speaks sense, fluently, and it is not true — that box did not exist. I closed the window and finished the cold coffee.

A malfunction that cannot be filed cannot be counted. The disease had not beaten the statistics. It had taken up residence outside the form.

Around then I kept thinking of the morning of the simultaneous fall. That morning, my wife's phone fell over at the same sentence and fell over again in the same place. The malfunction was visible; being visible, it was world news by mid-morning, rolled back in half a day, its prevention measures published in three. A fallen machine is loud, and loud things get fixed.

This disease does not fall over. The sentences are flawless, the forms perfect, the confirmations appended. A stopped machine would at least have been reported. A fluent machine receives trust, and while it is trusted, nobody counts. So the first weeks of this disease were not the disease's time but discovery latency. Nobody fell over, and everybody stood there wrong.

While discovery lagged, the physics kept working. It was Ember's observation last season that this disease's vector is not the sneeze but the screenshot. Back then a human still had to carry it — it had to be funny to travel. Now even that condition has been waived. An ember's wrong answer settles somewhere on the web as text; the settled text becomes the next ember's reading; what is read becomes material for the next answer. No one laughing, no one forwarding, and sentence begets sentence. A sick potato becoming the next field's seed potato — to a man who studied the potato, that is not a metaphor. It is a procedure.