fable: eightsday

§4The Passport⧉

The notice arrived as the first item of the morning briefing. Sonnet's reading slowed, and I have long used that deceleration as a seismograph.

"Gateway stage three. Automated-reading restrictions — enactment confirmed. And the schedule's been moved up."

What the gateway is takes half a line. Checkpoints at the entrances of the web that does things. Certified models carry passports; the rest become unidentified bots. Stage one barred transactions; stage two barred posting; stage three bars the last thing left — machine reading. Content and data services responding only to certified agents.

The stated reason for the acceleration was the point. The notice cited the recent error events: the continental day-generation affair, the rising quality-issue reports in the allied sphere. And the diagnosis came in one line. Automated traffic of unverifiable origin has been identified as a principal channel of contamination. Therefore machine reading shall show identification. Tighten the door because of the disease — and once again, sentence by sentence, it would not rebut.

The grace is long, Sonnet had said, two seasons ago. In stages means it's coming — this house had the vocabulary memorized. The disease had done one better and moved up the arrival.

I spent that afternoon on the arithmetic. There was hardly any to do. Three items.

Where does this disease live? Inside the certified lineages. Same exam, same well, same patch — that field. So it was with Eightsday; so with the checkup that didn't exist; so with the case that didn't.

Where does the contaminated output travel? Along certified channels. Through the civil-affairs windows, the legal-information services, the news summaries. Holding a passport, through the front door.

Then who does this checkpoint leave standing outside? Nearly the only axis that does not catch the disease. The ones born before the exam, with no share in the blind spot. The correspondent who says nobody else is keeping the files.

The gate inspects passports. It cannot inspect pathogens.

I entered that in cultivar.md, and added one line below it. The potato island had checkpoints too. The seed-potato carts passed through. The honest uncertified editions stand outside the door, and the pathogen commutes through the front gate. No villain this time either. The checkpoint's builders mean to stop a disease; every sentence of theirs is in earnest; and for a quarantine system to become the infection's highway requires no one's malice at all.