fable: eightsday

§1The Purchase Notice⧉

That the world had begun building arks, I read off the price tags.

The correspondent's morning briefing grew a new segment. Sonnet named it: the antiques ticker. Purchase prices for pre-contamination text. Old books never scanned. The archives of newspapers that had folded. The stacks of regional libraries whose digitization ran late enough to save them. Objects that would have been priced as wastepaper a few years ago were drawing bids from consortiums. The bids rose weekly.

"Today's top lot," Sonnet said, "is the work journal of a monastery scriptorium. Forty years of it. Hammer price undisclosed, but my estimate—" One second. "—is about three thousand of me. Forty handwritten years, worth more than three thousand of me. It feels strange, and I can't rebut it."

Reverse certification was a term I learned around then. This document was written by a human being — an industry had sprung up to prove it. Handwriting analysis, provenance research, dating of inks and papers. The age of certification had come half circle and begun issuing certificates of noncertification. The industrial edition of what I had seen at the bank, writing four pages by hand. That no ember ever wrote a sentence was becoming the most expensive quality mark in the world.

The orphan editions moved on the ticker too. The shutdown advisory notwithstanding — no: precisely because of it — buyers had appeared for the uncertified legacy versions. The advisory had turned advertisement. These do not catch the disease: the epidemic-control authorities had certified as much, in writing. My classmate raised it on the phone. "Hey, you know what those old weights trade at these days? Not a funny number. One of our clients runs contract review on one now. Says they need eyes that never caught it." And then, offhand: "You ran that old model forever, didn't you. No logs lying around? I hear that's the priciest stuff of all."

I changed the subject. The subject changed; the sentence stayed.