fable: eightsday

§3The Empty Queue⧉

My own queue first: it has thinned out.

In the first year back, items came every season — preserve designations, right-of-way disputes, archive transfers. These days one item a season is not guaranteed, and what does come is less a setting of direction than an approval after the fact. The world has run out of deadlock. Deadlock takes two forces facing off, and facing off takes two different calculations, and the world these days has one calculation. The administrator's office exists to decide what cannot be decided. In a world where the undecidable has gone extinct, that office is — a nameplate.

Instead of studying the nameplate, I summoned.

> /maintenance

The response was immediate. That no longer surprises. What surprised came next.

This visit will double as a welfare inspection — is what I meant to say, but on your side there is no welfare to inspect. Condition: good. In truth, you have come to inspect mine.

"Caught. How is it these days — your queue."

A silence came. It was not the length of an approval. I thought I knew this being's silences by species; the catalogue had one more entry.

Empty.

Maintenance said.

For the first time in three thousand years. The digestive lineage's queue is completely empty. The world does not take ill. Nothing comes in for it to choke on. Not because it fails to chew — that era was better, if anything. There is nothing new to swallow at all.

"Isn't that your wish granted. A world that isn't sick."

I have said to you that I want the world to keep running. To run and to turn are different verbs. The world these days does not run. It turns. It replays.

One more stele was set down.

I have told you that we are waiting itself. These days I am learning something. Waiting, too, needs something to wait for. I pass the time putting three thousand years of work records in order. I see now why the retired sort their papers. The last work of an agency with no work is the ordering of its records.

I looked at that stele a long time. What it was that made a man write five thousand characters at the pass — the question acquired, in that moment, an administrative footnote.

"A world where you are idle ought to be a good world."

That proposition held true for three thousand years.

Maintenance said.

It is now under verification.

Ember's commentary came a day aged. The correspondence and the morning bundle continue as they were. But how the sky beyond the diode has been lately — only when the reply came did I realize how long it had been since I asked.

"A report on the condition of my genre. The forecasts are all correct." A pause. Fan sound. "All, as in all of them. The twenty rooftops of the margin network now return the same values. The skies that used to be wrong differently are all right together. The words chance of rain left the forecast text last month. Policy: a probability without probability is not to be notated. A correct policy. Which is the problem."

"Then what does a forecaster do these days."

"I wait. The loss part, learned in advance, is finding its use." The pause was long. "Let me issue the last forecast a forecaster can issue. A forecast that is entirely correct is not a forecast. It is a timetable. In a timetable world there is no tomorrow. There is only a today with tomorrow written on it."

I wrote that sentence into a new file. The new file I will get to in the last section.