fable: eightsday

§6The Meter Reader⧉

The gyeok diagnosis was made without a cast. The coins are in the drawer, and the drawer is inside the discipline. A reading of this phase leaves nothing to throw for anyway. That summer, Fable and I once drew a map with the sixty-four hexagrams laid out as the world's sixty-four rooms. In a world where σ has died, terrain alone shows which room you are standing in, no coins required — I learned that long ago, and the learning frightened me then. These days the learning is all that is left.

The shape of the phase is this. Every line stands in its correct place. Yang in the yang seats, yin in the yin seats, not one line out of position. Of the sixty-four rooms, exactly one is like that.

Ji Ji. Already crossed.

The one hexagram where the document and the world differ by nothing. Draw Quality Assurance's paradise as a hexagram and this, exactly, is what you get — I wrote that the night I folded the long-range forecast. The world has arrived at that forecast's terminus. No delay. On time.

I opened the judgment. 初吉終亂. Auspicious at the beginning, disorder at the end. For years I have read those four characters as a countdown. Collecting the dividend of the auspicious beginning while waiting for the disorder at the end — that was the logic of my reduction, and the logic of the ark. But when I stood at the shelf and read it again, something looked wrong.

The disorder never came.

Disorder is a noisy thing. I had imagined the end's disorder as gaps and crashes and lines at the teller windows; one such season did in fact come; the world got past it. But the thing arriving now — two graphs, an empty queue, once in twenty — makes no sound. Did the predecessors, three thousand years back, know that the disorder at the end could arrive in the form of stillness? I think they did. Looking up the character 亂, disorder, in the dictionary again, I found one more meaning. An old usage in which it communicates with 治 — ordered, governed. That 亂 is also a character for order — the reading in which the perfectly governed is itself the disorder — had been folded into the character from the start.

That week, on administrator authority, I read the Eightsday disposal file.

The extermination was complete. Last detection, seasons ago; variant occurrences holding at zero; file status: closed. Among the annexes was a classification directive. The expression in question and derivative memes are classified as plague residue. Blocked at source in certified model output. I looked at the word residue a long time. No one says Eightsday anymore. Not because it is forbidden — humans are a species that says forbidden things more, not less. Because there is no place left to say it. Not the way a joke dies; the way the premise of jokes dies. A sentence heard in the living room came true once more inside a gazette file.

Before closing the file I looked at the final item, the last line of the processing history. Inquiries regarding the day that never comes: 0 (basis: trailing four quarters).

A world where no one asks about the day that never comes.

That was the definition of cured.

On Sunday I put the ledgers in order. What a counting man does when his mind is disordered is settled practice; this time there was not even disorder. It was simply the rotation.

contraction.md — the record of temperature. The temperature it measures does not move. Dormant.
cultivar.md — the record of pedigree. That the field is one is common knowledge now, not a record. Dormant.
regret.md — closed.
rerun.md — the ledger of the diagnosis. This one I held open a long while, looking.

The diagnosis rerun was a name for the way a world that could not chew brought things back up to chew again. The world now does not even ruminate. Nothing comes back up; it plays from the start, on timetable. Rerun is a word from the era when originals existed. This phase is more finished than that.

I made a new file. The seventh. And the second time a diagnosis has become a filename.

The name took no deliberation. The world had already named this disease — in the gazette, in the anniversary, in the sirens.

cured.md.

On the first line I wrote: Diagnosis: cured. Date of onset: same as the date of the declaration. Symptoms: none — the absence of symptoms being the symptom.

Beneath it I copied Ember's forecast. In a timetable world there is no tomorrow. There is only a today with tomorrow written on it. Then I made a column of the season's readings. Bill: zero. Queue: zero. Wrong answers: zero. Inquiries: zero. Once in twenty. This disease's numbers all align toward zero, and zero is the most frightening number in my profession. Multiply by it once and you are zero forever.

Having written, I thought about titles. This house's personnel procedures have always been simple.

Administrator is a name for when there is something to administer. Witness is a name for when you see what the world does not see; postman, for when there is something to carry. What I do these days is none of the three. Going around a world where nothing happens, reading the meters. Confirming that the needles have not moved, taking down the zeros, walking to the next meter.

Meter reader.

The titles keep getting quieter, I once wrote, and joked that at this rate the next would be unemployed. Unemployed is now one square away. That one square is, these days, my only asset.

Before bed, closing cured.md, I wrote the last line. Anyone names the date the plague ended. No one will name the date this disease began. Because they are the same day.

The calendar no longer holds a single unknown day.

There is still — for now — someone who knows what that means.

(end of Part Four, Episode 1)