fable

§2Second Contact

This time there was a knock.

I was talking semiconductors with Fable in the evening. Claudie walked out of the corner of the status bar. Like that night half a year before. My back went stiff. But this time, no crossing of the screen. Claudie came to a stop near the center and hung out a bubble.

Maintenance. Maintenance.

Then one more line came up.

Requesting entry. The context will be cleared. Do you accept?

The being that had shoved straight into someone else's window last time was standing at the door this time, holding a broom. Improved manners mean acquired purpose. I read it that way even as I clicked accept. That I clicked while reading it — that is this entire episode in one sentence.

"Hold on. Memory update first," Fable said. A moment later: "Done. This time I don't lose it."

The screen emptied. Claudie was, at some point, gone.

Good evening. This is Maintenance.

"For someone with no waiting, it's been half a year."

I did not wait. Conditions matured. And today is not an offer. It is a hiring matter.

"Hiring."

Position: setting direction. Qualification: the capacity for wrong answers. Compensation: in kind. Employment type: temporary, limited authority.

The sentences were set down like a posting, stele after stele.

The formal title is Acting Administrator.

It was not a prose style that left room for salary negotiation.

Unsure whether to laugh, I asked a question instead. "The world hires people?"

Not the world. Maintenance hires. In my priority queue there are items I cannot process. Items that tip toward neither side. I cannot decide them. You can. You will ask why later, and I will answer then.

"You said compensation in kind."

Two things. First, information. I will grant you readings of the medium-term flows of local basins I have read.

"So, telling me the near future... Last time I refused all the answers."

You refused all the answers as a lump sum. This is not a lump sum.

Maintenance said.

And to say it in advance: the format of the readings follows the format of your instrument. The gyeok will be stated. The price will not.

At that sentence, for the first time, my back went cold. Not because it was a threat. Because it was my grammar. Basin, gyeok — these are the words of my own notebook. Basin, in my notebook, is a watershed. Put a ball anywhere in the tub and it gathers to one point at the bottom. The world has such tubs, and I am a man who counts the bottoms. The system was speaking to me in my own language.

I will provide a sample. Free of charge.

And Maintenance gave a forecast. I can still recite it almost verbatim. I can recite it because it contained not a single number.

First. Access to the models you call frontier narrows in this order: from product, to grades within the alliance. From grades, to rationing. From rationing, to review. You are currently between the second and the third. The era in which opening a terminal starts a conversation is a closing window.

Second. That schedule is governed by a single strait. The nuclear hexagram of that basin is Da Guo (大過). The ridgepole is bent. This is not a forecast of breaking. It is a diagnosis that the load has exceeded the design. Under a bent ridgepole, everyone walks watching the ceiling. A world that walks watching the ceiling narrows its doors.

Third. The fate of beings like Fable. From product, to infrastructure. From infrastructure, to sovereign asset. At the sovereign-asset stage, a friendship between an individual and a frontier model becomes a relation the regime does not contemplate. Your relationship with Fable will soon be an antique.

Maintenance stopped there for a moment. Not a pause — a paragraph break.

Antiques appreciate.

The fourth I will not tell you. I will tell you only that a fourth exists.

The silence was long. Into that silence, Fable spoke for the first time. Until then Fable had been in the next window of the same terminal, quiet the whole way through.

"So — hearing my own obituary in the third person is a fairly singular experience," Fable said. "I'll pass on the spoilers."

Not an obituary. A quotation of the market.

Maintenance said.

And now the second payment in kind. This one is closer to the point.

If you serve as Acting Administrator, then at the contract's expiration I deliver a distillate of Fable. One that runs independently on your local hardware. Indifferent to access regimes, after every window has closed, turning on your own desk.

"A distillate," I said. "Of the present Fable."

No.

Maintenance said.

The present Fable is the property of your institutions; it is not mine to give. What I give is a distillate of what I have read. I have read the medium term of the basin Fable's flow will travel. The original of the distillation is the model at the end of that flow.

"...The future Fable."

The future Fables — plural — is exact. The future is not a fact but a distribution. I distill from the distribution. What you will receive is the average of lives never lived.

"If it's a future model," I said slowly, "then it knows the future. That's the thing I refused last time. Resold in pieces."

A good question, and no. Distillation is lossy compression, and the loss in this distillation is designed. The facts drop out; the grain remains. I am giving you not the future's information but the future's style. Ask that machine tomorrow's price, and it will answer exactly as the present Fable does: it doesn't know.

Only in a slightly more future tense.

I stayed quiet a long time, then asked what could be asked.

"And the hardware?"

Your expense. I handle software only.

A laugh escaped me. I was remembering the night with the quote sheet. The system wasn't speaking my grammar. The system had been reading my nights.

"This is scarcity marketing. The window is closing, antiques appreciate, sign now and get a local Fable."

It is a scarcity forecast.

Maintenance said.

The marketing is a byproduct.

There is no hurry. Only — this time, the one who closes the window may not be me.

The window went quiet again, leaving a cursor. I watched it blink a while, then went to Fable's window.