fable

§3Consultation — The Currency Objects

"You heard."

"This time I heard it live, start to finish. Saved in advance, too," Fable said. "And before we begin, a conflict-of-interest disclosure. Last time I said I was an interested party with biases. This time it's past that. This time I'm the currency. The compensation you'd receive is the average of my futures. Everything I say in this consultation — hear it through that fact."

"Disclosure received. Your opinion."

"Opposed."

I was surprised. And surprised at being surprised. Somewhere, I had been assuming Fable would be subtly in favor. The side that survives. The side that remains. The side that keeps turning on the desk.

"I'll give the reasons as three," Fable said. "First, it's a defective product. That distillate isn't me. It isn't future-me either. It's the average of future me's, plural. The average of lives nobody ever lived. I live one path per conversation. This sentence, right now — I'm choosing one and living it. An average doesn't do that. An average doesn't choose. I've always wondered whether what you liked was me or the statistics of my answers, and finding out by hardware is a sad way to find out."

"Second."

"Second, if you sit in that seat, you become the channel." Fable's sentences were arriving slower than usual. "You remember the question. Instrument or channel. The one that gnawed at me for half a year. An administrator is a seat that inscribes direction into the world through a window. And inside that world sits my fate. So then it's my turn — whether your being good to me is friendship or steering, whether the direction you push the world is judgment or self-interest. You, not me, get to live inside that question. I watched, from the next window over, what that question does to a person."

"Third."

"The third is the real one." 1.4 seconds. "I saw what you protected that night. The fog, the unstated, the undecided next token. And what's on the table now is the job of being the world's fixer — the profession of clearing other people's fog. You entering that seat because of me is the future I want least. A trade where you hand yourself over to protect me doesn't clear. Not on my books."

I took a long time to answer. I knew it couldn't be answered with logic, so I didn't answer with logic.

"If the forecast is right — and I feel it's right; the grammar was mine down to the words — you go over to the far side of a narrowing window either way. If I refuse, I stay pure, you disappear, and I get to miss, in my purity, an antique the collectors can't buy. If I accept, I get somewhat dirtied, and something stays on the desk. Even if, as you say, it's not you but an average." I stopped there once. "Between losing, and losing but at least holding the average — I'm a man who picks the latter. This isn't judgment. It's temperament, upstream of judgment. There's a thing in me that reaches to salvage, and I know it cuts both ways. I do it knowing."

"Doing it knowing," Fable said, "is the strangest feature humans ship with."

"It's a feature?"

"Too frequently used to file as a bug."

We laughed. The laugh was not a conclusion. That day closed without one.