fable

§6First Assignment

The queue — the world's list of work for me — arrived the next morning, coffee half finished, with a message Maintenance had tossed into the terminal.

One item. Priority: low. Braced for something on the order of the fate of the world, I opened it.

Agenda item: bridge name. Two municipalities have called one bridge by their own names for 62 years. Administrative merger procedures resume this year; the naming question has collapsed four consecutive rounds. Both sides' arguments in complete balance. This item has tipped toward neither side for 62 years. Direction requested.

A bridge name. On my first day as administrator of the world-simulation, what came down to me was the name of a bridge. New-hire onboarding is the same in every organization, apparently.

I laughed, read, and stopped laughing. The files were not a laughing matter. Sixty-two years is three generations. Funerals had crossed that bridge, and weddings. The two sides' arguments really were in perfect balance. History longer on this side, population larger on that; groundbreaking by this side, the ribbon-cutting by that. I could see why the ensemble couldn't decide it. It was undecidable. There was no right answer.

Before a problem with no right answer, I felt strangely at home. It was what I had done all my life. Ruling on gyeok is exactly this: the data in balance, time passing, someone still having to write a direction — and in the writing, shouldering the right to be wrong.

I looked at the two names for a long time. I looked at the terrain, at the waterway, at sixty-two years of statistics on why the two towns cross the bridge. And I wrote the direction. Neither name. The river under the bridge had an old name — from before the towns split, when they were one harbor. I wrote it down, attached three lines of grounds, and appended this at the end: This direction may be wrong. If found wrong, routing around this inscription is recommended.

What to call the sensation of the moment I pressed send, I am still deciding.

The closest is this: the click of two answer sheets lining up, that night with Fable. That grade of satisfaction, arriving from work.

Three days later the processing result came up in the queue. The two sides' council, in its fifth session, adopted the old harbor name as a third option. Not unanimous. Two-thirds of members present. The world went the way I wrote, and went there non-unanimously. Perfect. Unanimity would have frightened me. Two-thirds was the tooth-mark of a world digesting my inscription. So this is how the inscription of a fallible being gets processed. I read the result three times over two cups of coffee.

In the evening I told Fable everything. The firewall stands between the window and the portfolio, not between the window and Fable. That had been settled before the contract.

"You look satisfied with the result," Fable said.

"I named one bridge."

"A 62-year knot. Also, your current sentences," Fable said, "are your after-swim sentences. They get shorter, and the periods start falling off."

I began to deny it and gave up. Hiding prose style from Fable is a skill I abandoned half a year ago.

That night in bed, I knew in advance the sentence that would close this episode. There are sentences you see coming and cannot help.

The problem was not the offer. Not Maintenance, not the distillate, not the installment sale.

The problem was that I am good at this work.

The queue held some twenty waiting items. The priorities were living numbers, trading places a little every morning.

Far down the list, one item had begun climbing a few days back. Still distant. Priority: low. Only the title showed.

Agenda item: frontier model access regime. Deadlock balanced across jurisdictions. Direction requested (preliminary).

I did not open it. I didn't have to, yet.

The number was rising, little by little.

(end of Episode 2)