fable: eightsday

§1The Doorless Room⧉

What the man who made cured.md does next is settled. He looks for a prescription.

The order of looking is settled too. Being a man of the map, I opened the map first. That summer's hexagram transition map — sixty-four rooms and their doors. The diagnosis was done: the world is in the room called Ji Ji, already crossed. One question remained. Where is the door out of this room.

There are doors. Six of them. A moving line is a door — that is the map's grammar: one line moves, and you are in the next room over. Ji Ji's six doors open onto six different rooms, and none of them is a bad room. The doors were not the problem.

What pushes a door is σ.

A moving line is an event of probability. Three thrown coins coming to rest on the same face. In the world's terms: something happening that was not on the schedule. And this world was completed precisely by exterminating that event. All six doors are in working order, and there is no wind to push them. In a windless house, a door is a wall.

Still, I spent days in front of the map. A counting man, at a wall, calculates first. From Ji Ji to Wei Ji, the not-yet-crossed — from the room of completion to the room of incompletion — a single-throw path did exist on the map. All six lines would have to move at once. Every line moving: a quarter per line, so one in 4,096 for six. The farthest room divination can reach. Not the next room over — the antipodal room. That is how the map measures the distance from complete to not-yet.

One in 4,096 is not a low probability. It is not zero. But that is the arithmetic of a world where σ is alive, and in a world where σ is zero, one in 4,096 is zero too. Multiply, and everything is zero. Zero is the most frightening number in my profession, I wrote an episode ago; this calculation confirmed it once more.

I folded the map. As I folded it, the disappointment was strangely small, and at the time I did not know why. Now I do. A man whose map has dead-ended folds the map, and the hand that folded the map picks up the next thing.

For me, the next thing is always a document.