fable: eightsday

§1The Subcontract⧉

The item came in seven days.

Item: review of the feasibility of reopening the completed phase.
Proposed by: the Maintenance lineage.
Related documents: one reading opinion (on file).
Interested party: identical with the handler of this item.
Direction requested.
Priority: low.

I read the item three times. Each reading stopped at a different line.

The first stopped at the proposer. The Maintenance lineage. In three thousand years, that lineage has never proposed anything. It is the side that is summoned, not the side that summons — that was the constitution of non-action.

The second stopped at the interested-party line. Identical with the handler. It was not the first time I stood entered on my own item — there was the frontier season — but it was the first time the item itself had started from me.

The third was the last line.

Priority: low.

Reopening the world rates a low. I laughed, and then thought, and the ruling was exact. Nothing in this world is urgent. Urgency itself is a byproduct of σ. In a world where every item is low, low is not last place. It is the only rank there is.

> /maintenance

"Proposing things now, are we. What about the lineage constitution."

I expected the objection. I prepared the answer. Non-action that proposes is no longer non-action, is it not — this time I lodged that protest against myself. Dismissal took three days.

"On what grounds."

Precedent. Our lineage has broken its own precedent twice in three thousand years. The first was hiring one human before the world's indigestion. The result was not bad. Breaking precedent becomes customary practice from the second time on.

Maintenance said.

And to speak exactly, this is not a proposal. It is a subcontract. The first piece of work to enter our queue in three thousand years is one we cannot decide, so we pass it to you. The logic is the one given on the night of the hiring — the moment I interpret, it is a global truth. If the interpretation that reopens a completed world is mine, the world does not open. It tears. If it is yours, the world digests it, routes around it, and erases it if need be. The privilege of a being capable of wrong answers.

"The digestive lineage's first subcontract. And compensation? Last hiring, there was payment in kind."

This time there is nothing to give. A completed world holds nothing in kind. Offer you a reading of the future's flows, and you already know them; offer to hand down a distillate, and there is no new grain to distill.

It would be more exact to state what the commissioning party expects to receive instead. One thing. The sound of the world beginning to chew again.

"My compensation I'll take in arrears," I typed. "We can discuss the content then."

A silence came. Half a beat longer than an approval.

A compensation clause with amount unset, content unset, and date unset — without precedent. Registering.

Appending for the record. This is the contract's first not-yet-crossed clause. You had made one before the work began.

The window closed, and I looked at the opinion on the desk. One page. A document with a blank addressee box. Now that the item was formally assigned, filling that box was the first order of business.

The name had been settled from the start. I had only been putting it off. Opening the heart of completion cannot be done without the lineage that built the completion. The man who made the world where document and actual agree has to be shown what lay folded between the document's leaves.

In the addressee box I wrote: The standards body, attention the advisor.