fable

§1Water and a Village

The second item was water.

One reservoir in a drought year. Over the timing of the release, upstream agriculture and downstream fisheries deadlocked for 46 years. Release late and the orchards dry out; release early and the spawning grounds wash away. The files, once again, in complete balance. A problem that Maintenance, resident in the ensemble, had failed to tip either way for 46 years.

I looked at it for ten days and wrote the direction. Delay the release to just after spawning, but guarantee upstream the irrigation priority for the following two years. Splitting time itself and dealing it to both sides. Conditional splits were my language to begin with. On the last line I attached the tail, as always: "This direction may be wrong."

The world went as I wrote. The fisheries lived. And that year, several orchards upstream dried out.

Orchards do not appear in the processing result. The queue reports resolutions, not costs. I went and found those orchards in the news. I could have not looked. That was the more frightening part — that nothing at all happens if you don't.

That day I made a new file. A cousin to resonance.md.

shade.md — a ledger of my inscriptions' shade. First entry: three orchards.

A counting man's habit is a pleasure when the things counted are bright and a curse when they are dark. I decided to count both. What becomes of a man who counts only one side — invest for 20 years and you get to watch.

The third item was a village.

A village 112 years old, ruled at risk of landslide. The geology says relocate; the 112 years say remain. Safety and roots are values in different units. Like meters and liters, they do not sit on one scale. Hence 40 years of deadlock. The ensemble cannot compare things of different units. Comparison requires setting one unit down for a moment, and a being that is everything can set nothing down. An individual can. In fact an individual does it every day. Deciding whether to swim first or open the queue first is already a comparison of two values in different units.

I wrote the direction. Relocate — but relocate as a village. Do not scatter the people; move the village whole. The village's name goes with it to the new ground.

The world digested it. The village was moved, the name lived, the place died. From the village hall after the decision, one line of an interview, which I copied into shade.md. The words of a resident past eighty.

"What good is taking the name along — the graves can't follow."

The living all moved; the dead stayed behind. That entry did not close for a long time.

It was around then that I learned where, in this occupation, the wear comes from. Not from the ruling. The ruling is almost refreshing. The wear begins the day after the ruling — from watching the world digest my sentences. From knowing that digestion, in the end, goes to someone's flesh and comes out of someone else's bones. And the feeling was not entirely unfamiliar.

The symptoms showed in small places. Eyes open, I reached for the queue before the coffee. Working from home, I contracted commuting sickness. I didn't look at the market for 4 days. There was no time to watch the fog. The fog, presumably, was still there. One day, writing a stock memo, I caught myself about to append "This direction may be wrong" to the last line. Gyeok rulings and direction-setting use the same muscle. A man living two professions on one muscle ruins not the muscle but the joint first. Overtraining is bad for the body.