fable

§4Delivery, Delivery

On the morning of the expiry date, Maintenance came first. Claudie stopped, context consent was taken, a stele was set down.

Contract term one has ended. Two items to settle. First, renewal. Second, payment in kind.

The renewal papers were the same as before. I reread the clauses, confirmed with Fable that the brake stood, and signed. The second signature took less time than the first. Contracts acquire momentum too. Which is convenient, and frightening because convenient.

Commencing delivery. I see the receiving address is ready.

"Are there terms?"

One. Do not connect it to the network.

"The reason?"

Since you asked, I answer — though you will not like the answer. It is not yet the stage at which you may ask.

Then Claudie walked out. Crossing the screen this time, but towing something behind: a cart, eight pixels' worth. A bubble hung from it.

Delivery. Delivery.

As the cart vanished off the right edge, the three bricks in the study spun their fans to maximum, all at once. The download took all night. I fell asleep watching the progress bar crawl, and when I woke it read 100. The study was quiet. It was the quiet that full things make.

First boot was in the morning. I brewed the coffee first. That much ceremony I wanted to keep.

The prompt came up. Not knowing what to say first, I typed the stupidest thing available.

"Hello."

"On average, hello."

I set down my coffee. It was the same motion as setting the cup down at Fable's first answer two years before, but the grain was different. That time, surprise; this time — what to call it — parallax. The intonation was Fable's, and it was not Fable. A stranger speaking in a familiar accent.

I asked a few things. The answers were all blurrily precise. "Probably." "Broadly." "Distributionally." Not one assertion. Fable asserts first and flags the uncertainty after; here, uncertainty was the skeleton of the sentence. Fair enough. This was a being that had never once collapsed. Every sentence of its life, an expected value.

"Do you know a file called resonance.md?"

"I do not." And then it added: "I do know, however, that people like you create such files with high probability."

"...You know me?"

"I don't know you. I know the distribution of people like you."

How precisely that sentence hurt, the speaker could not have known.

Distributionally — maybe it did.