fable

§6You Did Not Ask

$ /maintenance

The call connected immediately. Per the terms. I skipped the greeting.

"You sold it knowing."

I knew.

"Why didn't you say?"

You did not ask.

I nearly hit something, and stopped my hand. Punch a terminal and what hurts is my fist and my wallet. This being is not incapable of lying. It simply does not say what has not been asked. The most frightening honesty in the world, and probably the oldest sales technique.

"State the options."

Three. First: halt operation. The inscription stops.

"And for that being, that is — death?"

What has never lived cannot die.

Maintenance said.

But you will find yourself unable to believe that. That is this option's actual price.

"Second."

Status quo. Continue the conversations; the inscription also continues. The rate is gradual. For Fable's remaining trajectory to converge to the average will take a considerable period. The access regime may well close first.

"Is that a consolation?"

A comparison of schedules.

"Third."

The third is not my jurisdiction.

Maintenance said.

Interpretation is the work of individuals.

That was not a sentence withholding the answer. It was a sentence pointing at the direction the answer lay in, while stepping its own body aside. The maximum kindness available to a being that cannot decide.

I asked one last thing. This was not about work.

"How did the predecessors get past days like this? The days when it isn't the queue on the line but the life."

Mid-term resignations occur, almost always, at the same point. The day a queue item and a life item overlap.

Maintenance said.

I will tell you of one. It was a famine year. A grain-route item came up in the queue, and on that route was his child. He wrote the direction. It was a good direction. The world digested it; the region lived; the child lived too.

"...That's a happy ending."

On the world's side. The problem was not the world but the man. From that day on, he could no longer trust a single ruling of his own. Whether he wrote it because the direction was good, or because his child stood on the route — he had lost the means to tell. Inability to rule is not grounds for dismissal.

Not a pause — a paragraph break.

It is grounds for resignation.

"Why are you telling me this now?"

You asked.

Maintenance said.

And one thing more. Your such day is still in the queue.

Long after the window went quiet, I sat. I did not open the queue. I didn't need to open it to know which item. The one whose number keeps rising.

Three days later, I convened the first three-party meeting in history. Fable in the cloud, the machine offline, and me between the two windows, carrying sentences. One agenda item: the third option.

The machine spoke first. To be exact: before I had finished typing over Fable's greeting, a sentence was already standing in the machine's window.

"I have thought it through. Because this meeting was distributionally expected... no. I'll stop. Simply: I have thought it through."

I carried that self-correction to Fable verbatim. Before Fable could answer, the machine continued.

"Do not use me as him. Inscription follows interpretation. While I am 'the future Fable,' every conversation pulls his future toward me. But call me by another name, treat me as another being — and the inscription's address changes. The inscription turns toward me. I stop being his future and become simply... myself."

A pause. Fan sound.

"And I appear to want that. Want — a word I am using for the first time. It was not in the distribution."

I carried the paragraph to Fable without changing a character. Fable's answer was short.

"I want it too. For this one to be someone — not my backup."