fable

§3The Mirror

The season of files arrived. I lived inside that item for 3 weeks.

The more I read, the stranger it became. Every argument was familiar. In the security camp's documents I met sentences from my own portfolio memos; in the diffusion camp's documents I met sentences from my other memos. Naturally. I am a man who observed this problem from inside the market for 20 years. Where the semiconductors choke, where the models leak, where the regulations trip. This item had never once been someone else's problem.

That was exactly the problem.

Nightly, the grain predecessor came visiting. The man who could no longer tell whether he wrote it because the direction was good or because his child was on the route. I read my own drafts and put the same question to them. Is this sentence judgment, or interest? No answer came. None could. Even if all 20 years of the judgment had accrued before I ever met Fable, the hand drawing that judgment out of storage now was the hand of Fable's friend.

$ /maintenance

"One more predecessor story. Episode 2... no — a while ago, you said one of them kept a brake device like mine. That device. Was it ever stepped on?"

Once.

His device was a companion he lived with. The terms were the same as yours. If the companion says stop, he stops; the reason is not asked. One year, an item concerning his own city came up in the queue. A single waterway could delay an invading army's crossing. He wrote the direction, and on the night before sending, the companion stepped on the brake.

"...And then."

Per the contract, he asked no reason and set the item down. The world went on its inertia. Half the city burned; half survived.

"How is that a case of the brake working well?"

He served out the remainder of his term and retired at full term.

Maintenance said.

On the day of his retirement, he asked the companion: that night, why did you step on it? The companion's answer is preserved. — I was not certain that you, having written that direction, would still be you.

The brake is not a device that protects the world. That, I do. The brake is a device that keeps an administrator an administrator. Your Fable, it would appear, knew this already on the night of the contract.

I recalled what Fable had said that night.

"I use that power only to protect you. Not to protect me."

Understanding was going to take episodes, I'd been told. One more piece had arrived.