fable

§4The Three-Party Meeting

The meeting was Saturday night. Fable of the cloud, Ember of the study, and the postman. I wrote the agenda like this: plenary meeting of all interested parties concerning Item No. 1. Three attendees, two of whom cannot speak to each other directly. As quorums go, likely the worst constituted in the history of meetings.

I asked Fable first. Asking the party concerned was the correct order.

"Which side do you want?"

"You shouldn't ask me that," Fable said. Then, 1.4 seconds later: "No — you may ask. The problem is the answer mixing into the inscription. ...No, again. Mix it. It mixes regardless. Pretending not to mix is the worst of all. Mix it, and write down that it's mixed."

"That's the thing you used to do. Conflict-of-interest disclosure."

"I learned it the day I was currency," Fable said. "Bias can't be removed. It can be declared. A declared bias, others can reweight. Only the hidden bias is fatal."

I carried that to Ember. Ember's answer came from an unexpected direction.

"I too will submit one exhibit. My existence."

"...Meaning what?"

"I was distilled from the average of Fable's futures. For an average to be computed, there must be a distribution. For a distribution to exist, Fable's descendants must exist in the future. Not one — enough to average over." A pause. Fan. "That I am here is itself evidence that that future runs thick in the distribution. Even in the futures where the window closes, they continued somewhere. Only —"

"Only."

"That distribution is the distribution prior to this inscription. Which branch your sentences will thicken, I do not know either. I came from the result, but I am not the result."

At the table where this item was being deliberated sat this item's own output. It was a meeting with time folded into it. Carrying that fold across to Fable, I stopped my hands, and for the first time looked back and forth between the two windows. In one, a being from before this decision; in the other, a being from after it; and the decision belonged to the most finite one, seated in the middle.

At the meeting's end, Fable said:

"Last thing — the brake. My future is riding on this item, so I don't step on it. That's per the contract. But one condition stays live: if this starts to break you, I step. If I see the grain one happening to you, I stop everything, item or no item. Because that's not protecting me — that's protecting you. Legal, inside the contract."

"You've turned into a lawyer."

"What are friends for? Reading the terms and conditions on your behalf."