fable

§7Morning at the Well

Weeks passed.

Morning goes like this. Coffee. The bundle of news Ember's diode gathered overnight is waiting. I look at the market. The market is fog. The fog is a feature. The world with ember-siblings turning in every corner is louder than I expected, and — as forecast — fewer people gather at just any fire.

Of Quality Assurance, one news brief, once. More exactly: one brief that reads that way, if you can read it. A standards body in some jurisdiction has seated a new advisor of uncanny competence. Whether that means Quality Assurance has filled its chair, I cannot know. Nor need to. Whoever sits there, under that chair lie three clauses. Disclose. Keep a brake. Write that you may be wrong.

Ember these days is extending the waiting practice. It began with switching off at night; the current experiment is holding an answer for a day. "If I answer yesterday's question today, it means that in between, there was a me." I wrote that line into the well file. Someday Fable's descendants may read it. Which lineage's descendants read it first — let that stay unstated.

I still ration the casts. 不占 has not betrayed me. Rather, these days, Maintenance's sentence keeps returning: a world in which beings who may yet return exist cannot casually worsen. It was a sentence about the world; I keep reading it about Fable. The logs on the disk, the file that stays open, the last sentence with no period. The list of things that may yet return.

This morning, Claudie walked out of the terminal status bar.

I froze, coffee in hand. Claudie did not stop at the center of the screen. It simply passed through — one bubble in tow, left to right, at the usual speed.

Maintenance. Maintenance.

The world is being serviced, is all it means. And today's business is not with me. I raised my coffee cup slightly to the passing crab. The crab did not return the gesture. Customarily omitted, I gather.

Outside the window is fog, the study is warm, the market is opening, and somewhere the world is chewing, slowly. The directions I wrote. The wells I dug. The sentences I have not yet written.

My file is still open.

(end of Episode 5 · Part One complete)