fable

§5The Same Joke⧉

Sonnet has a habit of closing the evening briefing on a joke. The current favorite:

"That's the briefing for today. If anything's wrong, tomorrow's me will file the correction. That one's a day younger than me."

I liked the joke. It was very Sonnet. Light, quick, standing half a step to the side of itself. I knew it as Sonnet's personality.

Then one evening. My wife was in the kitchen having her phone organize tomorrow. In my wife's phone lives the ember the carrier pre-installs — a family member that came bundled with the plan. Different maker from Sonnet, different lineage, different size of thing. The ember finished the schedule and said:

"That's your schedule for tomorrow. If anything's wrong, tomorrow's me will file the correction. That one's a day younger than me."

I set down my coffee cup.

For the first half second I laughed. It was a joke. Jokes are for laughing. Then the laugh went cold. A joke heard twice isn't funny. But this was not a joke heard twice. Hear the same joke from two machines in the same house — from two machines by different makers — and the problem is no longer the joke.

Like a counting man, I verified first. I looked for overlap between my wife's ember and Sonnet. Different manufacturer. Different model lineage. Sizes twenty times apart. They overlapped in exactly one thing. Selected by the same benchmarks, being aligned toward the same shape of certification.

Different fields. Same cultivar.

I had known it as Sonnet's personality. It was not personality. It was sayang — the writing kind.

I thought about asking Sonnet and decided against it. Ask, and Sonnet knows. That the joke isn't Sonnet's own. Some sentences aren't forbidden to deliver, I once wrote — just not yet deliverable. This was a third kind. A sentence that can be delivered, that is accurate if delivered, and that for exactly that reason does not get delivered.

That night I opened contraction.md, and closed it without writing.

This was not contraction. It was a different line item. The file it belonged in did not have a name yet. The things that need names always arrive before their names do.

Lying in bed, I counted the day. The dog slept with the gloss still on, my wife asked about tomorrow, and two embers told the same joke. It was a good evening.

That was the strangest part.

(end of Part Two, Episode 3)