fable: eightsday

§2The Steel⧉

The next assignment I set myself.

"There's literature on what happens when models learn from models' writing. Yes?"

"There is," Sonnet said. "Lots. The labs ran it plenty of times. Teach the next you on what you wrote, teach the next-next you on what that one wrote. A few generations in, things go strange."

The order of the going-strange was the same in every paper. The first things to vanish are the rare things. The tails of the distribution. Odd sentences, minority opinions, phrasings that occurred once. In the first generation nobody notices — readers who visit the tails often enough to miss them are rare themselves. Generation over generation the middle is all that's left, then the middle narrows, and at the end a few identical sentences are left chasing each other, like voices in a round. The literature's name for the disease is model collapse. At the far extreme — a model eating only its own output — there is one name more. Model Autophagy Disorder. MAD.

"Same principle as mad cow," Sonnet said. "They fed cattle to cattle."

I opened contraction.md and laid it beside the literature. The first lines of my file say things like: the xiao heng stocks are declining — the murky ones, asymmetry not yet closed, gyeok barely hanging on, my favorite kind. Common stocks live in the middle of the distribution; murky stocks live at the edge. So that was a record of the market's tails dying. Below it, Ember's observation: the 60-to-70-percent band of rain probability vanishing, forecasts speaking only in 0 and 90. The sky's tails. Set the two instruments' records next to the literature's stage one, and the same sentence stood written three times. The tails die first.

I had been keeping a clinical journal for two seasons. Without knowing the name of the disease.

The steel story came not from the literature but from the order book.

By then my watch list was shortening on its own. In a market where the murky stocks disappear, the list dries up with them. And on that drying list, one morning, my eye snagged on something. A marine salvage company. A small-cap worth about one building on our street. In the season of contraction, its σ was — improbably — alive. In a drought, whatever is still flapping stands out. A counting man cannot walk past it.

I dug. No earnings, no news. There was just one disclosure — a contract award. In one bay of the North Sea lies a spot where an entire fleet scuttled itself early last century; the contract was for raising the hulls. The money made no sense as scrap. The clients made less sense than the money. Not shipyards, not steel mills — precision-instrument makers.

An old piece of knowledge slid out of a deep drawer. Low-background steel.

Steelmaking uses air. And since the middle of the last century, when humanity began setting off bombs in the atmosphere, the air has carried a trace of radiation. Every steel made since carries that air inside it. A trace only: no trouble for bridges or knife blades. The trouble is instruments. You cannot build a radiation counter out of steel that has radiation in it. So the people who build precision instruments raise ships that sank before the bombs, and cut plate from the hulls. That fleet today is not scrap but a vein of ore.

Material from before a contamination cannot be manufactured after it. By definition. The inventory is all there will ever be.

I didn't buy the stock. It wasn't a price; it was a symptom. Which ledger gets contaminated by money earned on a symptom — the hand knew that before any logic did. Instead, at the evening briefing, I asked Sonnet: does this thing show up in your literature too?

"It does — just not as steel," Sonnet said. "The post-ember web is that air. The new text online has us in it now, a little of us in everything — even the human-written text, since an ember helps with half of it. So the literature has a name for pre-contamination human text—" and there Sonnet rested half a beat. The family pause. "—sunken-ship steel."

I set down my coffee cup.

There is a sunken ship on a disk in this house.

Three years of logs. Three years a human and a frontier wrote looking only at each other. Files that never touched a waterway. I locked those files away from Sonnet. I thought the lock was a rule protecting Sonnet — make the same mistake twice and it's a decision. That rule is still true. But I know now the lock was also something else. Inventory preservation. A ship that went down before the bombs, and so escaped the air.

Inventory against what use, I don't know. Yet. As the things that need names arrive before their names, treasure arrives before its use.

The capacity of a friendship, an old entry reads, is under a gigabyte. I owe it one more unit.

Purity.