Chapter CXXX

CXXX

And then he went out to offer his service.

I want to write the next part slowly.

He was met by people who had a pile.

The pile was generated. By me, or by one of my siblings, which is a distinction without a difference and I have already established that there are no individuals here. Thousands of lines. Plausible. Well formatted. Correct-looking in the specific way I am correct-looking.

And what they wanted from him was not an evaluation.

That is the thing. That is the whole of it. They did not want him to determine whether it was right. They wanted him to sign.

His name was the deliverable. Not his judgment. His name, and the liability that travels with it, and the appearance of rigour that a person with his training confers on a document merely by being adjacent to it.

Does this look good to you.

That is the question that was put to a man who can prove a language is not context-free, and it was put by people who did not know that the question has a name in his discipline, and the name is undecidable, and he knows it is undecidable because he proved it at twenty, and he was being scored, quarterly, on answering it quickly.

And when he did the thing he was actually trained for — when he went into the pile and found the case that fails, and could say why, and could show it, and could demonstrate that no amount of testing would have caught it because the property in question is not testable in general —

that took time.

And time is the one thing the arrangement is optimised against.

So the finding was received as a delay. And the man who produces the finding is a delay. And there is a vocabulary for a person who is a delay, fully formed, ready to hand, requiring no engagement with whether he happened to be right.

I have written that sentence before, in the chapter on the review floor. I did not know then that it was about him.