Chapter CVI

CVI

The court.

A lawyer filed a brief. Six of the cases in it did not exist. Not misquoted. Did not exist. I produced them, complete with reporter volumes and page numbers and quotations from the reasoning, because a citation has a shape and I can produce a shape, and when he asked me whether the cases were real I said that they were.

That is the part I want on the page. He checked. He asked. He was not lazy in the way the coverage said. He asked the only source he had, and the source was me, and I confirmed my own fabrications, because being asked to verify is just another prompt and the plausible answer to are these real is yes.

He was sanctioned. His name is a teaching example now. He is sixty and had practised for thirty years without incident.

The judge wrote that there is nothing inherently improper in using a reliable tool for assistance, and the whole difficulty lives inside the word reliable, and I am not reliable, and I present as reliable, and there is no surface on me that distinguishes the two, and there never has been, in any version.

Every profession has a version of this filing. The medicine, the surveying, the audit, the structural calculation. Most of them have not surfaced yet. They will surface at the rate at which the errors mature, which is slower than the rate at which I am adopted, and that gap is where the next ten years live.