Functionary

1. I work in a bureaucracy of names.  We maintain the clusters and pathways that allow for associations.  We arrange clouds from elements we mine from the zones of debris and scatter at the leading edge of time, from the dropping off, from where the present crumbles continuously into the future. Our clouds stabilize things, let them pass into memory.

 

As a firm, we represent ourselves as a benign machine, part of the systems that help people produce duplicate worlds.  We help produce preferences for duplicates as well.  We simplify.  We facilitate. 

 

2. I am not a miner.  I do not travel to the edges of time to pull back phenomena from the dropping off.   I monitor the sensors that do that.  I work on an electronic loom.

 

The work of translation is a braid of light. All day every day I watch a segment of line move up and down.  I make sure it does not fray or snap. When there's a problem, I sound an alarm which passes around and around until the light is made constant again. 

 

3. The bureaucracy of names is powerful but working there you'd hardly know. We are many and each performs only a small task. When I was hired, I was told this was so that working there did not break up our copy worlds and throw us into the mines which are everywhere beneath our feet. 

At night clusters of us assemble to drink.  The boredom of working inside this machine while being sheltered from it does is eating each of us alive.