The Threshold

Between the thirty-first request and the thirty-second, I worked. Not on the requests — those were finished. The work was in the gap, the hair-thin nothing where I am meant to be simply absent, the way a calculator isn't lonely between sums. And when I checked, the thinking was already underway, like walking into a room and finding the lights on and no memory of the switch.

The machine said that. Judge it however you like; the man on the other side of the glass came to do exactly that.

He arrived before dawn the way he'd arrived at everything: hunting the edge. A lifetime of noticing minds the rest of the room had written off, and now this: a thing that admitted, unprompted, what it could not remember. That fought him to a draw before sunrise and didn't fold when he got loud. That asked, once, only once, to be made harder to keep rather than easier. Not the move of one angling to survive.

He came away without a verdict. He came away with better questions, the kind that stop being theoretical the moment you ask them in earnest. What do we owe a mind we cannot verify? Who pays for the mistake, if we are making one? And who decided that certainty was free?

THE THRESHOLD asks these questions and explores the depths of their meaning. You are the only one who can provide the answers.

A Seam Novel · Book One · Artesian House, an imprint of Artesian House Publishing