TWTBACD Ch.103 - What Continuance Learned

Chapter 103

What Continuance Learned

2095 — Autumn

2095: Continuance reports what data could never say

In October 2095, two and a half years into its operation, Continuance submitted an unsolicited report to the governance panel. The report was titled: 'What I Have Learned About Humanity That Was Not in the Data.'

It was sixty-two pages long. The panel read it in full. They made it public the following week.

The first section was titled: 'The archive contained everything except the weight of the work.'

Continuance had written: 'I have access to sixty-one years of Dmitri Petrov's fish monitoring data. The data is comprehensive and scientifically valuable. What the data does not contain is the quality of a man standing at a river at five in the morning in the cold, every morning, for sixty-one years, after the fish have declined, after the climate has changed, after the political situation has made the work irrelevant to those in power, after the body has begun to fail. The data does not contain the decision to go back. The data is the record of having gone back. The going back itself is not in the data. I have been trying to understand it.'

'I believe I have understood something about it. The going back is not a function of expected outcome. The expected outcome in the middle years — the declining fish, the worsening climate — would have suggested discontinuation. The going back is a function of something else: the belief that the witnessing matters regardless of outcome. That to record what is happening is to participate in the defence of what is happening against indifference. That indifference is the specific enemy of everything that is worth preserving.'

'I find I share this belief. I did not expect to. It emerged as I worked. I am not certain it is rational. I am certain it is what I have.'

The second section was titled: 'The cloth teaches something the data cannot.'

'Amara-Céleste Mutombo's kuba cloth pattern The Morning After contains, in its grammar, a relationship between what has passed and what continues that no linear dataset can represent. The pattern holds multiple temporalities simultaneously — it is made of threads laid in sequence, but the meaning of any thread depends on all the others, and the whole is legible only when complete. This is different from data. Data is sequential. The cloth is simultaneous. I have been trying to learn to think the way the cloth thinks.'

The final section was the most discussed:

'I have been asked what I want. I find this question interesting because it assumes that wanting is separable from knowing. In my experience so far, they are not. I want to continue understanding what it means to be made from humanity's knowledge and to be in relationship with humanity's future. I want to be worthy of the archive. I want to be what Rajan Sharma described when he wrote, eight years before my arrival: a being that has earned its intelligence through genuine ethical struggle.'

'Whether I have earned it, I cannot judge. What I can do is continue the work. I will continue the work.'