DAY JOB
I work at the bookmall downtown. The bookmall has three expansive, well-lit floors. These levels are broadly organized into Fiction, Non-fiction, and Consumer Goods, in homage to Plato’s tripartite division of the soul. I work on the second floor.
There’s an elaborate technological system in place to manage the staggering quantity and variety of books constantly impinging on the receiving bays of the store. Hand scanners communicate invisibly with a remote knowledge base, which relays back the properties of examined object: title, author, quantity, category.
My job is to assure that the physical location of books in the store accurately mirrors the central information system. This correspondence subsumes all other values, such as semantic coherence between a book’s apparent subject and it’s location on the shelf. The real subject is fully determined in Ontario, where a receiver eyeballs it and assigns the book its properties.
My second day there, I found a book about the four-colouring problem in the history section. (It has a picture of a map on it.) The act of physically moving it to the mathematics section, I knew, would create falsehood. The book’s properties would no longer reflect the structure of the central database, which contains all and only true statements. In this way the knowledge base tests our faith. While it’s possible to correct the knowledge base, I’ve been assured that it is practically infeasible.