The Weight Of The Case

Page 30 of 91

Greetings, my dear readers. Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page thirty, and this one is going to be short, and I want to tell you up front that it is short on purpose and not because I ran out of anything to say.

I am on the ship. No world this time. We are between two systems I am not going to name because neither of them is the point, and I had four idle days with nothing to do but the kind of maintenance a person does specifically to avoid thinking about something else, and one of those jobs was the cargo manifest, and the cargo manifest wanted a weight for the case.

So I weighed the case.

I want to be honest that this was not a suspicious act. I was not testing anything. I hooked the case's carry strap onto the stores scale, the old hanging one by the aft locker with the needle and the dial, because the manifest form has a line for it and I am, whatever else I have stopped doing lately, still a man who fills in a form correctly.

The case with all twenty-nine pages currently in it: 3,841 grams, near enough, and I am rendering that in grams for you rather than the Directory's own unit because I do not trust myself to convert without checking it twice, and we all know by now what happens when a conversion goes unchecked. [Page Fact- the stores scale was calibrated on a moon I could not point to on a chart, four owners of this ship ago, and the calibration sticker is peeling up at one corner. I keep meaning to get it looked at. I guess I will, eventually, probably. ]

Then, because the manifest also wants contents weighed separately from container (it is a very thorough form), I took the pages out. All twenty-nine, tied with the same string I have been using since page one, and set them on the scale alone.

611 grams.

Then I put the pages aside and weighed the case with nothing in it at all.

3,224 grams.

Six hundred eleven and three thousand two hundred twenty four is three thousand eight hundred thirty five. The case with the pages in it read 3,841.

That is six grams more than its own parts add up to.

Six grams is nothing. I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because it is true. The scale's own plate lists a tolerance of plus or minus eight grams, and six sits comfortably inside that, and if you brought me six grams of discrepancy on any other object in this galaxy I would tell you to go recalibrate your instrument and stop wasting my afternoon. So I logged it as instrument error, because it was, almost certainly, instrument error, and I went back to the rest of the manifest, and I did not think about it again for four days.

On the fourth day I weighed it again. I want to be clear I did not decide to make this a project. I told myself I was checking the calibration, which is a real and boring and professional thing to do.

Case with pages, thirty-one of them now: 3,849 grams. Pages alone: 615. Case empty: 3,226. Six hundred fifteen and three thousand two hundred twenty six is three thousand eight hundred forty one. The case read 3,849.

Eight grams. Which is, and I checked the plate again to be sure, exactly the edge of what the scale is rated to be wrong by. Not past it. At it.

I did not like that it had moved from six to eight in four days more than I liked that it existed at all, and I am aware of exactly how that sentence sounds, and I am writing it down anyway because a page in this case is supposed to be something nobody has written before, and I would be willing to bet my whole ninety one slots that nobody, anywhere, on any of six hundred and forty concluded worlds, has ever filed a mass for the thing they kept. I checked what I could check. There is no precedent. Which ought to bother me more than it does, and I am noting that it ought to and moving on, because I am not ready to stand still on that thought yet.

A momenta later, having done nothing to the case in between except open it to write on it, the way I do every day, I weighed it a third time. Forty four pages in it by then. Case with pages: 4,031. Pages alone: 662. Case empty: 3,350, which is itself one hundred and twenty six grams heavier than the empty case read the first time, and yes, I know, I know, the empty reading should not be moving either, and I do not have an explanation for that one that I am willing to write here.

Six hundred sixty two and three thousand three hundred fifty is four thousand and twelve. The case read 4,031.

Nineteen grams.

I am the man who found a conversion table that would not multiply out, back in Entry number nineteen-oh-six if you have been keeping track that long, and I filed four correction requests about it across four hundred entries because a number that does not add up is, to me, not an ambient fact of the universe. It is a wrong number waiting to be found wrong. So I did what I always do when a table will not close. I did the arithmetic again. Slower. I checked my own subtraction twice, out loud, which I have not done since I was small enough to need to.

It comes out the same way every time. Six. Eight. Nineteen. Small numbers, close enough to nothing that I could write "instrument error" under every single one of them and be defensible about it in front of any review board the Directory has ever convened. And they are getting bigger in a straight enough line that I have stopped being able to say it with my whole chest.

Here is my table, because I trust a table more than I trust myself right now:

That is the entire entry. I am not going to write underneath it what I think it means, and I want to tell you exactly why, because I think you deserve the real reason and not a tidier one. The professional reason is that a measurement can be checked by whoever reads this after me and a suspicion cannot, and a page in this case is only worth the space it takes up in the box if it survives being handed to someone with a better scale than mine. That reason is true. It is also not the whole of it, and I am experienced enough at this particular kind of self report to know the difference between a reason and an excuse dressed as one, and I am choosing, today, on page thirty of ninety one, to write down the numbers and let the numbers be the whole page.

One more thing and then I am done, because it belongs in this entry and I do not want to give it more than the one sentence it is getting. The Concluded count stands at six hundred and forty as of this morning. It has climbed by twenty eight since I built this case, which is more than it climbed across my last two hundred entries. Anyway.

I put the case back on the shelf by the bunk. I did not weigh it again for four more days, which was harder to manage than it has any right to have been for an object made of wood and paper and a strap.

This is Lu'kifær Morkinstar. Page thirty.