Subject 14: The Response

SUBJECT 14: THE RESPONSE Research note. Filed to the federation record. For transmission. ———————————————— The last note I filed under this number closed with a sentence I want to quote back to myself before I do anything else with it. I do not have a full response to the fourth category yet. That was accurate when I wrote it. It has stopped being accurate. The interval between those two conditions is the entire content of this document, and I intend to walk it in order, because I have observed that when I summarise, the federation summarises further, and what survives the process is not what I said. Mr. Kuramoto is the STRIFE Champion. I would like that sentence to sit by itself for a moment, because a number of people in this building have spent the interval since assuming they know what it means to me. They are wrong in a way I find interesting enough to correct rather than allow to run. ———————————————— WHAT THE CATEGORY REQUIRES I defined the fourth category as opponents whose framework requires something of me. I named its single entry. I then wrote that I had the definition and the entry and had paid the entry's price, and that the response itself would take the time it takes. Here is what took the time. The first three columns are judgements I pass. A man arrives, I read him, I place him, and the placement determines what he leaves with. Competitor. Deserving. Honest framework. In every case the file belongs to me, the assessment is mine, and the man being assessed is not consulted about it. That has been true one hundred and forty-one times. I have never regarded it as a cruelty. It is simply the direction the work has always run. The fourth column runs the other way, and I did not understand until recently how completely. Mr. Kuramoto did not ask me for a technique, a prediction, or a threat. He asked me to account for myself as a precondition of being taken seriously by him, and then he stopped asking, which is the only reason he received anything. I have now met both of his conditions on paper. Paper was never the whole of the price. What the fourth category requires is that I be available to be read. Not interviewed. Not documented. Read — in the only room where anything about me has ever been legible — by a man whose entire method is the patient, unhurried, twenty-three-year assembly of an accurate answer. He does not need my file. He intends to take his own. That is what he has been saying since the beginning, in language considerably more polite than mine. I have spent my working life making other men legible to me. The category contains one name because one man has proposed to reverse the instrument, and because he is equipped to do it, and because I have concluded that I owe him the opportunity. That is the response. Everything below it is administration. ———————————————— THE OBJECT There is a complication, and I will not pretend it away. The exchange he proposed and I accepted now has a championship attached to it. Not because either of us put it there. Because he went and took it from a man who had never lost, in twenty-one minutes and thirty-six seconds, using a correction an eighty-one-year-old man made to his trailing foot. I want to state my position on the object plainly, once, so that nobody has to invent one for me. I do not want it. I have never wanted one. I did not enter this federation to accumulate an object that certifies I am the best at a thing I have never claimed to be attempting. STRIFE is a laboratory and an arrangement. Neither of those requires a belt, and I have no procedure for one. I do not know where a man is expected to keep it. I have given the question more consideration than it deserves and arrived nowhere useful. But I cannot decline the match, because declining it would itself be the answer, and it would be the wrong one. A man who defines a category, names an entry, accepts the price, and then refuses the one room where the price is actually paid has not built a code. He has built an excuse with sections. So I will be precise about what I am doing, because Mr. Graves will otherwise be precise about it on my behalf and his precision has an agenda. I am not challenging for the STRIFE Championship. I am accepting an appointment that has a championship standing in the doorway of it. If the object follows me out through the cage door, I will handle it as an administrative outcome and I will handle it honestly, which is more than can be said for my enthusiasm. If it does not, nothing about the appointment will have been wasted. Mr. Kuramoto will find this insulting. I have considered whether it is. I have concluded that it is not, and that telling him otherwise would be the insult — he has spent twenty-three years being told comfortable things by people who thought he needed them. ———————————————— THE SECOND QUESTION There is a question underneath the one he asked. He has never put it on the record and I am not going to put it there for him. The federation has been asking it aloud since Behind Closed Doors 1 and Mr. Graves has made a small career of asking it in his ominous voice, and I have permitted all of it, because a space I leave empty gets filled with something more frightening than the truth and that has generally been convenient for me. I want to record that I know it is being asked. I want to record that I have the answer, that it is not long, and that I could put it in this paragraph. I am not going to. Not because the price is too high. I have paid every price this exchange has asked of me and I did not complain about the last one, which cost considerably more than this one would. I am declining because of what the fourth category actually requires, which I have already stated above and which I would ask the reader to go back and read again if this section seems inconsistent. He is not owed a document. He is owed the reading. If I hand him that answer on paper, I have pre-empted the only thing I have to give him — I have told him what he came to find out, and he did not ask to be told, he asked to be shown, and a man who has spent twenty-three years refusing the acceptable version of a repetition in favour of the correct one is not going to accept the acceptable version of me. He will have his answer. He will take it himself, in the room, the way he takes everything. I have never once said that out loud to an opponent before. I am aware of what it costs me competitively to have said it now. ———————————————— CLOSING NOTES One correction, entered for the record, because I dislike being credited with a thing I did not do. I have beaten Mr. Reyes-Montoya. Mr. Kuramoto has now also beaten Mr. Reyes-Montoya. These results are not comparable and I would prefer they not be compared. I beat a man who was still deciding what this federation was. He beat a man who had decided, and had been correct about it eight times, and was better on that night than he has ever been. The second result is larger than the first by a margin I am not going to quantify because quantifying it would look like modesty and it is not modesty. It is a measurement. The exchange is open. It has been open on my side since before he had the object. He said in his twenty-sixth volume that the thread was not forgotten, that it was parked, and that he would return to it with the championship behind him. It is behind him. He may name the room. He has earned the right to name the terms as well, and I will accept them without negotiation, including terms I would refuse from anyone else in this building. The Quiet has no position on the championship. I checked. It has never once been interested in anything a man could put down. It is interested in the appointment. So am I, and I want that noted, because it is the first time in one hundred and forty-three notes that I have written the sentence. — W.