Subject 14: Addendum

SUBJECT 14: ADDENDUM Research note. Filed to the federation record. For transmission. ———————————————— Every note I have written has carried the same two lines beneath its title. Filed in private. Not for transmission. I have written one hundred and forty-one of them. The federation has seen the small number of them I have elected to release, and has correctly understood that the release was a decision each time and not a habit. This one carries different lines. I want that noticed before anything else in it is read, because the format is the first part of the answer. Mr. Kuramoto asked me a question on the federation's record. He set two conditions on the exchange: that both frameworks be honest, and that both be publicly verifiable. He then waited. He has now stated, publicly, that he will not ask again before his championship match, and he has given his reason: that a man who repeats a correctly-asked question is asking a different question, which is *will you please answer me*, and that he declines to ask that one. He is right. It is a different question. I would not have answered that one either. He stopped asking. That is why I am answering. ———————————————— CONDITION ONE: HONEST Met, and I do not think it is disputed by anyone, including him. My framework is written down. It produces the same decisions when applied by me on a Tuesday as on any other day. It has been extended twice under public examination and I published both extensions, including the one that cost me a category I had been comfortable with. Mr. Kuramoto's framework is honest by the same test. It is not the same framework. It is not one I would have built. He has, in twenty-three years, never taken the version of a repetition that looked acceptable rather than the version that was correct — and I want to be precise about how I know that, because it is not admiration and it is not from his volumes. I know it because I fought him. I have his file. I opened it before this federation had a champion. His body does not lie about what it has done. Nothing else in his life had to be honest for that to be true, and everything else in his life is honest anyway. Condition one is met on both sides. It was met before he asked. ———————————————— CONDITION TWO: PUBLICLY VERIFIABLE This is the condition I could not meet, and this is why the reply took the time it took. I want to state the problem without ornament, because I have noticed the federation prefers to supply ornament on my behalf when I leave a space for it. There is no record of me. Not a sealed record. Not a concealed one. There is no trainer on file because no trainer would claim me and I do not know whether one could. There is no debut logged. There is no gym, no lineage, no first card in a converted building where somebody's aunt sewed a robe. Men in this locker room can name the room they were made in. Mr. Kuramoto has flown eleven hours to stand in his. Mr. Morse has filed a document explaining that he selected his, off a list he compiled himself, against his family's advice. I have neither. I was not made and I did not select. I arrived. I have audited it. I did the audit properly, the way I do them, and I have written before that the lost years remain partially documented even to me, which is an unpleasant sentence to have to keep writing about one's own life. There are years I can describe and cannot prove. There is a man who taught me the vocabulary I use to speak to myself, and his name is one syllable and belongs to no language I have been able to identify, and I have no photograph of him and no reason to believe he wished to be photographed. So when Mr. Kuramoto set his second condition, he asked me — without intending to, and without knowing he was doing it — for the one thing I do not have. He asked for my paper. I considered, for some time, telling him that the condition was unmeetable and that the exchange therefore could not occur. That would have been true. It would also have been a man declining to pay a price and calling it a rule, which is precisely the behaviour the Code exists to prevent in me. So here is what I have instead. ———————————————— THE ONE VERIFIABLE THING There is exactly one documented event in my life. It is a matter of public record in the jurisdiction where it occurred. It is retrievable by anyone with the patience to retrieve it, and I am told the patience required is considerable but not exceptional. When I was sixteen years old I went into a hospital room and I turned off the machines keeping my mother alive, in the order she had taught me, because the people whose job it was to do it had been prevented from doing it by a committee and by a relative neither of us liked. She watched me do it. She approved. I held her hand until it stopped. I was questioned for nine days. I answered every question that was put to me. I did not lie to them and I have not lied about it since. The case was closed without charge. That is my verifiable record. That is the whole of it. One file, in one building, about the worst night of my life, in which I am the subject rather than the author. I am providing it because the condition was public verification and this is the only public verification I possess. Mr. Kuramoto has a dojo, a floor that has been resurfaced twice, an eighty-one-year-old man on a cushion who is still permitted to correct him, and four thousand mornings of witnesses. I have nine days of interview transcript and a death certificate. I am aware of the asymmetry. I am not complaining about it. He set an honest condition and I have met it with what I have. ———————————————— THE FOURTH CATEGORY He asked whether the Code has a fourth extension and what it accommodates. It did not have one when he asked. It has one now, and he built it, and I am going to name it precisely because he is owed precision. The first column is competitors. The second is the men who have hurt people who could not fight back. The third is honest frameworks — men whose rules are real and consistently applied, who are not my work, who leave outworked and intact. The fourth category accommodates opponents whose framework requires something of *me*. Every previous category is a judgement I make about a man. The fourth is the first one that runs the other way. It contains, at present, one name. Mr. Kuramoto did not ask to be categorised, did not ask for my assessment, did not ask for anything I customarily give. He asked me to account for myself, on the record, as a condition of being taken seriously by him. Nobody has done that before. Opponents ask what I am going to do to them. He asked what I am. I do not have a full response to the fourth category yet. I have the definition and I have one entry in it and I have, now, paid the entry's price. The response will take the time it takes. I will not write code while the filing is happening; that rule has not changed and will not. ———————————————— CLOSING NOTES I will not be at Behind Closed Doors 10 in any professional capacity. I have not been booked and I have not asked to be. Mr. Kuramoto has a championship match in front of him and a man in front of that, and the correct thing to do with a fighter in that position is to leave him alone. When it is finished — however it finishes — the exchange he proposed remains open on my side. Both conditions are now met. He may hold me to that at a time of his choosing. One further note, entered because I have found it interesting. Mr. Morse has filed a document in which he distinguishes between men who were made and men who selected, and argues that selection is the more accountable of the two because a man who selected can be asked at any moment whether he selected correctly. It is a good argument. I want to record that it is a good argument, and also that it has a third case it does not consider, and that the third case is standing in the same federation writing this sentence. The Quiet has no opinion on any of the above. I checked, carefully, before I wrote the section about the hospital. That room is where it started. It does not revisit its own beginning. It only ever looks forward, which I have concluded, after a very long time, is the single kindest thing about it. — W.