My plan was to dive into PROJECT HOURGLASS by May 1st, but I'm not yet done with PROJECT ROSEWATER or KILLJOY, partly because getting anything built and/or installed in Cairo demands undivided micromanagement.

Kitchen is now a hair away from final-final completion (whenever you think you're done, a new loose thread seems to reveal itself). Renovation on the unit upstairs is finally finished (exceeeept for a minor plumbing thing and some woodwork that needs mending). Today I try to get mirrors installed on a big unfinished wall in the building entrance (the original plan was to create an original mural for it, but I'm learning to take things off my plate when the pile gets too high. and the mirrors will be a good fix).

Other things needed for the studio are: – Closet – Storage Unit for Works on Paper – Shelves and Cabinets for the washroom/storage room – Sofa (in an effort to make my life more difficult, there's a particular design for it I'm looking to get made). – Rocking chair (which will serve as my reading chair—settling into my old age with acceptance). – Side table (to go with said rocking chair—already have the marble slab that will serve as the tabletop, cut out of the kitchen counter to make way for the electric stove top, which means said table will need to be custom-built). – Floor lamp (for the reading/rocking chair) – Additional table on casters (also have a design in mind for it 🙃) – 3 Assorted table lamps – 1 wall-light fixture – Assorted mirrors (to reflect the light around the eerily dark corner of the studio) – 2 floating shelves

And then and only then will I finally feel situated in my new digs. Which puts me at... what? 50 years from now at this rate?

#journal

What love wants is to be wise.

Dad has cancer, he told me two weeks ago, as casually as someone saying, “pass the salt, please.” I decided to dance his dance, to give him the comfort of following his tone. So, just like someone passing the salt, I answered: “Hm, and how are you feeling?” He told me about the radiotherapy treatment that will start soon, that he isn’t afraid of death. I joked and said: the last time I visited you at ICU (that was in 2017, when he had a heart attack) I brought you some books to keep you entertained in the room, since they wouldn’t let you have access to anything. After bringing you a pile of books, I asked: “Dad, anything else you want?” and you answered, “Yes, I want to be cremated.” We both laughed.

And then I told him I was reading The Symposium by Plato. That in 380 b.C, the greek philosophers got together to discuss what is love. And what love wants. The conclusion from Plato is, what love wants is to be wise. Saturn, by castrating his father (Uranus), who is the sky and the time (which makes a lot of sense, because the sky is the imprint of time, literally), creates a cave with his semen, and inside it he keeps humans. The cave is an allegory for our system of beliefs. We're constantly moving in life from one cave to the other. We start life in the mother uterus, then we move to the family uterus, the friend's uterus, the university uterus, the work uterus, and finally the final uterus, which is the grave. Saturn is fundamentally this force that tries to control things. Tries to keep us inside the cave, as if that it could prevent us of being devoured by Uranus (time). But there is no way to escape. Thinking of other traditions, like the jewish one, what greeks call “Saturn” I understand in Kabbalah being represented as “Binah”.
Binah is the feminine, the great uterus that gives shape to this infinite masculine energy flow known as Gevurah (in greek mithology, “Mars”). Without the vessel (Binah), this flow is nothing but infinite potential. The irony is: what limits, what contains, is also what gives shape and forms life. Creating does not exist without the two elements.

He told me he still hasn’t shared the news with my older sister, his daughter from his first marriage, because he wasn’t sure how she might react and she had already her other concerns in life. Then he asked me what I thought. I answered: “Well, you clearly think I am on vacation, right?” And he laughed a bit more. I suggested he might wait another week, start the radiotherapy and see how it goes, and then give her a call, since she deserves to know. The cave is always destroyed, but it is nice to have some time to process things. He thought it was indeed a good idea. And then he said he knew he should talk to me from the very beginning, not because he thinks I am in permanent vacation (haha), but because he knew I could hold it. And I think in that moment my dad did more for our connection than he has done in a long time, because he trusted me. And that's all I actually need from him.

/May26

I think I’m starting to feel comfortable being the person that I am. I feel like I’ve now had an avenue to meet essentially an unlimited stream of people through 222, and I feel like that has really given me a lot of confidence on depart like I felt like I couldn’t control and so I’m feeling like a complete lack of dread and I feel like that makes me feel more content as a person.

久々に喫茶ナドックへ。 やはりここには、帰ってきたという感覚がある。自分にとっての拠点のような場所のひとつだ。

ここへ通うようになってから、毎回のようにピザトーストを頼んでいる。ピザトーストには、ビネガー系のドレッシングがかかったサラダと飲み物が付いてくる。普段、他の喫茶店ではホットコーヒーを頼みがちな俺も、ここではホットレモンティーを選ぶ。妻もホットティーを頼むからだ。

とにかく落ち着く場所だ。あまりに毎回ピザトーストを頼んでいたせいで、ここへ来ると自然と口がピザトーストを求めるようになってしまった。だが最近、メニューに「天国トースト」というものが追加されたらしい。フレンチトーストにバニラアイスが乗ったものらしく、いつか挑戦してみたいとは思っている。ただ、口がまだピザトーストになっているうちは、しばらく頼み続けることになりそうだ。振り返ってみても、自分はこういうルーティン的な行動をなかなか変えられた試しがない。

喫茶店を出たあと、妻は髪を切りに行った。あとで合流することになっていたので、俺は別の喫茶店へ移動し、パソコンで作業をすることにした。1時間ほどすると、お尻が痛くなってきたので店を出る。

なんとなく近くのゲームセンターに入り、クレーンゲームの景品を眺めながら歩き、二階のアーケードゲームコーナーへ向かった。インターネットが普及した今でも、ゲーセンのアーケードコーナーにはある程度人がいるようだった。

アーケードゲームの筐体デザインは、昔よりもどんどんテック寄りになってきている気がする。今では当たり前なのだろうが、スマホ決済にも対応しているらしい。

ただその一方で、アーケードゲームの筐体そのものは、なぜかそうしたアップデートから取り残されているような印象も受ける。100円玉の実物を入れないと、いかにも反応してくれなさそうな形をしているのだ。

妻とは、トレッキング用のメレルのゴアテックスシューズを一緒に買おうという話になっていた。だが、本当に欲しいものでもない限り、二万円は出せないよねという結論になり、今回は見送ることになり、いつもの電車に乗って帰る。

Ni él sabe lo que quiso decir, pero le da risa. Y a mí.

In a Davos meeting room in January 2026, a panel of chief executives, labour economists, and education ministers sat through a slide nobody seemed entirely able to answer. It was a simple chart drawn from the World Economic Forum's recent labour data: the traditional corporate ladder, with its familiar pyramid geometry of firms feeding juniors through years of progressively more demanding work, was losing its middle rungs. The session had been meant to reassure executives that the 170 million jobs the Forum projected would be created by 2030 would more than offset the 92 million expected to vanish. Instead, it produced one of the week's most uncomfortable discussions, because the numbers at the bottom of the ladder had started to tell a different story from the numbers at the top.

In the most AI-exposed occupations in the United States, employment among workers aged 22 to 25 had fallen by 13 per cent since late 2022, according to a Stanford Digital Economy Lab study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, updated in November 2025 and titled, with studied understatement, “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”. Older workers in the same occupations had seen their employment hold steady or grow. Entry-level work, the Forum's own March 2026 analysis noted bluntly, was not being redistributed. It was being redefined out of existence. The message the Davos panel kept circling was that the foundation for the next generation of senior experts was being removed at the same pace as the work it had historically performed.

Three weeks later, on 13 February 2026, the Guardian published an investigation by Lucy Knight with additional reporting by Sumaiya Motara titled “The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers”. It ran a sequence of portraits: Jacqueline Bowman, a 30-year-old Californian freelance writer whose work “kind of dried up” in 2024; Janet Feenstra, a 52-year-old academic editor in Malmö who had left a decade at Malmö University to retrain as a baker; Richard, 39, a chartered occupational health and safety professional in Northampton who had taken “a huge cut” to retrain as an electrical engineer; Paola Adeitan, 31, who had abandoned her plans to become a solicitor despite a law degree and a master's. Angela Joyce, chief executive of Capital City College in London, confirmed “steady growth in students of all ages” enrolling in engineering, culinary, and childcare programmes. A 2023 UK Department for Education report found finance, law, and business management among the most AI-exposed occupations; a King's College London study from October 2025 identified software engineering and management consultancy as facing the steepest AI-driven declines.

What made the Guardian piece difficult to classify was that the people in it had not, for the most part, been made redundant. They had looked at a future they could not see the bottom of and decided to jump. Carl Benedikt Frey of the Oxford Internet Institute, whose 2013 paper with Michael Osborne launched the entire modern genre of automation-panic statistics, told the Guardian something almost embarrassed: manual work “is going to be harder to automate”, yes, but career decisions driven by hypotheticals rather than evidence might produce their own harms. Dr Bouke Klein Teeselink of King's College offered a different warning: “becoming really good at working with AI is probably going to be a skill that will pay off”.

By early 2026, a number of writers and researchers had converged on a framing that the economic vocabulary of displacement could not quite capture. The most influential of these, circulating widely on Substack, in newsletters, and across professional networks, was built around a single phrase: the apprenticeship severance. The argument was that what was being lost was not principally jobs, or wages, or even the first rung of a ladder. What was being severed was the mechanism through which one generation of professionals had historically transmitted tacit knowledge, professional judgement, and domain expertise to the next. The loss, in other words, was epistemic before it was economic. If the mechanism disappeared before a replacement existed, the consequences would not land for five years, or ten, but would surface as a slow subsidence in the quality of senior expertise two decades out, when today's missing juniors were supposed to be tomorrow's partners, principals, and surgeons.

This is an argument worth taking seriously on its own terms, because it says something the standard productivity-and-displacement debate cannot.

The Thing That Cannot Be Written Down

The Hungarian-British philosopher Michael Polanyi spent the second half of his life worrying about what he called the tacit dimension of knowledge. In his 1966 book of the same name, he offered the formulation that would define the field: “we can know more than we can tell”. His examples were ordinary and devastating. We recognise a familiar face without being able to list the features that identify it. A driver cannot be produced by reading the theory of the motorcar. A swimmer does not swim by consulting the physics of buoyancy. There is, Polanyi argued, a whole order of human capability that resists articulation, and it is transmitted not by instruction but by contact: the apprentice watches the master, absorbs rhythms, imitates, fails, adjusts, and eventually acquires the same unarticulated competence.

The sociologist Harry Collins spent decades refining this idea. In his 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Collins broke the concept down into three types. Relational tacit knowledge is the sort that could, in principle, be written down, but in practice is not, because the effort of articulation is too great or the social context too specific. Somatic tacit knowledge is what the body knows: balance, coordination, the grip of a surgeon's hand. Collective tacit knowledge, in Collins's view, is the only truly irreducible form, the kind that exists not in any individual at all but in the fabric of a social group, and which can only be acquired by long immersion in that group's practices.

What all three types share is a resistance to codification. You do not learn them by reading a document. You learn them by being placed, awkwardly and often inefficiently, alongside somebody who already has them, and by spending enough time in that proximity that something percolates. In professional contexts, that structured proximity has a name: apprenticeship. The junior associate buried in a document review is not, from the firm's perspective, primarily performing document review. They are developing a sense of what cases look like, what contracts signal, how partners think, when to push back, when to shut up. Document review is the pretext. The product is the slow accretion of professional judgement.

This is the core of the epistemic argument. If you automate away the pretext, you do not thereby eliminate the need for the product. You just eliminate one of the primary mechanisms by which the product was ever produced.

The Surgical Analogy Nobody Wants

The person who has done more than anyone to document what happens when this kind of severance occurs in real working environments is Matt Beane, an assistant professor in the Technology Management Program at UC Santa Barbara. His 2019 paper in Administrative Science Quarterly, “Shadow Learning: Building Robotic Surgical Skill When Approved Means Fail”, remains the clearest field study of the phenomenon, and it concerns not lawyers or consultants but surgeons.

Beane's work began with a puzzle. American hospitals had rapidly adopted robotic surgical systems, and the formal curriculum for residents had been updated to accommodate them. Residents rotated through robotic cases, accumulated hours, and received their certifications on schedule. On paper, the training pipeline was intact. In the operating room, something else was happening. Beane's two-year ethnographic study across multiple sites, combined with blinded interviews at thirteen top-tier teaching hospitals, found that residents trained on robotic systems were receiving ten to twenty times less hands-on practice than their predecessors on traditional techniques. The robot, by automating the fine motor work and concentrating decisions in the hands of the attending surgeon, had quietly removed most of the intermediate positions from which a resident used to learn. The mentor was no longer close enough, literally, to guide in real time. Residents were graduating licensed to operate but missing the tacit competencies their predecessors had acquired almost invisibly.

The residents who did manage to develop expertise, Beane found, were doing so through what he called “shadow learning”: prematurely specialising, rehearsing in simulators without proper supervision, and engaging in “undersupervised struggle” near the edge of their capacity. They were acquiring skill in ways that violated the formal training model, learning by proximity and repetition, as Polanyi described, but jury-rigging the proximity themselves, often outside their supervisors' knowledge. The skill-building had simply gone underground.

Beane's subsequent work, including his 2024 book The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, generalises the finding. Across professions where intelligent systems are rapidly displacing the routine work that once constituted the learning phase, he argues, organisations are systematically prioritising short-term productivity at the expense of the long-term capability of their own workforces. The robot gets faster. The partner gets more output per associate. The associate gets less practice.

The question the apprenticeship severance argument poses is whether the same pattern is now unfolding across the entire knowledge economy, only with generative AI playing the role of the surgical robot and with no equivalent of “shadow learning” yet visible in the data.

What the Numbers Actually Say

The empirical picture is partial but pointed. Using granular ADP payroll data covering millions of workers at thousands of US firms, Brynjolfsson, Chandar, and Chen documented a sharp divergence from late 2022. Employment for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations fell 6 per cent in absolute terms between late 2022 and mid-2025, and 13 per cent relative to less-exposed sectors. Employment for older workers in the same occupations either held steady or grew. In software engineering and customer service, entry-level employment fell close to 20 per cent. The effect was concentrated where AI automates tasks rather than augmenting them; augmentative fields showed no equivalent decline.

Around those findings, a scaffolding of smaller studies has accumulated. An IESE Insight analysis of AI-exposed firms found starting wages fell 4.5 per cent after ChatGPT's launch, with a 6.3 per cent drop for junior positions and stable or rising pay for senior hires. Between 2018 and 2024, the share of jobs in AI-exposed fields requiring three years of experience or less fell sharply: software development from 43 to 28 per cent, data analysis from 35 to 22 per cent, consulting from 41 to 26 per cent. In law, trade press and firm-level reporting confirm that automated document review has reduced the tasks first-year associates used to perform. Above the Law reported in March 2026 that at one BigLaw firm, AI training had been made mandatory for associates but would not count as billable hours, a tidy illustration of how firms treat the developmental cost of new tools.

The counter-evidence is real and worth stating fairly. McKinsey announced in late 2025 that it would increase North American hiring by 12 per cent in 2026, arguing that deploying AI strategically requires more creative problem-solvers, not fewer. Several law firms, including Ropes and Gray, have built substantial AI training programmes that treat junior associates' experimentation as a firm-wide investment, reportedly allowing first-years to spend up to 400 hours of their annual 1,900 billable-hour target on AI work. The WEF's March 2026 analysis argued that entry-level roles are not disappearing so much as being reshaped: from task execution toward judgement-based work, from drafting toward reviewing, from producing outputs toward triaging the outputs of machines.

This is the terrain on which reasonable disagreement sits. Not whether AI is changing entry-level work, which is not in dispute, but whether the change is structurally compatible with the transmission of expertise or structurally corrosive to it.

The Reviewer's Trap

The most seductive framing of the current moment, the one that dominates corporate training decks and consultancy white papers, is that juniors will move “up the value chain”. Instead of drafting, they will review. Instead of producing raw outputs, they will edit, critique, and direct AI systems that produce them. This is often presented as a promotion: the machine does the tedious bit, the human does the interesting bit, and juniors get to spend their early careers on judgement rather than grunt work.

There is a specific problem with this framing, which Beane has been among the sharpest to articulate. Reviewing is not the same skill as producing; in most professional domains it is derivative, presupposing the producer's craft rather than replacing it. A senior editor can improve a draft because she has written drafts for years and knows, in her body, what a draft looks like when it is working. Ask her to review a draft she could not herself have written, and the quality of her review degrades sharply. The same is true of surgery, code, legal argumentation, and financial modelling. Judgement is not a free-standing capability. It is the residue of having done the work often enough to develop instincts about it, and the instincts will not form if the work is never done.

Research on how junior developers use AI coding assistants supports the worry. A study of 52 junior engineers reported in InfoQ in February 2026, drawing on Anthropic-sponsored research into skill formation, found a stark divide between those who used AI for conceptual questions (scoring 65 per cent or higher on subsequent assessments) and those who delegated code generation to AI (scoring below 40 per cent). A separate data point suggested that 78 per cent of junior engineers trusted AI-generated output with high specificity, compared with 39 per cent of seniors. The junior's confidence, in other words, scales inversely with their capacity to evaluate the output. They cannot yet tell when they are being deceived. Seniors can, but only because they paid the price of the uncodified learning in their own earlier careers.

This is the reviewer's trap. If you redefine junior work as review, you have not simplified the developmental path. You have inverted it. Review-first workflows ask people to do the hard thing before they have done the easy thing, without noticing that the easy thing was never really easy, it was just where the hard thing was silently being learnt.

The Economic Argument Is Not the Whole Argument

There is a version of this debate that treats the apprenticeship severance as essentially a labour-market problem to be solved by re-aggregating work, subsidising training, or reconfiguring career ladders. The argument in the widely shared early-2026 analyses was that this framing concedes too much ground to the language of displacement. Even if every junior role eliminated by AI were replaced, dollar for dollar and hour for hour, the epistemic problem would remain. The concern is not aggregate employment, or aggregate wages, or even aggregate hours. It is the specific quality of the experience an individual professional accumulates on their way to expertise, and the mechanism by which that experience was transmitted.

The professions most exposed (law, finance, consulting, the creative fields) are precisely the ones in which senior practitioners have historically insisted that what they do cannot be taught from a textbook. Partners talk constantly about judgement, about a feel for the case or the deal or the client. They say these things because they are true. Their expertise is not a stored library of facts; it is a trained intuition, shaped over thousands of low-stakes decisions that were actually quite high-stakes for their formation. The junior who drafts a memo a partner tears apart is being taught something, but what they are being taught is not contained in the partner's edits. It is diffused across years of such edits, accumulating into a capacity to anticipate the tear-apart before it happens.

If that process is interrupted, even gently, the cost does not register immediately. It registers at the moment when the former junior is herself asked to be the partner, and finds she has not developed the instinct the role requires. The signal will be that the partner, when asked a question, gives an answer that is fluent and plausible and wrong in ways she cannot detect. Multiply this across a profession and across a generation, and you have something worse than a talent shortage. You have an expertise shortage masquerading as a talent surplus, because the people nominally qualified to hold senior positions will in fact hold them, only with less of the unarticulated judgement the positions were designed to deploy.

This is what the early-2026 analyses meant by epistemic severance. Not that the professions would stop functioning, but that their internal quality would subside over a long enough timeline that the subsidence would be difficult to attribute.

The Counter-Arguments Worth Taking Seriously

The sharpest critique of the thesis is that it presupposes a stable past that may never have existed. Every previous wave of professional automation, from dictation machines and typing pools to spreadsheets and document management systems, was greeted with the same set of anxieties, and the professions adapted. Senior lawyers in the 1990s worried that junior associates who had not spent their early careers on manual research in dusty volumes would be missing some crucial forensic sensibility. They were wrong, or at least mostly wrong. Spreadsheets did not hollow out financial analysis; they redefined what analysis was. Electronic discovery did not empty out junior legal practice; it shifted it. Perhaps generative AI is the same pattern at a larger scale.

There is force to this argument, and it should not be dismissed. But the analogy breaks down on the question of what, precisely, the new tools replace. Spreadsheets replaced the specific cognitive task of arithmetic; they left intact the interpretive, relational, and strategic work that constituted the junior analyst's actual development. Electronic discovery replaced the manual labour of sifting boxes of documents; it left intact the junior associate's exposure to the substantive law and the partner's reasoning. Generative AI, uniquely, is being applied directly to the cognitive and interpretive work itself. It does not merely automate the chore and leave the apprentice to do the thinking. It often does the first-pass thinking, leaving the apprentice to sign off on it. The replacement is categorically different from previous waves.

A second serious counter-argument is that the apprenticeship framing romanticises a learning system that worked poorly for many of the people in it. The old junior roles were exhausting, exclusionary, and often abusive. They selected for endurance and pedigree rather than for talent. If AI eliminates the worst of them, the argument runs, good riddance; design something better. This is a fair point, and it is entirely compatible with taking the epistemic concern seriously. The question is not whether the old system was optimal. It is whether what is replacing it has been designed with the transmission of expertise in mind, or whether it has been designed principally to reduce headcount, and whether the developmental function is a casualty of that redesign rather than an intentional part of it. At the moment, the evidence for design intent is thin.

A third argument, favoured by some AI optimists, is that the tools themselves will come to function as tutors and mentors. If an AI can produce a legal memo, it can also explain it; if it can generate code, it can walk a junior through the architecture. In principle this is possible; in practice, current systems are poorly suited, because they do not know what the learner does not know, and because the tacit dimension is almost by definition the dimension they cannot articulate. Beane himself has suggested AI could be part of the solution, coaching learners, teaching coaches when to mentor, connecting the two in smart ways. The ingredients exist. The question is whether anyone is building with them at scale, as opposed to selling productivity.

What AI-Assisted Work Preserving The Developmental Function Could Look Like

It is worth spending some time on the constructive question, because the destructive one is easier to describe. If generative AI is genuinely inescapable, and if the transmission of expertise still has to happen, what would a workflow that preserved the developmental function of early-career experience actually look like?

The first and most obvious shift is toward what might be called productive struggle by design. In the Beane framework, skill is built through proximate, near-the-edge work under light supervision. An AI-assisted workflow preserving this would not hand juniors finished outputs to review; it would hand them problems to solve, with AI available as a resource they can consult selectively rather than as a default producer. The principle is closer to the way a well-run graduate seminar operates than to the way a consulting pyramid traditionally operates. The junior does the work. The AI is not the competitor for the work; it is a reference consulted when the junior chooses. The senior reviews the work, but reviews it as a piece of the junior's developing capability, not as a piece of the firm's billable output.

A second shift is toward what a number of firms have begun calling visible reasoning. In a pure AI-augmented workflow, the junior's contribution often looks like a prompt, followed by a generated output, followed by edits. The reasoning is hidden inside the prompt and the edits. A developmental workflow would require the junior to make their reasoning explicit: to document what they asked the AI, why they asked it that way, what they kept, what they rejected, and why. This is not busywork. It is the externalisation of the tacit dimension, forced by the workflow itself, so that both the junior and the senior have something to review beyond the final product.

A third shift is a recovery of the master-apprentice relationship as an institutional priority rather than an informal luxury. In many professional environments, mentorship has for two decades been treated as something that happens around the edges of billable work, when the partner has time. The apprenticeship severance thesis implies that this is no longer survivable. If the developmental function has historically been embedded in the routine work, and that work is now being automated, then the developmental function needs to be relocated, explicitly, into structured relationships that are part of the firm's core design. This means paid mentoring time, mentor training, and developmental metrics that do not show up on the quarterly P&L. It is expensive. It is, in most industries, unusual.

A fourth, more speculative shift is the construction of domain-specific AI tools that model the tacit dimension rather than flatten it. The current generation of general-purpose assistants is engineered for confident plausibility. A developmental AI would be engineered for calibrated uncertainty, designed to say “I do not know”, to flag where senior judgement is required, to offer multiple framings rather than a single answer, and to build over time a model of what the specific junior user does and does not yet understand. Some of this is technically hard. Some is merely unfashionable, because the market for confident plausibility is much larger than the market for calibrated uncertainty.

None of these shifts is going to happen by accident. They will happen if they are prioritised and funded by the people who run firms and educational institutions, and they will fail to happen if the dominant logic of AI deployment continues to be headcount reduction. The evidence from early 2026 is mixed. Some firms are investing seriously. Many more are deploying AI as a substitution for the bottom rungs of the ladder without any plan for where the top rungs will come from in 2040.

The Long Horizon

The apprenticeship severance argument is difficult to win politically because its costs are invisible on any timeline a quarterly-driven organisation can see. A firm that cuts its junior headcount in 2026 will show improved operating margins in 2027. The cost, in missing expertise, arrives in 2040, when the cohort that was supposed to fill senior roles cannot fill them with the depth the roles require. By then, the executives who made the 2026 decisions will have retired; the foreshortened careers will have been foreshortened too long ago for anyone to connect the dots; the profession will settle into a new, subtly degraded normal, and most of its members will experience that normal as simply how things are.

This is the epistemic dimension the Guardian investigation could not quite reach, because the Guardian was reporting on a labour market, and labour markets do not have a vocabulary for this kind of intergenerational loss. It is the dimension the WEF session in January gestured at without naming. It is the dimension the early-2026 analyses tried, not always cleanly, to articulate: that the severance is not of workers from their jobs, though that is happening too, but of one generation of professionals from the accumulated tacit competence of the generation before, with no institutional arrangement yet in place to re-establish the link.

Whether the link can be re-established is an open question. It will depend on whether the version of AI-assisted work that preserves developmental function turns out to be a plausible design object, or merely a plausible essay. It will depend on whether firms are willing to treat the transmission of expertise as a first-order obligation rather than a nice-to-have. It will depend on whether regulators and professional bodies, who in theory exist to maintain standards across generations, decide the standards include the pathway, not just the endpoint.

It will also depend on whether the people at the bottom of the ladder, currently retraining as bakers, electricians, and therapists, are willing to persist in their professions long enough for new pathways to form, or whether the flight the Guardian documented accelerates, hollowing out the base of the knowledge economy from the other side. One quieter finding in the Guardian piece was how many of its subjects had chosen manual trades specifically because they perceived them as AI-resistant. If enough talent follows that logic, the problem is no longer theoretical. The senior experts of 2045 will not exist because the juniors of 2026 decided the risk of their existence was not worth running.

The people who keep saying that every previous wave of automation produced worse predictions than it justified may turn out to be correct. Generative AI may reshape entry-level work into something more developmentally rich than it ever was, and the junior cohort of 2030 may look back at the panics of 2026 with the same mild condescension that today's analysts reserve for the automation anxieties of the 1990s. That outcome is possible. It is not, on current evidence, being actively engineered. The difference between outcomes that arrive by good fortune and outcomes that arrive by design is, in the end, the difference between a profession that keeps its expertise and one that spends a generation rediscovering what it has lost.

The question posed at Davos, and in the Guardian's pages, and in the analyses that followed, was not principally about jobs. It was about whether any institution currently operating at scale has decided that the next generation of senior experts is worth building on purpose. The answer that emerges from the spring of 2026 is, in most places, not yet. Which is to say: not ruled out, but not being worked on either, and the work, if it is going to happen, is going to have to start from the recognition that the old system's developmental function was never visible on anyone's balance sheet, that its replacement will not be either, and that the absence of a line item has never, in any field, been a reliable argument for the absence of a cost.

References and Sources

1. World Economic Forum, “Davos: What to know about jobs and skills transformation”, January 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-here-s-what-to-know-about-jobs-and-skills-transformation/
2. World Economic Forum, “How AI is changing the nature of entry level work”, March 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/how-ai-is-changing-the-nature-of-entry-level-work/
3. World Economic Forum, “Four ways AI and talent trends could reshape jobs by 2030”, January 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/here-are-four-ways-ais-impact-on-job-markets-might-take-shape/
4. Lucy Knight with Sumaiya Motara, “The big AI job swap: why white-collar workers are ditching their careers”, The Guardian, 13 February 2026. Archived via Portside: https://portside.org/2026-02-13/big-ai-job-swap-why-white-collar-workers-are-ditching-their-careers
5. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence”, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2025 (updated November 2025). https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/
6. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, University of Chicago Press, 1966.
7. Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, University of Chicago Press, 2010.
8. Matthew Beane, “Shadow Learning: Building Robotic Surgical Skill When Approved Means Fail”, Administrative Science Quarterly, 2019.
9. Matthew Beane, The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines, 2024.
10. Stanford Digital Economy Lab, “Canaries, Interest Rates, and Timing: More on the Recent Drivers of Employment Changes for Young Workers”, 2025. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canaries-interest-rates-and-timinga-more-on-recent-drivers-of-employment-changes-for-young-workers/
11. Harvard Business Review, “AI and the Entry-Level Job”, March 2026. https://hbr.org/2026/03/ai-and-the-entry-level-job
12. IESE Insight, “How AI is depressing entry-level wages and hiring”. https://www.iese.edu/insight/articles/artificial-intelligence-junior-employees-wages/
13. Above the Law, “AI Training Is A Must At This Biglaw Firm, But Lawyers Won't Receive Any Billable Hours For It”, March 2026. https://abovethelaw.com/2026/03/ai-training-is-a-must-at-this-biglaw-firm-but-lawyers-wont-receive-any-billable-hours-for-it/
14. InfoQ, “Anthropic Study: AI Coding Assistance Reduces Developer Skill Mastery by 17%“, February 2026. https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/02/ai-coding-skill-formation/
15. Judy Hanwen Shen and Alex Tamkin, “How AI Impacts Skill Formation”, arXiv, February 2026. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245
16. Fortune, “First-of-its-kind Stanford study says AI is starting to have a 'significant and disproportionate impact' on entry-level workers”, August 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/stanford-ai-entry-level-jobs-gen-z-erik-brynjolfsson/
17. Time, “Who's Losing Jobs to AI? New Stanford Analysis Breaks It Down”, 2025. https://time.com/7312205/ai-jobs-stanford/
18. CNBC, “AI is not just ending entry-level jobs. It's the end of the career ladder as we know it”, September 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/07/ai-entry-level-jobs-hiring-careers.html
19. UK Department for Education, report on AI impacts on UK occupations, 2023.
20. King's College London, study on AI exposure in UK employment markets, October 2025.

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Day 91

Stayed in bed until 1:30 pm. Watching YouTube videos – mostly reviews and reactions to The Boys Season 5, episode 6. The consensus seems to be negative, but I have liked the final season thus far.

I have been unemployed since November. I cannot believe that as I type this.

I have been very depressed, which is nothing new. I have been on 40ml of Prozac and 15 mg of Adderal since forever. I don’t think it does much.

I have to make a change.

For the next 90 days, I’m going to dedicate myself to finding a job and/or getting contract freelance work. I’ll exercise everyday and try to eat healthy.

If by the end of 90 days, I have not made noticeable changes, I will take other actions. I will plan for each outcome in parallel.

My mom has dementia, which is not atypical for 80 year olds with alcohol problems. I spent a few years by her side, trying to make her comfortable. It was not difficult for me; I love her so much.

Meanwhile, my sister and her (now ex-) husband were committing credit card and mail fraud against her. My mom did not want to report it, in spite of the stress it caused her. The documentation of all the financial crimes is massive. I reported the case to Adult Protective Services, but no action can be taken with my mom’s consent – which she would never give. She also emotionally manipulated my mom into giving her $40k, which led to her financial advisors dropping her account.

Very long story, very short: I have to cut them off. I don’t care about the money, obviously. My sister is a monster. I guess she has some girl friends, but every male that gets around her eventually realizes that they want to be as far away from her as possible.

I have really had a pretty decent life, but maybe peaked too early. The last few years have just been a nightmare. Honestly, I’m “good”. I don’t need to continue on, but I don’t have the constitution to take the ultimate step at the moment. I guess I still have hope that life might have something to offer. But, there is a point when the evidence outweighs the hope so drastically that you have to be realistic.

I suppose I will call today 91 – to be fair. Here are some of the things that I want to do in the next 90 days :

• Land a job (or, have a big enough pipeline of prospects to see real hope)
• Get more freelance projects
• Workout everyday (lose weight)
  • Keep my apartment clean, take vitamins, eat healthy, all that shit

Today, I actually hit 25k steps. I ran 5 miles, and just kept walking. I didn’t do any weight training, but I figured I’d save it for tomorrow. I also took vitamins, drank water, and ate generally healthy. I hung out with my best friend, who is the only thing I have in my life really.

I didn’t do any job stuff today, but I am waiting on feedback from my resume (it really needed a revamp).

I will also be planning for the alternative scenario. This will be hard. I hate even just the feeling of falling asleep. I figure I’ll have to get super high and take another substance and just … go to sleep.

This is the plan. It’s 8:30 pm right now, and I’m still at my friend’s place, so I guess this journey is not starting well.

I’ll post everyday until the 90 days is done.

In Summary: * Much of today, actually much of this week has been spent preparing for my appointment tomorrow with the Retina Doc to have my eyeballs injected. No, I'm not looking forward to that. But having a good night's sleep tonight and a smooth morning here at home tomorrow are the only steps I have yet to take that may make tomorrow afternoon's appointment a better experience.

Wife is fixing me a late meal and smells coming from the kitchen now are VERY nice! After the meal I'll focus on the night prayers. An early bedtime won't be far behind.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.9 lbs. * bp= 159/95 (63)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 06:45 – 3 little cookies * 09:45 – ham and cheese sandwich * 12:00 – a few little cookies

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:50 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 06:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 10:30 – following the pregame show for today's Yankees / Rangers game * 15:00 – Working with my darned computer printer, can't get it to print from my computer – finally got it to work after many wasted hours. * 16:10 – listen to the Jack Show * 17:00 – listening to The Joe Pags Show * 17:45 – load weekly pill boxes

Chess: * 17:30 – moved in all pending CC games

The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you.

---

Love the memory of you The thought of you The imagined pressure

Sound of a voice Like a sparkling brook

The quiet sounds Of a presence unseen

I exist this morning In two realities

The light grows brighter And brighter in two worlds

There you are, picture of Grace and poise

Vibrating edge of control From copper tips and up

Those ivory stems And the secret garden

That tingles at the sense Of this spectral visitor

And that fingerprint of God Reminding you that you came

From love Just like all of us did

And the rosy left with two copper coins, life and pleasure,

A brand adored and In want of oiling and flipping.

The silver crown beset with Amber gems and plum perfection.

In this elastic reality You move across galaxies.

Distance beyond measure And tears of loss.

But as the room’s dim haze Begins to shift from blue to yellow

It closes, the distance, and I pull You from your reality to mine

Where I suddenly feel your heat And smell the presence of

A love so strong that Neither lifetime

Nor oceans can Temper

Its power. But only

Sharpen the Intensity

---

#poetry #wyst

Willkommen, bjarnevie, welcome!

I’m listening again to H.I.M “His Infernal Majesty” (🤘), “Wings of a butterfly “. I always circle back to this track; it has this deeply disturbing text about ripping out the wings of a butterfly, which I think is a very potent symbol of corruption and dekadence which for some reason resonates with my darkness which is churning deep within.

Because a human being isn’t either good or bad, they could be, for example, a great guy but who likes HIM nonetheless.

Wow! Can’t believe I made it this far. All three drafts of The Package trilogy are done. Now, all I have to do is revise and edit them.

If things go well, I’ll publish the first story by the beginning of June. Maybe sooner. I’ll let you know where I’ll publish them, stilll deciding on that.

Thank you for those still interested in the series. I hope you like them.

#writing #draft #editing #novelette #shortstory #update

On hot, hazy, summer days like this one, Enty was glad she went topless. She had lived with a sensory processing disorder since childhood, and the Harvester Maid of the 10th Order had never been able to stand the feeling of clothing against her skin. Winters were rough because of it, but that wasn't something she had to worry about right now.

The not-so-fun part was that her Arch Maid, Vindik Mal, had reassigned her to a working party for the week outside a small city called Velaeden. It sat between Belentine and the mining town of Furaela, nestled in the Arethanovi mountain range. On top of that, the work was backbreaking.

Velaeden's flood channels ran entirely above ground, a deliberate choice that kept the whole network accessible for maintenance without ever needing to break earth. The large channels were broad stone-cut runs that swept heavy rainfall away to the river, easy enough work for machinery. But branching off from those were dozens of smaller ones, hand-laid and narrow, that wound through the farm fields and between the hamlets like open veins. Too intricate for any machine to navigate without causing damage, they had to be cleared by hand before the autumn rains returned.

This part was going to hurt. Already Enty's back was aching as she clawed at the packed mud in a culvert that a machine couldn't easily reach. Her gloves were soaked with foul smelling mud and her protective trousers and boots were coated. On the nearby bank, her top lay folded in case she had to put it on for safety.

Across the channel, maids of Iron Forge Estate of House Irisik worked in silence.

The arrangement was civic obligation dressed up as cooperation. Iron Forge and Blue Blossom shared a sphere of influence over Velaeden and the hamlets scattered around it, which meant that when maintenance work came due neither house could simply send their people and call it done. Both had to show up. It was written into the old civic agreements that governed border territories like this one, a practical solution to the question of who was responsible for communities that sat between estates rather than inside them. In theory it demonstrated unified support to the civilians who lived and worked here. In practice it meant two houses that would cheerfully ruin each other given half a chance.

Enty glanced further down the channel. She had noticed them the moment they arrived that morning, and she thanked whatever god or goddess took pity on her that she was not a member of Iron Forge Estate or House Irisik. The senior maids were fully dressed despite the heat, every piece of their burnt orange to gold uniforms in place, accouterments worn like medals because to them that was exactly what they were. Below them it stepped down by degrees, less and less with each rank, until at the bottom the newest maids wore nothing but tall boots that came up to the knee. Every bit of comfort and protection in House Irisik was earned, and they only wore those boots thanks to the Imperial Contract Code's stipulation that maids must be protected from severe harm. Everything else was something they hadn't suffered enough to earn yet. Some of them worked stoically while others looked obviously miserable, which Enty supposed was also the point. Where her own party had shed layers and exchanged complaints with cheerful openness, the Irisik maids worked without commentary. No grumbling, no jokes passed between them, no pausing to stretch an aching back. Just the rhythmic scrape of tools against packed earth and the quiet of people who had decided that enduring without remark was the whole point.

She watched one of them for a moment, a tall maid working the opposite bank of the same channel, dragging a clogged mass of sediment free with her bare hands, on her knees and completely ignoring the fact that she was getting covered in it. No hesitation. She just crawled into the mud and fixed it.

Enty looked away before the woman could catch her looking.

The last thing anyone needed was for a staring contest to turn into something that got reported back. She could already imagine how it would read in whatever account House Irisik sent home.

Blue Blossom maid observed making provocative eye contact.

It sounded ridiculous when she put it that way. It would sound a great deal less ridiculous by the time it reached someone with the authority to make it into a problem.

“You're tense,” said Meklaer, working beside her without looking up from his own section.

“I'm fine.”

“If you keep gripping your tool that tight, your hands aren't going to make it to the end of the shift.” He shook his head.

Enty loosened her fingers and drove them under the lip of a packed mud clot instead, working it free. The smell hit her fresh and she grimaced. Across the channel the Irisik maid hadn't reacted to anything. Not the smell, not the heat, not the ache that Enty could see in the set of the woman's shoulders even if her face gave nothing away.

She made herself focus on the mud in front of her. Just the mud. Just this section of channel, this particular pocket of packed silt that needed to come loose.

It wasn't that she had anything against House Irisik personally. She didn't know any of them. That thought sat uncomfortably in her chest. Was she giving a bad impression? Reflecting poorly on her house and her lord? That was no small thing for someone oathed to the only estate in the Empire with a Terran Lord.

---

The footbridge was barely wide enough for two people to pass each other without turning sideways. It crossed one of the mid-sized channels, low enough that the wooden covering overhead forced anyone over a certain height to duck, and Enty had crossed it twice already that morning to move equipment between sections. She wasn't thinking about it the third time. Just her aching back and the fact that she was fairly sure she had mud somewhere it had no business being.

When it was time for lunch. It was loud on the Blue Blossom side.

Someone had started a complaint about the state of the equipment and it had evolved, as these things always did, into a broader discussion about everything wrong with the assignment, the location, the smell, and apparently sad sandwiches provided by the kitchens. Enty loved them for it. On any other day she would have been right in the middle of it, adding her own grievances to the pile with cheerful enthusiasm.

Today she peeled off quietly with her packed lunch and headed for the footbridge they used to cross multiple times to the work vehicle waiting for them.

The covering gave shade and that was reason enough. Her shoulders were starting to pink despite liberal application of tymor oil. She ducked under the low beam, settled herself against the side railing with her legs dangling over the edge, and pulled open her meal. Enty did her best not to squeal when she saw the sandwich there. Her Arch Maid actually got the kitchens to provide cucumber sandwiches...at least that's what she was told their Terran lord called them. He had actually had it imported to the estate specifically for the maids as a treat. She had never tried human food until she discovered these sandwiches. It was between two thick pieces of bread on top of a layer of doveluveeha, a soft cheese mixed with a hint of citrus juice.

Enty had picked up one half of the sandwich making sure her water bottle was close when she spotted her. She was about six feet away from her leaning against one of the supports in the shadow of the awning. The Blue Blossom maid was so focused on her lunch she hadn't seen the orange clad girl Irisik maid. The woman had short violet hair gathered into a ragged bun on the top of her head. Her matching eyes were large staring at her “enemy” who had just plopped down without thinking.

The two just stared at each other for a few moments before Enty spoke.

“Sorry. I didn't see you there.”

The other didn't respond as she just watched with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

“I'm Enty. Harvester Maid of the 10th Order of House Patton-Avernell.”

Half of the Blue Blossom maid expected her not to respond. Enty had only heard rumors about why the two houses don't like each other but that was well above her station.

“Raeva. Custodial Maid of the 6th Order of House Irisik.”

The silence reigned between them for a few moments before Enty just grinned and offered out half of her sandwich. “Colleague Raeva. Share a meal? It's a cucumber sandwich. From the Terran Confederacy.”

That definitely perked the woman's interest. Enty could see the keen curiosity take over. Silently the maid took the half of the sandwich, rummaged through her own pail of food and offered half a medium sized roll which Enty took.

“Daezak sausage roll. Imported from House Kolisai. We succeeded in our quota for ore extraction this month.”

“Congratulations!” Raeva started and Enty thought that might have been a bit to excited of a response. She breathed to remember to stay polite. “Your estate must be very good at what it does.”

“We are the best on the planet,” Raeva responded, the pride slipping into her voice.

Enty smiled and took a bite of the sausage roll. It hit her immediately, rich and savory with a deep smoky edge that she suspected had something to do with however House Kolisai cured their meat. It was very good. She made a mental note not to say so too enthusiastically given the morning they'd both had. Raeva, for her part, was looking at the cucumber sandwich with the careful attention of someone approaching something they genuinely did not know what to expect from. She turned it over once, examining the pale layer of doveluveeha visible at the edge of the bread, the thin green slices embedded in it.

“It's cold,” she observed.

“Yes.”

“The cheese is cold.”

“That's part of it.”

Raeva took a small, considered bite. She chewed. Something moved across her face that she clearly hadn't intended to be visible, a sort of reluctant recalibration.

“That's,” she started.

“Good, right?”

“It's very mild.”

“It is.”

“I expected something more.” A pause. “Human food has a reputation.”

“For being terrible?”

Raeva looked at her. “For being complicated.”

Enty laughed before she could stop herself, which seemed to startle Raeva slightly, who then looked like she wasn't sure what to do with the fact that she had caused it. She took another bite of the sandwich, more confident this time.

They ate in a silence that had lost most of its edges. Below them the channel moved at its steady pace, indifferent to the politics sitting above it. From the Blue Blossom side came the distant sound of Meklaer still apparently defending himself about something, which meant lunch was running its natural course without her.

Raeva finished her half of the sandwich. She looked at the remaining portion of her own meal in the pail, seemed to make a decision, and took out a small cloth wrapped package which she opened to reveal several thin sliced pieces of something dark and glazed.

“Preserved kolisai fig,” she said, setting it between them without quite making it an offer and without quite not making it one either.

Enty took one. Raeva took one. The matter was settled without discussion.

It was another few minutes before Raeva spoke again. When she did she was looking at the channel below rather than at Enty, which Enty had already learned in the space of one lunch break was how this particular maid approached things that cost her something to say.

“Your estate.” She stopped. Started again with the careful precision of someone who had rehearsed this and was now discovering that the rehearsed version wasn't quite right. “Blue Blossom moves goods. Across estate lines. Imported goods.”

“It is one of the things we do,” Enty said, keeping her voice even.

“Specialist goods. Things that aren't easily found through standard channels.”

“Sometimes.”

Raeva was quiet for a moment. Her hands had gone still over her meal pail, which Enty was beginning to recognize as a tell.

“I wish to ask the blue blossom maid a favor about indikin silk.”

The channel moved below them. The calm that Enty was feeling immediately locked up with anxiety. Indikin silk was not super rare but required not only special licensing but being on good terms with House Avernell if you didn't want to spend a ridiculous amount of money for it. It was produced from a specific insect that could be found across the galaxy on extremely wet worlds. Maelstrom, the third planet in the star system, had those bugs and Glittering Light Estate produced it.

Enty remained silent.

Raeva finally looked at her, and the large violet eyes were steady even if the rest of her wasn't quite. “I would like to acquire a ream.”

“Can I ask why indikin silk specifically,” Enty said trying to keep her voice steady. This situation could go wrong in so many different ways. Something shifted in Raeva's expression. Not defensiveness exactly. More like someone deciding how much of a true answer to give.

“It's for a gift,” she said. “To my Arch Maid. I'm being considered for my fifth order and I want to demonstrate that I can source things. Difficult things. Through my own initiative and my own contacts.” A pause, shorter than the others. “Indikin silk is the kind of thing that says you know people. That you can move in spaces above your current station. As you know our houses and allied houses are not quite on good terms.”

She said it plainly, without embarrassment, which told Enty that whatever else House Irisik's philosophy cost its maids, it at least seemed to cure them of false modesty about their own ambitions.

“Your Arch Maid doesn't know you're doing this,” Enty said.

“No. I'm supposed to be resourceful.”

“So if it goes wrong...”

“Then I pay for my indiscretion,” Raeva said with a simple finality.

Enty looked down at the remaining piece of sausage roll in her hand. There were so many moving parts with this request. It was obvious that maids of House Irisik had to prove themselves differently than her own. But agreeing right off the top of her head, as much as she wanted to, was extremely risky. Enty didn't want to wind up on the Pillar, her body uncovered in this heat. She knew that there was a supply of Indikin silk in the storage room as part of supplies being sold in Velaeden and it was being manned by Nizzie, so she knew she could get her to agree.

“Let me think about it.”

Raeva nodded once. She had the look of someone who had prepared for this answer and found it more tolerable than some of the others she had prepared for.

“How long do we have,” Enty asked. “Before you need an answer?”

“I move to another channel two days from now on the other side of Velaeden. Tomorrow if possible?”

“Alright,” she said.

Raeva looked at her. “Alright you'll think about it?”

“Alright I'll think about it,” Enty confirmed. “That's all I'm promising right now.”

It seemed to be enough. Raeva reached back into her meal pail and produced two more pieces of preserved fig, setting one in front of Enty without comment. Enty ate it. Below them the channel ran on, full and fast from the morning's work, carrying everything downstream to somewhere it could do less damage.

---

As expected, Nizzie was happy to sell her the ream of indikin silk. She processed the order as if purchased by a civilian and Enty made sure to give a few extra credits from her personal account and a promise to cover one of her illicit naps. Now, Enty had a ream of the very soft white material on her bed back in her room. What she did not expect was standing in front of her Arch Maid's office. Everything in her gut told her that she was about to get discipline but she cared too much about her estate, her lord.

Enty knocked on Vindik Mal's door and waited trying to keep her breathing as regular as possible.

“Enter,” he said.

His room was nicer than hers, which was expected, and he had already made it orderly in the way that Vindik made everything orderly, which was to say completely and without apparent effort. His uniform jacket was hung precisely on the back of the chair. His reports were stacked. His traveling case sat against the wall as though it had been placed there by someone who had thought carefully about where a traveling case ought to go.

He was sitting at the small desk by the window reading something and he did not look up immediately when she entered, which was also expected.

Putting her one hand over the other in front of her, she bowed.

“Harvester maid requests an audience with the Arch Maid.”

He set the document down and looked at her.

“Sit down.”

Enty sat on the edge of the chair across from his desk and waited. Vindik looked at the silk for another moment with the expression of someone cataloging information rather than forming a reaction. Then he looked at her face.

“Is there something you wanted to tell me,” he said.

Oh. The way he said that. She was sure it was a good decision to speak with him even if her butt was going to be sore in a few minutes.

“I acquired something,” Enty said. “On behalf of a colleague. From another estate. I wanted you to be aware of it.”

“Did you.”

“Yes.”

“And this colleague.” He continued. “This would be the Irisik maid.”

Yeah. He knew that they talked.

Enty kept her expression even. “Yes.”

Vindik leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap, which meant she had his full attention and should choose her next words with some care.

“Walk me through it,” he said. “All of it.”

So she did. She told him about the footbridge and the preserved figs and Raeva's careful rehearsed words and the violet eyes that gave too much away when she was nervous. She told him about going to Nizzie, about processing it as a civilian order, about the extra credits from her personal account and the nap she had promised to cover. She kept her voice steady and her account precise and she did not editorialize because Vindik did not respond well to editorializing.

When she finished he was quiet for a long moment. Outside on the street below someone was having a conversation that drifted up in fragments, warm and ordinary against the evening.

“You used your personal account,” he said.

“Yes. I made sure of that.”

“And Nizzie processed it as a civilian order.”

“Yes.”

“So on paper...”

“On paper a civilian bought a ream of indikin silk as expected. That's all.”

Another silence. Vindik picked up his computer stylus and turned it over in his fingers once.

“I cannot,” he said carefully, “tell you that what you did was correct. You understand that.”

“Yes.”

“I cannot condone backroom arrangements between maids of opposing estates. Officially, all interactions more than cursory agreements must be handled by a representative or Emissary Maid.” He set the pen down. “Do you understand the difference between what I am saying and what I am not saying.”

Enty looked at him. “I think so.”

“Think more carefully.”

She did. “You can't condone it,” she said slowly. “But you're not telling me I was wrong.”

“I am telling you,” Vindik said, “that there are transactions among maids that have always existed and will always exist regardless of what any Arch Maid officially condones. The estate knows this. Every Arch Maid in the legions knows this. The system accounts for it the way water accounts for the fact that stone has cracks.” He paused. “What the system does not account for, and what no unwritten rule will protect you from, is being caught doing it carelessly.”

Enty felt something shift in her chest. Not quite relief. Something more complicated than that.

“Was I careless?” she asked.

Vindik considered this with genuine seriousness, which she appreciated.

“No,” he said finally. “You were not careless. The civilian order was clean. The personal funds was not the best choice. What you were, was lucky. And luck is not a strategy.”

“No,” Enty agreed.

“The Irisik maid.” He said it without particular inflection. “You believe she is genuine?”

“Yes.”

“You believe this was about her fifth order?”

“I do.”

“And you did not consider,” he said, very evenly, “that a maid trying to demonstrate resourcefulness to her Arch Maid might consider it useful to have demonstrated that she successfully ran an arrangement with a Blue Blossom maid instead? It was not anything about the silk and that she has an way in to a hostile house?”

The room was very still.

Enty opened her mouth and then closed it again.

She had not considered that. She had looked at Raeva's nervous hands and her careful words and her preserved figs and she had not once considered that the nervousness might be performance and the figs might be investment.

“I.” She stopped.

“You don't know,” Vindik said, not unkindly. “That is my point. You made a decision with incomplete information in a politically sensitive environment and it worked out. This time.” He leaned forward slightly. “I want you to understand what I am about to say to you, Enty. Not as your Arch Maid speaking officially. As someone who has been doing this a long time.”

She straightened without thinking about it.

“The higher orders are not given to maids who do their work correctly and keep their heads down,” he said. “Every maid does her work correctly and keeps her head down. The higher orders go to maids who understand how the estate actually functions. Who can process risk and reward and make decisions that help the estate, know when to bend the rules. The formal structure and the informal one. The rules that are written and the ones that aren't. The deals that get made in corridors and on footbridges and in the back rooms of supply quarters.” He held her gaze. “You have a talent for it. You read people well and you act on it, which is rarer than you think. But talent without judgment is how a maid ends up bent over a bench taking the rod for something she thought was clever.”

Enty kept her expression still with some effort and tried to not shift in her seat.

“The question you need to ask yourself,” he continued, “every single time, is not can I do this but what happens if this goes wrong and who does it land on. Not just you. Your estate Your lord. Me. If that Irisik maid walks into her Arch Maid tomorrow and presents this arrangement as a demonstration of her capability, someone somewhere is going to hear about it. And when they do, the question they will ask is not what she did. It is what Blue Blossom was doing making quiet arrangements with House Irisik. If it your mistress is challenged on it and she looks like a fool. There will be hell to pay. You know her.”

Enty swallowed. Though she hadn't been a true target of Mistress Maevin Maer's fury, she had seen it. It was terrifying.

“I used my personal funds,” Enty said. “It's not traceable to the estate. Right?”

“Credits are not the only currency that traces,” Vindik said. “Relationships trace. Favors trace. The fact that a tenth order Harvester Maid somehow got her hands on a ream of indikin silk traces, Nizzie now has money while working in the storage unit, the fact you were witnessed speaking with an Irisik Maid,” He looked at her steadily. “I am not telling you not to play the game. I am telling you to play it better than you did this time.”

Enty looked down at her lap, the true weight of what she had done hitting her. The Arch Maid's room at the end of a day that had started with a footbridge and a cucumber sandwich.

“What do I do with it,” she said. “The silk. Now?”

“Your choice,” he said picking up the computer pad making it clear the talk was over. “This conversation didn't happen. Just understand that if I found out officially, you're not going to be able to sit down for quite awhile...if you're lucky.”

Enty swallowed hard.

“Close the door.”

Being dismissed, Enty quickly stood, bowed again and left.

---

Finding Raeva alone was easier than Enty expected. The Irisik maids had taken their evening meal separately as they did everything else, quietly and without the sprawling communal noise of the Blue Blossom table, and by the time Enty slipped out into the guesthouse's small rear courtyard Raeva was already there. Standing near the back wall with her meal finished and her pail at her feet, looking up at the first stars appearing over the rooftops of Velaeden with the expression of someone who had been waiting and was trying not to look like it.

She saw Enty and went very still.

Enty crossed the courtyard without hurrying, the ream of indikin silk tucked under one arm wrapped in plain cloth she had found in her room. She stopped in front of Raeva and held it out without ceremony. Raeva took it with both hands. She didn't unwrap it immediately. She just held it, feeling the weight of it, and something moved across her face that she didn't manage to keep inside in time. Relief was part of it. Something that looked very much like genuine disbelief was another part.

So she hadn't been entirely certain Enty would come through. That was useful to know.

Raeva set the package carefully under her arm and reached into the inner pocket of her uniform with her free hand, producing a small cloth purse that was heavy enough that Enty could hear it when it moved. She held it out.

Enty looked at it for a moment. She thought about Vindik's voice. Relationships trace. Favors trace. She thought about Nizzie already sitting in the storage unit with extra credits in her account and the nap arrangement hanging over both of them. She thought about her own shared living space back at the estate, the three other maids she bunked with, any one of whom might notice something tucked away that hadn't been there before.

She thought about how clumsy she had already been and how much clumsier adding a physical purse to the situation would make it.

“Keep it,” she said.

Raeva blinked. “I told you I would pay.”

“I know.”

“I meant it.”

“I know that too,” Enty said. “But I'm not taking the money.”

Raeva looked at her with those large violet eyes that gave too much away when she was thinking hard, and Enty could see her working through the implications of that. Trying to decide if she was being managed or if this was something else.

“Then what do you want,” Raeva said carefully.

“A favor,” Enty said. “Unspecified. At some point in the future, if I ever need it and if it's something you can do.” She paused. “That's all.”

It was a strange thing to ask for and they both knew it. An unspecified future favor from a maid of a hostile house was not a coin you could count or a debt you could put in a ledger. It might never be called in. Enty might never have cause to contact Raeva again in her life. The estates might do something that made any contact between them impossible for years. The honest truth was that she was eating the cost of the silk as the price of a lesson she hadn't known she needed until Vindik had sat across a desk and laid out exactly how clumsy she had been about all of it.

She wasn't going to say that though. Raeva looked at her for a long moment. Then she tucked the purse back into her inner pocket and straightened slightly.

“You have my word,” she said.

Enty had been watching her face since the courtyard and she still believed what she had believed on the footbridge. The nervousness was real. The gratitude was real. The word, she thought, was probably real too.

Probably.

“Good luck with your fifth order,” Enty said.

Something softened briefly in Raeva's expression. “Thank you. For this.”

Enty nodded once and turned back toward the guesthouse door before the moment could become anything more than it was. Behind her she heard Raeva's footsteps moving in the other direction, quick and purposeful, already putting distance between the courtyard and whatever she was going to do next. Enty stopped at the door with her hand on the frame and looked up at the same strip of darkening sky Raeva had been watching when she arrived. The stars were coming in properly now, the Arethanovi range a dark shape against the deep blue at the edge of the city.

She had done a clumsy thing reasonably well. Didn't she?

Can my Rangers do it again?

Today's game is the 3rd in this 3-game series between the Rangers and the New York Yankees. The Yankees won the 1st game on Tuesday, and my Rangers won the 2nd game yesterday. I'll certainly be cheering for my Rangers to win again today in this early afternoon game.

Following today's game may be tricky as the wife will be returning home from work during the game. She and I usually watch old episodes of “Price is Right” on TV while we eat lunch at home together. So if she gets home during the game, we'll probably follow our regular routine. I've hauled a laptop out to the front room so I'll be able to follow the game scores and stats quietly in real time, but rather than listening to the radio call of the game I'll be listening to either Bob Barker or Drew Carey hosting old episodes of their game show.

And the adventure continues.

you create nothing

A friend of mine handed me a nice camera “to give it a spin” and see if I needed it. A few years ago this would've been a godsend, with ideas trickling out of every orifice of my body I'd have set forward to doing something with it. Now as a resident corporate slave who's firmly attached to the teat of the system, this event was stark in the way it non-registered. I used to reason earlier that the reason I didn't do more creative projects was the lack of money, resources, the Ausländerbehörde not accepting creativity as a valid excuse for having a work visa, laziness, lack of network.. the pit of excuses has no bottom. Now, coming from a place of plenty where I have the resources to make things work, years spent trying to find stability have eroded any last figments of creativity in me. There are days when there are no dreams in my head, the hunger has died down both in the stomach and the brain and I think more about tax efficiency than lighting, so I am on the good path to being a good middle-aged person who has given up on their dreams and gets salty as the years pass by.

Having a voice is also important and the time I spent trying to figure out corporate Germany stymied any kind of creative voice I've had. Working with career drones who can only talk about sport, profit margins or cars means a day spent without thinking about Philip K. Dick's exegesis or the latest Linklater (there seems to be two of them and I've skipped them both). This stability induced lethargy, combined with the dullness of the everyday makes me a non-questioning, almost non-human, just a piece of flesh existing for pleasure hits and bonuses.

What is the way foward from here? Only time will tell, but this is exercise in trying to keep the writer in me a bit out of the vegetative state. Will I survive?

#writing #corporate #adulthood

11:09GMT Oh my god Hongjoong’s rap in lemon drop has me turning straight

-TSWR

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign.

This issue details sessions 106, 107, 108, 109, and 110

Adventurers escape from trouble and then run into new trouble—because that is what adventurers do!

You can download the issue here.

Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 11:

#Zine