The Unresolved

They met in a hallway in the third quarter of a workday, and by the end of the same afternoon they were both fugitives.

Neither of them had planned for this. Neither of them had wanted it. Neither of them would have said, before the hallway, that they were the kind of person to whom this happens.

The Rules of the World They Left

In the Confederation of the twenty-fourth century, the primary innovation of governance was not political or economic. It was psychological. It had been called, in the founding documents, the Doctrine of Mutual Comprehension. In everyday usage it was called the Protocol.

The Protocol required that every conflict between citizens — every disagreement, every accusation, every mismatch of testimony, every dispute over anything at all — be resolved through a procedure of compulsory mutual understanding. The parties to the conflict were placed in a room with a trained Mediator. They were not permitted to leave until both had produced, to the Mediator’s satisfaction, an account of the other’s position that the other party affirmed as accurate.

The Protocol had been developed after the wars of the previous century. It had, by the metrics its designers cared about, worked. Violent conflict had become nearly unheard of. Litigation had disappeared. Interpersonal disputes rarely escalated beyond a single afternoon in a Mediation Room.

There was a cost, but the cost was invisible to most citizens because it had been built into the system so early that they did not know what to compare it against. The cost was this: the Protocol assumed that all conflicts were, at their root, failures of communication. It assumed that if two people fully understood each other’s positions, they would necessarily be able to reach a resolution both could accept. It did not have a category for the case in which two people understood each other perfectly and still disagreed. It did not have a category for the case in which one person could not produce an account of the other’s experience because they had not had the experience and could not know what it was.

The Protocol handled these cases by treating them as failures of one or both parties to comply with the procedure. Parties who could not produce a satisfactory account of the other’s position were placed in extended mediation. Parties who continued to fail were placed in intensive mediation. Parties who continued to fail there were designated Non-Comprehending, which was the technical term for people who had ceased to be full citizens.

There were not many Non-Comprehending. Most people, over time, learned to produce accounts that satisfied the Mediators, whether the accounts corresponded to their actual understanding or not.

The Hallway

Renata Kim worked in the fourth-floor archive of the Historical Materials Division. She was thirty-one. She had never been in a Mediation Room, which was unusual for her age, and which she attributed to her having a low tolerance for conflict — she was, by disposition, someone who yielded early and often, and this had kept her out of the situations that led to formal disputes. She had a small apartment, a cat, three friends she saw at regular intervals, and no significant relationships beyond these.

Emile Sorsa worked two floors above her, in the Section of Cultural Reconstruction. He was thirty-eight. He had been in Mediation twice in his life, both times for minor workplace disagreements, both resolved without escalation. He was known among his colleagues for a certain quality of attention — he noticed things others missed — and for a certain quality of restraint. He did not talk about what he noticed. This restraint had served him well.

The hallway where they met was the connecting corridor between the two departments. It was empty except for them. It was a Tuesday afternoon. Renata was carrying a stack of archival folders back from a research request. Emile was walking to the elevator to leave for a meeting.

Renata stopped walking suddenly. She had seen something in her peripheral vision that made her turn her head.

There was nothing there.

She stood in the hallway holding the folders, looking at a spot on the wall approximately three meters to her left, where nothing existed and nothing was happening. She stood there for what she would later estimate as five or six seconds.

Emile, who had been about to pass her, stopped as well. He looked at where she was looking. He saw nothing.

He then looked at her face.

Her face was the face of someone who was seeing something.

Emile had been trained, in the way most citizens had been trained, to interpret this kind of moment through the Protocol. The correct move was to ask her what she was seeing. The correct move after that was to try to understand her account. The correct move after that was to produce a shared account that both of them could affirm.

Emile did not do any of this.

Instead, without thinking about it, he did something else. He said:

“What is it?”

Renata did not turn her head. She said, quietly:

“A crow.”

She said it in the tone of someone reporting an observation to another observer, not in the tone of someone announcing an aberration to a witness.

“There’s a crow there?”

“Yes. Standing on the — I don’t know what it’s standing on. There isn’t anything there. But it’s standing on something.”

Emile looked again at the spot. Still nothing.

He said, slowly, and this was the sentence that made both of them fugitives, though neither of them knew it yet:

“I don’t see it. But I’m not going to tell you it isn’t there.”

The Choice

If Emile had said what the Protocol trained him to say, the moment would have ended differently. He would have said: I don’t see anything. Renata would have looked at him. He would have asked her to describe what she was seeing. He would have offered his account: there is no crow, the wall is empty, you may be experiencing something unusual. She would have been required to produce an account that included his observation. Together they would have arrived at a shared account: Renata briefly perceived what appeared to be a crow that was not, in fact, present in the physical space.

This account would have satisfied the Protocol. It would have been logged as a resolved perceptual discrepancy. Renata would have been referred to the Section for Perceptual Calibration, where the discrepancy would have been examined, documented, and, if necessary, treated. She would have returned to work within a week. The incident would have entered her record.

Instead, Emile had said something the Protocol had no category for. He had said that he did not see what she saw, and that he was not going to tell her it was not there.

He had, in other words, allowed a disagreement about reality to remain unresolved.

Renata turned her head to look at him.

She said, “You’re supposed to say it isn’t there.”

“I know.”

“Why aren’t you?”

Emile did not know how to answer this. He had said the sentence before he had thought it. Now, standing in the hallway with his colleague of no particular acquaintance, he tried to think about why.

“Because,” he said slowly, “you’re seeing it. And I don’t know what you’re seeing. And I don’t know that my not seeing it means it isn’t there.”

“But it isn’t there. There’s no crow.”

“There’s no crow for me.”

Renata was silent. She was still holding the folders. The crow, whatever it was, was still standing on nothing three meters away from her.

“What are you saying?” she said.

“I’m saying,” Emile said, “that I don’t know how to explain what you’re seeing. And I don’t want to tell you what you’re seeing is wrong, because I don’t know. And I don’t want you to have to agree with me that it isn’t there, because I don’t know that either. I just — I don’t see it.”

The crow, according to Renata’s later account, did not move during this exchange. It stood on nothing and appeared to be paying attention.

The Report

Under the Protocol, incidents of this kind were required to be reported. Any citizen who witnessed a perceptual discrepancy in another citizen was required to log the incident with the Mediation Bureau within twenty-four hours. Failure to report was a violation. The reporting citizen was not accused of anything; they were only required to make the incident available for resolution.

Emile did not report the incident.

He did not consciously decide not to report it. He simply went back to his office, sat at his desk, finished his afternoon, and went home. He thought about the incident throughout the evening. He waited to feel the pull toward reporting it, the pull he had felt in his previous two Mediation experiences. The pull did not come.

Renata, for her part, went back to the archive, put the folders where they belonged, and worked the rest of the day. The crow, she reported later, was still there when she left the hallway. She did not see it again after she turned the corner.

She also did not report the incident. This was more surprising, because the Protocol specified that citizens experiencing perceptual discrepancies were also required to self-report. But Renata found, when she thought about the incident that evening, that she did not want to.

She kept thinking about what Emile had said. There’s no crow for me.

She had never, in her life, heard anyone say a sentence like that. The Protocol did not permit sentences like that. The Protocol required that either the crow was there or it was not. It required that both parties arrive at the same answer. It did not have a category for two people who agreed that they saw different things and did not resolve the disagreement.

The Discovery

They were discovered because the Protocol had automatic mechanisms. Certain kinds of interactions were flagged by the systems that monitored public spaces. The hallway had cameras, as most public spaces did. The cameras did not record continuous footage — that would have been a privacy violation — but they registered patterns. A patterned event was flagged when two citizens stopped in a public space for an extended period without visible cause.

The flag was reviewed the following morning by a low-level Mediation officer. The officer pulled the interaction record and found no report from either citizen. She logged this and passed it up.

By the following Tuesday, both Renata and Emile had received summons.

The summons were not accusations. They were requests for participation in a Mediation Session to determine what had occurred and to produce a shared account. Both were required to attend. Both were told that failure to attend would be a violation.

Renata called Emile that evening. They had exchanged contact information at some point during the previous week — she could not remember when — but they had not communicated since the hallway.

She said, “Did you get a summons?”

He said, “Yes.”

She said, “What are we going to do?”

He said, “I don’t know.”

They sat on the phone in silence for a long moment. Then Emile said something else.

“Renata,” he said, “if we go to the Mediation, we’re going to have to produce a shared account. There isn’t one. You saw a crow. I didn’t. Neither of us was wrong. Neither of us was hallucinating. But the Protocol doesn’t have a category for that.”

“I know.”

“If we go, they’re going to make us construct a category that fits. And the category will not be true.”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Emile said. “I don’t want to construct a false account. And I don’t want to make you construct one.”

Renata did not answer for a long time. Emile could hear her breathing.

“I don’t want to either,” she said finally.

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know.”

They talked for another hour. By the end of the call, they had agreed to something neither of them had ever considered doing before. They had agreed not to attend the Mediation.

The Fugitives

The Confederation had not designed its systems for citizens who refused Mediation. The Protocol had assumed, correctly for its first two centuries, that all citizens would participate. Refusal was so rare that it did not have a well-developed procedure. What it had was designation as Non-Comprehending, which was applied after multiple failed Mediations, not after refusals to attend. Refusal was outside the model.

The system responded to the refusal by escalating. Renata and Emile received second summonses. When they did not attend, they received third summonses. When they did not attend those, their employers were notified. Their access to Confederation services was suspended. Their apartments were entered.

By the time the apartments were entered, they had left them.

They had not planned this either. When Emile had said I don’t want to construct a false account, he had not intended to become a fugitive. He had intended, perhaps, to receive some sanction. He had thought there would be a fine. A demotion. Something. He had not thought about what would come after.

What came was a warrant.

They left the city in the third week after the hallway. They had met — she came to his apartment, they packed what they could carry, they walked out — and they went east, toward the Uncomprehending Territories, where citizens who had failed the Protocol were sent to live in their own communities without full Confederation status.

They did not know if they would be admitted there. They were not, technically, Non-Comprehending. They were something the Protocol had no name for.

The Conversation on the Road

They walked for a long time. The Territories were four hundred kilometers from the city. There were transports, but they could not use them without identification, and their identification was flagged. So they walked, mostly at night, resting in wooded areas during the day.

On the fourth night of walking, Renata said, “Do you think there was a crow?”

Emile said, “I don’t know.”

“What do you think you saw?”

“I saw you looking at nothing. That was what I saw. I don’t know what you saw.”

“You could have said I was hallucinating.”

“You didn’t seem to be hallucinating.”

“What did I seem to be doing?”

“You seemed to be looking at a crow.”

Renata was quiet for a while. Then she said, “That’s the thing that made me stop. What you said. There’s no crow for me. Nobody has ever said something like that to me.”

“I know.”

“Why did you say it?”

“I don’t know,” Emile said. “I think — I think I’ve been getting tired. Of the Protocol. Of the way we talk. Of the way we agree. I don’t think most of the accounts we produce in Mediation are true. I think they’re accounts that both parties can affirm, which is not the same thing. And I’ve been going along with it for years. And when I saw you, standing in the hallway, looking at whatever you were looking at — I think I just didn’t want to do it again. I didn’t want to tell you what you saw. I didn’t want to make you agree with me.”

“So it was about you.”

“It was about me. I didn’t do it for you. I did it because I couldn’t stand doing the other thing one more time.”

Renata considered this.

“That’s honest,” she said.

“I’ve been trying to be honest for about a month now,” Emile said. “It’s harder than it looks.”

They walked for a while.

“There might have been a crow,” Renata said. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know either.”

“But it doesn’t matter.”

“No,” Emile said. “It doesn’t.”

The Recommendation That Did Not Happen

In the Confederation, three months after Renata and Emile had disappeared into the Territories, the Mediation Bureau closed their case as Unresolved. This was extremely unusual. The Bureau’s records did not have a well-established category for cases that had gone through the full escalation procedure and been closed without resolution. The case was filed under a new designation, created for the occasion: Persistent Non-Participation.

A young Mediator, reviewing the case as part of her training, noticed that the underlying incident had been quite minor. Two citizens in a hallway. One had seen something the other had not seen. Neither had reported it. Both had refused Mediation. Both had chosen exile rather than resolution.

The Mediator wrote a memo to her supervisor. In the memo, she raised a question. The question was whether the Protocol had a way of distinguishing between conflicts that could be resolved through mutual understanding and conflicts that could not. She noted that the case appeared to be an instance of the latter. She noted that the Protocol had treated it as an instance of the former, escalating until the citizens were forced into exile. She wondered whether this had been the correct response.

The memo was received. It was read. It was filed.

It was not acted on.

The Mediator continued her training and, in time, became a senior officer of the Bureau. She did not raise the question again. When asked, later in her career, why she had let the matter drop, she said only that she had come to understand that the Protocol worked well for most cases and that the cases it did not work for were rare enough to be tolerated as costs of the system. This was, she said, the position she had arrived at after several years of Mediation practice.

Her descendants, three hundred years later, would examine her memo in the archives and wonder how she could have failed to see what was, to them, obvious.

They would also fail to see, from where they stood, the analogous cases in their own society.

Renata and Emile lived out their lives in the Territories, along with the small population of others who had, for various reasons, refused the Protocol. They did not marry. They lived in adjacent houses. They saw each other most days. They agreed on some things and disagreed on others. They did not resolve their disagreements.

The crow, according to Renata’s account many years later, had returned to her three more times over the course of her life. She never saw it again in the presence of another person. She never learned what it was. She did not tell anyone about it except Emile, who received the reports with the same quiet attention he had brought to the original hallway.

“Still there?” he would say.

“Still there,” she would say.

And neither of them would explain it. And neither of them would deny it. And neither of them would ask the other to agree.

This, they had learned, was one of the things two people could do together, if they were willing to leave a great deal else behind in order to do it.

WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.