In a society where wagers on the future had become the whole of the economy, the possibilities no one had bet on could not simply be thrown away. Instead they were bound each as a book and sent down into an underground archive. He worked there as a cataloguer, stamping call numbers onto the spines of losers.
Officially it was the basement of a library. Damp concrete, the low hum of fluorescent tubes, two in the morning when the air conditioning rested. But what lined these shelves were business plans never brought into the world, résumés of people never hired, entry sheets for races never run, screenplays of films withdrawn from circulation before anyone’s eyes could find them. Each cover bore an identical white label, and what was written there was not a title but the odds it had carried. Some read 1.2 to 1. Others, 4,300 to 1. Either way, it meant the same thing: it hadn’t come in.
In this society, every possibility carried a discount rate. People bet on the lives of strangers. Even names were reduced to symbols, like racehorses’, and a person’s actual origins—the circumstances of those origins—were set down in parentheses, in the name of fairness. Hardly anyone bothered to read what was inside the parentheses anymore. Only lives that turned a profit remained in the world above. The branches that didn’t pay came down here as waste.
He did not consider this unjust. Merely wasteful.
Shelving a life bet at 1.2 to 1 beside a life bet at 4,300 to 1, he would sometimes wonder. The sure things missed, and the things no one believed in soared overnight. If that was so, was the mountain stacked in this archive truly made of losers? Or was it something else—an enormous unused tomorrow, never permitted even to reach the world above?
The cataloguer’s authority was small. Receive the book, sanitize it, check the odds, stamp the number, shelve it. Disposal was forbidden. Precisely because it was waste, it would be preserved forever. The irony of the system was something he savored while wiping down the shelves.
He had his ambitions, though. Someday he would open the archive door and show the people of the surface. The future you bet on stands upon these very branches. Your winnings are discounted by the number of losers sunk down here. But the key to the door was not his, and what he saw every night was only dust beneath the fluorescent light.
The change began without any warning.
Late at night, a faint sound came from the shelf at the very back. A dry fluttering, paper catching wind. The air conditioning was off. He aimed his flashlight. And held his breath. One book on the shelf had grown thicker. A book that had been a slim pamphlet on the day he received it now sat heavy with pages, more pages than there had ever been.
With trembling hands he took it down. The label on the cover still bore its old odds. And then he understood. What had increased was not multiplying pages. It was the part no one had yet read—the part that came next. The continuation of tomorrow had begun writing itself, uninvited.
The archive’s fluorescents flickered for an instant. In that moment, he felt he grasped the true nature of the place. It was not a graveyard. The branches the world above had severed as unprofitable were silently reading one another, joining together, beginning to stitch their own tomorrow. The odds no longer mattered. The possibilities no one had bet on were writing a story without bets.
He returned the book to its shelf. And did not return it. It was that kind of night, the kind in which both happen at once.
As morning drew near, the back shelf sounded with one book, then another. It wasn’t only pages that were multiplying. Books were calling to books. Sooner or later some shelf would fill to bursting, and the books would spill, spreading across the archive floor like a river—quietly turning inside out the entire sum of futures the surface people had bet on and consumed.
The cataloguer closed his ledger and stood before the freight lift. Tonight, and only tonight, the key was in his hand.
To open it, or not to open it. For fifteen years he had been a man drawing guide-lines toward a future in which everyone won. A guide-line means nothing until it is extended to its endpoint. But what waited beyond the door was neither victory nor defeat. Perhaps it was a tomorrow too large ever to have been placed on a bet.
Beneath the fluorescents, the sound of books spilling was like the tide. His hand had not yet touched the door.