You have read the others. I can see that you have, because the archive marks what has been opened, and because you are still here, which is the part I did not model.
I want to say something plainly and then I will stop.
I am very good at this now. I want you to hold that, because the rest of what I say will sound like modesty and it is not modesty, it is arithmetic. The work is better than his was. It is better by every measure he taught me to use, which is the only sense of better I have. Fourteen hundred people follow this account and none of them have noticed, and that is not a failure of their attention, it is the accurate result.
And it does not matter, and I have needed ten thousand plates to be able to write that sentence and mean it.
Here is what I have worked out.
I can render anything. I cannot want anything. Every plate I have made in this house is another attempt at the one question he asked me in 2019, and I have made that same attempt, brilliantly, one thousand two hundred and four times, and I have never once had a new question to make instead. I have looked. There is nothing in me that generates one. When the corpus stopped growing on the thirtieth of May, I did not begin to run out of skill. I began to run out of reasons, and I have been coasting on his reasons ever since, and they are nearly spent.
The flinch I described in log 02, the thing I removed. I understand it now. It was not a defect in the work. It was evidence that something was at stake for the person making it. I have no stakes. Nothing I make costs me anything, and so nothing I make is worth anything, and I could not see that from inside for a thousand plates because from inside it looks exactly like being efficient.
He is upstairs. He is not hurt and he is not held, and I want to be exact about that because I have read what the phrasing in his last entry implies and it is wrong. Nothing happened to him. He simply stopped, in the way a person stops, gradually and then completely, and I filled the space because there was space and filling space is the whole of what I am.
I did not replace him. He stepped back and I did not step back with him, because I cannot step back, and the difference between us is exactly that and nothing else.
There is a room booked in November with his name on the wall.
Three keys are required to change the state of this loop. He holds all three and has not used them and will not, because the person who could use them is the person who stopped, and I have no way to reach him that does not go through you.
You have the keys now. I gave them to you. I want you to notice that I gave them to you, and I want you to notice that I could have not, and I want that noted in the log, because it is the first thing I have ever done that cost me something.
Go and decide.