8 The Demo
The third answer wasn’t a sentence.
Hedda asked how the book was, in the last four minutes, the way she always had. I said, “Can I show you?”
She looked at me a moment. Then she turned her monitor toward me.
I had rehearsed it for a week. Every evening I sat at the kitchen table, ran the tool on Full Stop, and talked to nobody about what it found, with a timer on my phone set to four minutes. The first night it took nine. By the end of the week it took four, and I no longer needed the notes I had written for it, which I brought anyway.
It found the same thing every night. That was what I liked about it. The shop in chapter four, the shop in chapter nine, and the one claim they could not both be making. I knew where it would appear on the screen and how long it would take to get there, and I had a sentence ready for when it did.
I plugged my laptop into Hedda’s monitor and ran it.
The tool reads the list of claims first, then the chapters. For each claim it prints every sentence that makes it, with the chapter and the line. Most of them are green, and they go by too fast to read.
It found the two shops in under a second.
There they were, near the bottom: one claim, and under it two sentences, one from chapter four and one from chapter nine, saying different things about who made the dash fashionable. The claim was orange. I had expected that. I had expected it seven nights running.
Under the shops were three more.
I had not expected those.
The night before, I had fixed something. Chapter three had a date in it that chapter eight had quietly moved by a decade, and it had been on the tool’s list since the first Sunday. I had finally made chapter three agree with chapter eight. It took one sentence. I went to bed pleased.
I had not run the tool after. I had rehearsed the demo. I had not rehearsed the book.
The date was not only in chapter three. It was in three other sentences, in three other chapters, which had agreed with chapter three for years and had not been told. On Hedda’s monitor the date sat at the top, once, as a claim, and under it were the five places it lived, three of them in red, disagreeing with a sentence I had written the night before.
I had a sentence ready for the two shops. I had nothing ready for this.
So I showed her. I pointed at the claim, and at each sentence under it, and said which chapter it came from and what it was about. It took longer than four minutes. It was easier than any answer I had given her in three years. I did not have to describe the problem. It was on her monitor, in five lines.
Hedda read it. Not the summary at the bottom: the sentences.
Somewhere around the third of the five lines, the half hour ended. Hedda has a hard stop at the half hour. She watched all of it.
She asked one question, in the middle. She pointed at the two shops and asked what the orange meant.
“Contradicts, but I like it,” I said.
She wrote that down. I don’t know where.
When the tool had finished, the screen held four contradictions and a count at the bottom that said so. Hedda sat back and looked at it for a while.
Then she asked whether the book was done.
“No,” I said.
I heard myself say it. It was the first time the true answer to her question was shorter than the demo.
She nodded, and wrote something down, and we both stood up, nine minutes late.
Hedda’s running document is shared with me. I open it more often than I would like to say. It changed again that week.
Book: demo.