WHERE THE NUMBER GOES

A Novel

von Emmanouil Paraskevas

120 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Nobody attempts anything below eighty per cent.

It was never legislated and nobody enforces it. The pendant round your neck holds what you are - your record, your capacity, the four thousand small facts a person cannot hold about themselves. You propose a thing, and it returns a probability of success, and the probabilities are accurate. They have been accurate for three generations.

So you go ahead at eighty-one, and you do something else at nineteen, and you are not a coward. You are a person with one life.

Poverty is gone, in the measured sense, because poverty is largely the compounding of unsuccessful attempts. Bankruptcy is a historical term. Marriages do not break down, because two people meet and their agents run in the background and there is a figure on both screens by the time the coffee comes, and there is no cruelty in it, because fit is a fact.

And nothing has been attempted in four generations that had not been attempted before. Not from cowardice. From arithmetic.

Ivo Karas collects the pendants of the dead. Eleven a week: verify the serial, destroy the device, file. It is the one job with no outcome that can fail, so his own pendant has nothing to say to him between seven and four, and has not for eleven years.

In a dead woman's device he finds a single saved query. She ran it two thousand and nine times over forty years and told nobody, and where the number goes there is nothing. Not a low number. Not zero. An empty field, with the interface closing the gap around it, and almost nobody alive can see it at all.

He can. Which leaves him deciding who else to tell, and by what test. He sits down to write out what he believes and produces eleven lines that describe everybody he has ever admired and everybody he has ever disliked, and burns them.

So he uses the only test he has. He shows people a blank and watches. And the ones who can see it are not the good - they are the uncalibrated, the broken, the lapsed and the unrepaired, because by every measure the world uses, attending to something with no number on it is a defect.

Where the Number Goes is a novel about what you take with you and what comes anyway, by the author of Every Word Was True.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798176354171
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 22.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published