The Fold

“A distance is only so far as your ability to fold it”. So goes the motto of the fold. One can fold a journey in half and this is preferred for efficiency because it neatly links up two previously separated points. Others in the past were said to have folded their distances too many times and wound up creating more distances in the process. Indeed it seems that for some, this manner of perpetually folding distances into halves became a kind of mania which overcame them.

The warnings tell of bodies appearing high in the sky, with distressed onlookers having to watch as they then plummeted back to earth, and to certain death. Often, so the stories go, those who folded themselves into the sky were too surprised at where they’d found themselves to fold their way back to earth safely. For those that did fold away in a new direction in time, the heady thrill of the quick thinking fold in itself wound up being their demise. Towards the other end of axis upon which multi-folders found themselves, bodies were also said to have been discovered during earthworks, buried alive beneath many metres of dirt.

As the ultimate goal was to maximise efficiency of output and mostly that involves keeping workers along the earth bound axis, multi-folding was soon to be criminalised. Single folding was purposeful, respectable, and it enabled people to get from Point A to Point B quickly (and alive). There was no need to multi-fold, and indeed given enough time, the memory that one even could became folded into the obscurity of collective myth. It is in this post-multi-fold world we meet Harold.

Harold is, by all official and self-recorded accounts, a diligent and model single-folder, a straight Point A to Point B type of person. His work is located in a Stationary Building and his residence is Stable, though prone to a wobble now and then due to its proximity to a Public Fold and Residential Dot.

Commonly, Public Folds can be a bit wobbly. This is due to being so frequently bent. People are encouraged to fold in groups when heading to the same location but even so, the air along a Public Fold line will begin to thin out from over extension and physical objets within the fold line lose their vibrancy and sometimes, more distressingly, start to flake away in bits. This will, eventually, result in the Fold being relocated, to give the stuff within its line a chance to bounce back, but once an area has been over folded, it is never really the same. A great big storm seems to help a bit, something about the massage of the heavy rain and the extra moisture in the air, but nothing else really helps a tired old fold except time.

The fold near to Harold’s place is not so old as to need a rest yet. An average Public Fold generally has a wear-life of 7 years. The Residential Dot’s are spaced in such a way as to maximise the life of a fold by avoiding overcrowding. A little wobbly exposure is pretty standard Fold adjacent behaviour. Though, when things get really wobbly and the grass starts flaking, local residents are encouraged to write Letters of Discontent. These letters have rarely, if ever, been known to result in a Fold being moved before the seven years is up (the deposit boxes for LOD’s are rumoured to in fact be discreet incinerators) but they are encouraged nonetheless for the sense of adjency and release it affords the writers.

A fold is a quasi-natural occurrence and as such hard to cordon off or change. You may liken it to trying to change the lines on your palm- not impossible technically, in that all is required is that you hold your hand at a slightly different angle every minute of your day from now on. This is easier when you are forced to do it, such as when your hand is injured. This is how it is achieved when a fold line becomes unusable and things along it start flaking, fading or even, disappearing. Collectively, the injured hand adopts a new, temporarily uncomfortable position.and the injured line (or, fold) is able to heal. Anyway, the metaphors tire. Harold ought to have been an ultra-efficient folder because he only ever went between the place he worked and the place he rested. Granted, the latter was a little wobbly but it was still one of the better Residential Dot Zones around. The fold was relatively new, and it folded neatly and reliably. Some RD’s suffered from overcrowding or were located too close together, creating intersecting fold lines which caused thin air and unreliable arrival times. The same people Harold worked with from these places quietly complained of migraines often, and were also, often, late.

From Harolds home it was only a few steps, really, to the Supply and Entertainment Depo, a journey Harold took by foot every Saturday. It was on one such Saturday that the event took place. Harold was walking to the Depo, past the other Residential buildings. His head, despite best efforts, was not completely at ease. It seemed to be stuck, looping a mnemonic phrase that, while repetitive was unresolved. Despite wanting to walk his few steps in silence, he found himself externalising this internal loop. This sound interfered with his habit of quietly counting his steps, of which there were 535 in total from door to door. He had just stepped the three-hundredth-and-thirty-second step which, like usual, landed in a narrow beam of sunlight which fell between the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. The beam was just wide enough to fit the length of his foot and the placement of this sun shod step was a highlight of his walk. He had cast his gaze down momentarily to be sure of the alignment, and to get the satisfying glimpse of his foot where it ought to be, lit up gloriously between the two shadows. In the process of lifting his gaze back to the path ahead, his eyes came to rest upon something that was not there before. Now, where previously there had only been pavement and buildings and in the far distance another person walking also in the direction of the Depo, there was a body. Harold gasped.

A whole body, a person, was suddenly suspended about 4-feet in front of Harold. They were bent double, contorted in a painful looking fashion and the expression on their face confirmed the pain of their position. Harold reeled back and, for the briefest of moments, locked eyes with this person before they disappeared again, just as suddenly as they came. It was all over in a moment, but as Harold stumbled backward unsteadily on the pavement he just as quickly had the thought as to whether he would have to include these extra steps in his count. He shook his head violently and for a moment all thoughts fell out of it and everything was quiet. Then the eyes of the person returned to him, overlapped with the image of his sunlit shoe, and he felt very nauseous. Harold looked around himself fearfully. He had never experienced such a thing. Indeed, he had not known it to be possible. And yet, he had no experience with his imagination either. He had never known himself to invent anything- indeed, he’d only heard of dreams from others, even, and didn’t have any himself. He likened them to the screens one saw at the Supply and Entertainment Depo and as such had been rather glad for never having had any. But this, this had been so real! Not like the screens at all. He shook his head again in an attempt to regain some quiet but it would not come. Their eyes! What a terrible expression. The person had made no sound but how loud their eyes had been. They seemed to implore him from some unknown place, to take action. Yet, both of these concepts were wholly foreign to Harold and so he simply stood there, motionless and a little out of breath.

He was not sure how long he had been standing there when he discerned the sound of footsteps over his unsteady breathing. Someone was coming up behind him on the foot path. He heard the footsteps slow, and then come to a stop, the walker clearly at a loss with what to do next. Harold too was unsure, too flustered to accommodate yet another wholly new experience. Pathways were single-file, and walking intervals timed in order to avoid congestion or over-consumption of too-thin air. Of course, the footpath was two lanes wide, allowing for walkers returning home from the Depo, but no-one ever stepped into the wrong lane. No-one ever needed to. The person behind Harold cleared their throat quietly. Harold turned slightly as if to look at them, then thought better of it and turned his gaze forward again. “Hello”, he said aloud, and bowed slightly, in a greeting addressed to the now empty air ahead. He stifled a shudder. The person behind him coughed again, this time louder. “Hi.” They paused, and Harold felt the air move a little as they bent slightly in return. “We will block the pathway... if you do not keep moving.” Their quiet voice cracked a little, from lack of use or fear, Harold could not tell. But the words reached him clear enough to rouse him from his own uncertain state. He understood their meaning. Everything is on the brink of chaos. He nodded briskly in reply towards the empty path way ahead of him before jiggling his shoulders up and down a few times. Following this strange warm-up he took off and after ten or so steps so did the person behind him. Harold could hear them murmuring to themselves “three-hundred and seventy-one, three-hundred-and-seventy-two,” and so on, all the way until the Depo entrance way, where they were met with the warm glow of wall-to-wall screens ensuring them they were in the right place.