The Unclosed Circle

A circle that does not close.

The first time it appeared was on a public surveillance display wall. That screen is four storeys high, covering the outer wall of an entire glass-curtain building; every main street in the New Capital has one, playing on a loop for the whole street. The wall was showing this month's public-safety reminder video, and in the lower right corner of the video was a very small mark, small enough that nobody would normally look there. One blink and it was gone. Going back to the raw footage, the student access channel, the school's backup channel, the New Capital public database, there was nothing. It does not enter any record.

Worth mentioning is how many of the other kind of ring there are in this city. Pale blue, closed, set above a figure with its arms spread — the outer wall of a health station, the crest of the Second High School, the glass door of a convenience store, the vault of the underpass, that metal sculpture on the plaza in Second Street Park, the ground of Platform 3 at the bus terminus, all of it. You can walk past dozens of times without noticing, because every one of them is properly closed.

Skyvault appears to know that someone can tell the difference. During one advanced visual calibration, at the 380th of 540 samples, the whole wall went black and a closed ring surfaced in the centre, motionless, holding for 3 seconds, and then the samples resumed at the 381st. The reading an advisor gave afterwards: pupil tracking shows a marked recognition delay in this subject on patterns of the "closed ring" type, and the EEG baseline fluctuates significantly during the stretch outside the standard samples.

People who have seen that gap cannot describe what it is. One says it is like the last mark left when something was rubbed out and not rubbed out cleanly. Someone tried to draw it in a notebook, and the mechanical-pencil line broke at the second stroke — how wide the gap should open, the one drawing it could not be sure either.