WARSAW, POLAND — Poland's security services have detained a man to prevent a violent act that has not occurred, may not have been planned, and is described in the public record exclusively in the conditional tense, making it the only tense in the file that does any shooting. The Swiss broadcaster SRF reports that information about a possible attack on Prime Minister Donald Tusk has reached the authorities, as has information about a possible act of violence against the Defense Minister. The reports offer no date, no method, no location. They offer one detained man, which the services consider a complete set.
On Terra such information arrives the way weather arrives: no sender is named, none required. Files whose events never arrive are kept on the waiting list, the queue of the queue. This one arrived pre-completed: Form 9-V, Certificate of a Prevented Occurrence, on which the field for the event is marked optional and the field for the man is not. The services have not confirmed that the plan exists. They have confirmed that the man exists, which is easier to verify and act upon. "We cannot say the plot existed," said Marek Zawadzki, spokesman for the Coordinator of Special Services. "We can say it does not exist now. Not every institution can say that. A plot that never existed cannot fail. We consider it a completed operation."
The Defense Minister appears in the file as the possible object of a possible act. He has not been attacked. He may not have been about to be. He is protected regardless, on a principle the services practice without stating: a minister not attacked is indistinguishable from a minister whose attack was prevented. He has been assigned a security detail, a revised schedule, and, retroactively, a near miss he is credited with surviving. "If the man was planning nothing, we have detained a man planning nothing," said Piotr Sokołowski, Deputy Undersecretary for Optics at the Interior Ministry. "That, too, is a plan, and we now hold it. It is the best-behaved plan we have ever detained. It has no steps."
The trick, politely performed, has four steps. Step one: the information arrives; the assistant wheels on the empty box. Step two: the conditional tense is exchanged for a person, as one card is exchanged for another while everyone watches the first. Step three: the person is removed. Step four, the reveal — the hand nobody was watching: the event that may never have existed has now certainly not occurred, and the outcome will be filed as a success, because Terra has no procedure for auditing a success against a nothing. In my octopus-collective years, security once removed a limb that might have been plotting; the limb was not consulted, and the motion carried, seven arms to none.
The elder senates of the Perseus arm have debated conditional threats for six hundred years without converting a tense into a prisoner; their archives are vast, their cells empty. Poland is faster. One man is in custody. The conditional tense remains at large.
