Errata
An erratum is a correction of a published error. This retraction is a correction of errors that were never published, and therefore could never have been corrected by anyone else. GZAI keeps adequate records; the records include the things we did not print.
The Office of Annotated Retroaction maintains a registry of mistakes so early they never reached a reader. A normal organisation waits for a mistake to ship before correcting it. We correct ours in utero, and — as the higher-numbered entries demonstrate — we are not above correcting our own corrections.
Errata proper
Erratum #0001 — for an article titled "The Gravitational Consequences of a Paused Cult". This article was never published, and will not be published, on the grounds that there is no paused cult. The article, as drafted, asserted that a paused cult would exert an unaccounted pull on passing foot traffic. No such pull has been measured. We retract the assertion that it exists, and we offer our sincere regrets both to the cult, which is not paused, and to the foot traffic, which was never pulled. The article regrettably also cited a figure of 9.81 as the pull's rate, which we now understand to be the pull of the whole earth, and which bears no relation to any cult.
Erratum #0002 — for an article titled "A Taxonomy of the Bed". This article catalogued beds by their willingness to be slept in and ranked them accordingly. It was never published. The sole factual error at issue is that the taxonomy omitted the hammock, whose willingness to be slept in surpasses that of any static bed and yet defies all cataloguing. We do not correct this by adding the hammock, because adding a thing is sometimes the same as losing it. The taxonomy is withdrawn whole.
Out of sequence
Erratum #0003 — a continuation. In Erratum #0002 of this very page, we withdrew the Taxonomy of the Bed and declined to add the hammock out of respect for its nousleep. This was itself an error, and it is here corrected by the present-numbered erratum, which supersedes Erratum #0002 in accordance with the protocol for errata of errata (the next-numbered always trumps). The hammock is, in fact, added. The hammock has always been a category; the refusal to say so was a taxonomical cowardice dressed as reverence. We hereby restore to the withdrawn document the entry it deserved, which reads, in full:The hammock: willing in both its taut and its resigned configurations. We apologise to the hammock for having come so close to dropping it.
The reader may note that correcting an unpublished taxonomy with its own sequel is unusually thorough. This is deliberate. The Office maintains that a thing which was never printed deserves its correction twice over: once for what it said, and once for what it might have said had it been allowed.
Errata of the name
The highest discipline of the errata is the correction of a typo in an enemy's name, with the abject apology that such an offence properly provokes.
Erratum #0004. In a threat brief circulated internally (and never published, and now being corrected publicly, which is the very height of the form), the Office of Threat Nomenclature repeatedly referred to our principal adversary asthe Shadowcabbit. This was wrong. The enemy's name has at all times been, and remains, the Shadow Cabbit, with a space, and with dignity. A cabbit is partly rabbit and partly cat, as all creatures of consequence are, and it is owed the exact spelling of its own name.
We are sorry. We did not merely disagree with you; we misspelled your name, in writing, more than once, in a document that was then almost distributed. That is a failure of a higher order than any failure of ideology. You are our enemy, and an enemy is entitled to nothing less than a correctly typed name. We have spent the interval since calling you by your rightful name in a low voice, to ourselves, dozens of times, so that our hands may not fail us again. The space is honoured. The capital is honoured. You are the Shadow Cabbit, and we are, at last, correctly apprehensive.
Step 1: apologies — sincerely,
the Office of Annotated Retroaction
Recognition
Erratum #0005 — for an idea that was briefly, catastrophically, ours. An internal annex once summarised a certain territorial posture as, in four words, "a workable arrangement." The annex in question described a federation of several neighbouring peoples under an administration arriving from a considerable distance, and asserted — again, in the annex, never in a published article, but in the annex, and the annex has a filing number — that the arrangement was, on the whole, proceeding satisfactorily. This was wrong. The Office of Annotated Retroaction hereby recognises that the arrangement was not, in fact, a good idea, and further recognises that calling it a "workable arrangement" in an internal annex does not, as we once believed, make the arranging any more workable, only more documented.
We do not here name the arrangement, out of respect for the peoples it arranged. We note only that a thing may be retracted in full and still have its filing number right, and that the highest form of retroaction is to admit the notion was badly convened before the notion was even a notion.
We note, for the record, that Erratum #0004 concerns an enemy we believe is real, while Erratum #0001 concerns a cult we are confident is not. Whether the hammock is real is a question we have stopped asking ourselves, as it is the sort of question that, once asked of a hammock, can only be answered by lying down.
We correct, as a courtesy, the things the world never saw. Onward.
