REPRINT [ Andriy Nivchuk ]

The day the “Draft Law on the Harmonization of Units of Account and the Moral Security of Citizens” rolled into my feed, I caught myself not counting the steps from my apartment to the subway. Three hundred seventeen pigeons in the square—one of them glinting like plastic, as though somebody in quality control had missed it—108 license plates whose digits added up to a multiple of three, and zero faces noticing that their lives had long since become a spreadsheet with read-only permissions. But the steps had gone missing. My counting is toothless and eternal, like a Buddhist mantra: tiles, windows, stairs, toothbrush frictions, offices on each floor, vertical swipes across a screen. Once, a psychologist called it “an obsessive fixation on quantitative patterns,” my grandmother called it “an unclean spirit,” and I called it breathing.

The new bill read like a liturgy of bureaucratese until Section 4.7 suddenly flared up in italics: “Every citizen shall maintain a personal counting journal… Format: Appendix No. 3.” Below it, back in regular type but for some reason centered and set in all caps, was the slogan:

“COUNTING IS CONSCIENCE!”

And this was no longer merely unusual. It was familiar.

I had seen it somewhere. No—not somewhere. Sometime. The memory seemed to take a short running start and leap sharply over a line. A soft cover, thick pulpy paper, a strange illustration: a fish-eyed boy with a ruler instead of a spine. He counted everything, just as I did, and found himself in a world where numbers had to pass a morality test. I could remember neither the author nor the title, yet I remembered perfectly the children’s book resting in my own childhood hands. Memory held the image the way teeth hold a bitten tongue: painfully, with an emptiness at the center.

Emptiness, as befits our century, immediately goes looking for an outlet. I worked the keys like dharma prayer beads: “children’s book boy counts everything,” “Chamber of Reckoning,” “counting conscience law”—528 keystrokes, 24 of them Enter.

Naturally, what answered the summons was not my boy but the office-and-home poltergeist of productivity: counting apps, time trackers, and corporate blogs about KPI as a spiritual practice. As though to restore some balance, however, I also found the Antiquarian Books Forum—a surprisingly active website with an impressively current design. Before the day was over, it had fired back a barrage of jokes, nearly drowning out a single reply:

“Perhaps you’re looking for a typewritten pamphlet called The Counter. It comes up here from time to time. No one has seen it, but everyone remembers it.”

Collective memory is like the cloud: everything appears to be there until you ask for a link.

I, however, remembered the scenes far too clearly: a corridor made of numbered doors—101, 102, 103…—and a sign reading CHAMBER OF RECKONING, where a stern man in pince-nez told the boy, “You did not count on your own. We granted you the right.” It was funny and terrifying, like a push notification from the other side.

A day later, I unplugged myself and began seriously considering the old interface, where dust handles the indexing and the cache is stored in pencil notes in the margins. I had to go.

783 steps, 4 stops, 11 lightbox ads, 4 billboards. The municipal reading room smelled of old paper and hope.

The pamphlet lead dropped out of the running immediately.

“They were all removed from the collections about fifteen years ago,” said a dissonantly young librarian, describing an event in which she could not possibly have taken part. Her tone assured me otherwise.

“Were publications like that digitized before disposal?”

“No. But there wasn’t any disposal as such.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, they were simply ordered to take them out of every room, count them, and stack them in a pile. Then a truck came and hauled them away over several trips.”

The only possible next question was Where? So naturally, I asked:

“How many did they count?”

I leafed through bound volumes of children’s and young-adult magazines from past decades, searching for even the shadow of my phantom book. I found only myself: 37 stains on the page marked “1987”—I held it up to the light to make sure—and 64 binders on Shelf L.

“Are you one of those people who love numbers?” asked a different librarian now sitting behind the desk, knitting needles in place of fingers.

“It’s more that numbers love me,” I said, and went off to count the windows.

After the first wave of witty replies, notifications about new forum posts began arriving every few days. Each one surprised me slightly, since I had not responded to anyone in the thread. The topic was not exactly flaring up, but it continued to smolder. About a week later, my occasional encounters with the forum’s name in my inbox finally registered at the edge of my attention. A quick search showed that four “real,” physical used-book shops supposedly still existed, but calling through their listings produced nothing: the numbers either led nowhere or connected me to voices for whom the word book apparently existed only as the second half of Facebook.

I mechanically clicked through the numbered pages of search results and ventured much farther than living people usually do. On page nine, an archived website called KneeGoLove surfaced. In 2010, someone in its Classifieds section had advised people to call. Beneath the post hung an orphaned image: a half-erased flyer reading COLLECTION CLEARANCE. PICKUP ONLY. WAREHOUSE, followed by the name the alley had borne two renamings ago, somewhere in a residential district. The word COLLECTION paired with all caps triggered something. I entered the old name into a map app and zoomed all the way in to a virtual walk through a courtyard with no storefronts but, remarkably, a note in the reviews: “Ring intercom No. 27. Tell them you’re here for the books.” The search algorithm that a week earlier had tried to sell me performance indicators as the meaning of life suddenly winked at me: “Private Bookseller.” It was not what I had been looking for. It was what I needed.

783 steps, 8 stops, 11 lightbox ads, 3 billboards. In the basement, books did not stand on shelves but lay across the floor like sleeping animals. There was no furniture except a ridiculous-looking clerk’s desk. An old man in a jacket the color of tea dregs took his place behind it the moment I entered. He listened to my nonsense and said:

“Memory is a high-grade forgery. There are no originals.”

“Excuse me?” I was not sure I had heard him correctly and leaned closer without realizing it.

“Look.” He did not raise his voice, but he turned to face me, and I involuntarily began watching to see whether his lips moved in sync with the sound. “When you ‘remember,’ you are not taking some first printing of the event down from a shelf. You assemble it again from scraps: the smell of glue, the hiss of radiators, somebody’s intonation—the way a bookbinder works with the offcuts of a print run. A different spine every time. A different cover. Each new copy is the finest one, because it is the copy your brain has just produced. That is the whole of ‘truth,’” he concluded.

“But there must have been something first,” I said, unable to stop myself, addressing the question more to myself than to him.

“The ‘first’ is the print order no one preserved,” the old man said with a smile. “The world goes to press without a proof. That is why we live among reprints. Anyone who swears by the ‘original’ has simply forgotten how many times they edited themselves through the act of remembering. The brain is a printshop in a state of permanent emergency,” he continued. “The layout runs ahead of the content, and the proofreader is asleep on the piece of metal type that spells I.”

“Then how do I find my book?” I asked, feeling a paper clip snap somewhere inside my voice.

“Don’t look for ‘the one,’” he said with a shrug. “Look for a copy you can love. That will make it yours.” As he spoke, the old man glanced toward the boxes beside the radiator.

From the government portal, I downloaded the journal form: “Steps,” “Windows,” “Transportation,” “Birds,” “Offices,” “Cats”… There was also a section titled “Conclusions Regarding the Observer’s Moral Condition.” The final question read: “Did you exaggerate?”

The state was proposing to legalize something I had spent years feeling ashamed of. It was as though the city had opened a museum devoted to your secret stupidities and offered you a discounted annual pass.

The text of the bill had grown considerably since my last visit. Section 9.2 now included a new paragraph: “Citizens with a propensity for counting may be enrolled in the Volunteer Counter Corps and granted access to regional Chambers of Reckoning (see Appendix No. 7).”

Another snap of memory’s clapperboard. Which one was that already? The third? Wow. Never before had a numeral appeared in my mind with a questioning intonation.

783 steps, 2 stops, 8 lightbox ads, 1 billboard. The service center—a modern building, administrative from every possible angle, designed in a style one might call gov nouveau—stood on the site of a former children’s clinic. On the ground floor, I found a directory displaying the building’s layout: 101, 102, 103… 317. Memory no longer tingled. It electrocuted me.

“Are you feeling unwell?” the administrator asked, handing me one copy of my printed electronic-queue number while mechanically impaling the duplicate on a spindle.

“I’m fine, but this is going to take a while,” I told her honestly.

Number 108 appeared on the display before I had time to feel the itch of choosing between the comfort of my chair and the instinct to locate a coffee machine. Window No. 5—on the left.

A one-sided greeting… There were more windows here than at the old clinic’s reception desk, but some vestigial spirits survive even a complete renovation.

“Occupation?”

“Counter-observer,” I said. The clerk’s eyebrows rose exactly two millimeters. I checked against the ruler inside my head.

“Fill out the application. Sample under glass.”

Meanwhile, the phone in my pocket showed some sign of life. The tireless online antiquarian forum reminded me of its existence with a notification containing a new version of the lost-book legend: at some point in some era, a typewritten pamphlet called The Counter had circulated. No one had held it, but everyone quoted it. It was like enlightenment: no one has attained it, but everyone writes guides.

But that same evening, my forum thread truly came alive. Someone uploaded a scan of a yellowed typewritten page. Its page number had been circled in pen, the corner bore a stamp reading NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, and in the middle was a sentence that snagged the subconscious with a silicone hook: “Count how many times you counted the wrong thing.” Beneath the scan was a link to a chat hosted on a messaging app regarded as semi-hostile throughout the world, yet consistently ranked among the most downloaded. It was an external link, and following it required a captcha that made no pretense of being a test of humanity. It openly was one.

“Enter the sum: deadlines + likes + the feeling of being ‘on time.’”

I typed: “I don’t total things.”

The chat greeted me with an avatar showing a pocket-sized Citizen calculator and the words: “Welcome to the Reprint channel.”

Inside, it was as quiet as a reading room after “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re closing.” In response to my timid yet noisy “Hi, everyone!” a message appeared from a user named L1CH:

“The Counter isn’t a book. It’s a way of taking reality’s readings. Samizdat. Eighties. Printed under the guise of internal instructions and draft regulations. The cover lies. Inside is the truth. Looking for it? DM me.”

Our private exchange was brief. We quickly arranged to meet, and the question of money seemed not to interest the other person at all. Fine. We would work it out when we got there.

783 steps, 5 stops, 7 lightbox ads, 2 billboards. We had chosen a neighborhood park. Making my way through a procession of food trucks and arcade machines, I noticed an unusual piece of municipal infrastructure: a bench placed, for some reason, not alongside one of the smaller paths but directly across it. Presumably, relocating or removing it during the park’s renovation had not fit the budget quite as harmoniously as marking out plots for commercial structures, so someone had simply painted it with leftover paint in the colors of the city flag and the dominant regional party. A man of indeterminate age was waiting on the other side. Thin as a division sign in human form, he produced a slim blue notebook. Its cover bore the familiar words DRAFT LAW. And inside…

I fastened my eyes on the first sentence. “The day the ‘Draft Law on the Harmonization of Units of Account and the Moral Security of Citizens’ rolled into my feed, I caught myself…” Speechless, I looked up at the thin seller. He stared back with such perfect emptiness that a question along the lines of “What is this?” died before it reached my vocal cords. Next came the library, the bookseller, the business card, Window No. 5… The letters swam slightly, but the key words seemed to glint in the sunlight.

A note had been paper-clipped to the final page: “The buyer is required to count the change and report the result to the seller.”

“Starting from what amount?” I asked.

“I wasn’t instructed,” he replied.

I took out my wallet, counted out three hundred, and added two tens. He nodded and accepted the money. I turned the cover over. The imprint at the bottom read: “Print run: variable. Copy No. 1.” Suddenly, I felt as though a mannequin were smiling at me and I desperately wanted to smile back.

At home, I opened the government portal again, looking for a form that would let me check the current status of my application. There was no form. I opened the now-familiar Appendix No. 7, but the page loaded incorrectly, with fragments of code mixed in among developer comments. I had probably caught the server during some kind of peak load. I reflexively clicked Refresh and, out of the corner of my eye, barely managed to glimpse phrases like: “insert bookseller scene here” “service center goes here…” The page refreshed. The notes disappeared.

The phone call I had counted on but had not expected came at the bureaucratically respectable hour of 9:03 a.m.

“You submitted an application to the Volunteer Counter Corps. Come in. Second Administrative Complex, old building, Office 317. Walk-ins only.”

“Sorry, I’m afraid I might mix them up.” I could hear myself mumbling, but this mode of communication activated whenever I knew that the sleepy gods of landline telephony would never permit me to call a nervous, overworked minor quasi-official a second time. “I saw an Office 317 at the new service center. I definitely need the old building?”

“Old build-ing,” the receiver enunciated. “Third floor. Do you know what 317 looks like, or should I send you a picture?”

783 steps, 6 stops, 8 lightbox ads, 2 billboards. 60 stairs, 8 offices on my left. There was no line. I appeared to be the only living thing on the floor.

In Office 317, a man improbably stylish for his age, wearing designer pince-nez, laid out cards depicting apartment buildings across a black desktop.

“Count them,” he said pleasantly, though briefly and in a strictly businesslike manner.

18 windows. 36 windows. 72 windows. I did not total them, but I noticed that, from left to right, the cards formed the kind of sequence that makes you feel warm inside. At least, it does if you enjoy it when the world pretends to contain a pattern.

“Did you like the wording in Appendix No. 7?” my stylish interviewer asked as he removed the cards from the desk.

“It felt as though it had been copied from me.” I could not keep from smiling.

“Or perhaps you were copied from it?” he asked gently. He pushed a folder toward me, one I had not noticed on the desk until that moment. When I opened it, I found a metal clip holding another copy of my blue pamphlet. The first page was familiar down to the tiny burrs left by the printing process. Only one block of text was different: “Print run: variable. Copy No. 0.”

“Zero is the control copy,” the brand-compliant official explained. “All the others are counted from it. As for your application and the formal screening,” he continued, “you have just passed. We require only confirmation of your existence.”

“I confirm,” I blurted.

“Congratulations,” he said calmly, without altering the curve of his smile by so much as a degree. “You are now a counter. Here is your pass.”

The plastic rectangle displayed an emblem: a zero bisected by a one, set against the same old colors, belonging either to the flag or to the dominant party. A QR code was printed on the back. It led nowhere. This was the first thing I established once I was back in the corridor. The perfect symbol of the age: everything is labeled, but nothing can be fully read.

Once home, logged into the government portal in my fundamentally new capacity, I submitted an official comment. The law, I wrote, was absurd. It replaced freedom with a digitized conscience. It institutionalized my private obsession and declared it a virtue. More generally, the whole thing resembled some children’s book with a ridiculous plot and an unspeakable moral.

A minute later, a confirmation arrived at the email address I had supplied during registration: “Your submission has been assigned No. 108.” Another minute later, a second message appeared: “The book specified in your submission was not located in the registry. Please provide publication details. You may reply directly to this email.”

After the dotted line marking the beginning of my response, I entered:

“Author—unknown.

Year—unknown.

Print run—variable.”

The following day, I read in my feed: “The law has passed its first reading. 317 in favor, 108 opposed, 0 abstentions.” The numbers fell into place like a rhyme you notice in a work that was never intended to be a poem.

I opened the journal and honestly completed the fields for the previous day: cats, windows, frictions, birds, lightbox ads, toothbrush frictions. Then, without thinking, I entered the following under “Conclusions Regarding the Observer’s Moral Condition”: “I’m fine. But this is going to take a while.” I put down a period and counted the periods. One.

Before leaving the apartment, I glanced at the blue pamphlet out of habit. Where it had said “Copy No. 1” the day before, I could now make out something resembling a partially erased “No. ∞.”

I returned to my desk, turned the computer back on, and visited the Antiquarian Books Forum. My thread was gone from the section where people had spent the past several weeks trying to help me. I searched for the phrases “book about a boy who counted everything” and “Print run: variable.” I found a single thread in the Archived section. Judging by the details in the first post, it had been created fifteen years earlier by a user whose name meant nothing to me.

At the intersection, there were seven cars, one bus, and eleven pigeons. One was clearly plastic. Had quality control missed it again? I felt someone’s designer stylus in Office 317 add a note: “Observed stability.”

I looked up at the sky. The blue formed a perfect gradient, without a single cloud. There was nothing to count. Nothing at all. Not even in the background. For the first time? Could that be coun—

And at that exact moment, a numberless, entirely weightless, completely analog thought flowed through my exhausted brain.

“My book” was not a text. It was not even a memory. It was a procedure someone had written in advance, initiated whenever the bearer of a certain kind of attention—someone like me—encountered a trigger someone had planted in advance. Reverse causality? No. An explanation like that was simply unnecessary here. First you search for the book. Then the book writes you. Next, the law quotes the book. Finally, you confirm that the book existed because you held it in your hands. That is not causality at all. It is plot. And the only way to influence it is not to stop counting, but to count something else. Not pigeons or windows. The moments when you can choose not to check the total.

***

But as far as I know, I personally don’t total things. Do I?

And now I am climbing another staircase. On some landing, I stop and say aloud:

“One hundred eight.”

Or three hundred seventeen. Or zero.

The number comes back like a dog carrying a stick. It lays its head in my lap. The world breathes in a slow rhythm. I do not. For exactly two seconds, I stop counting.

Then I continue. Not because of the law, and not out of inertia, but because, in the plot that flickered raggedly into view during a peak-load glitch, I glimpsed something for a moment: Beyond the edges of No. 0 and No. ∞, there is nothing but an emptiness counting itself.

And for some reason, that is comforting.

Andriy Nivchuk is a Ukrainian writer, born in 1983, whose fiction explores history, systems, patterns, and the surreal logic of everyday life. His stories have appeared in various publications, and several of them have been adapted for audio performance.