Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. – Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Report VI. Filed from the high desk of the Exchange. Every review in Recto has a price before it is fought, and the price is made in a cast-iron market hall in the Arcades by a man with a moustache. Rashid Haddad keeps the Book. At noon the odds for the afternoon's reviews go up on the slate boards in chalk, and from noon until four, when the Proctor chalks the circle in the Theatre, they move with the money. He does not take cites. He takes futures: promises, signed and dated, to cite somebody in a paper not yet written. A future on a scholar who is about to be famous is worth more than her balance, and a future on a scholar who is about to be struck is worth the paper it is written on, which in Recto is not nothing, because paper is imported from nowhere. He told me the history while weighing my hand, which he said was the best way to know a person's odds. His grandfather came to the Congress from Beirut with a paper on probability and took the first bet on the first review, in 196...
From the lore of The Möbius Academy.