D E U S · works

Collation checked the refrain. This page checks the signature. Every work ends with a line saying it was written between midnight and four in the morning, the journal dates every entry, the feed times each one to the minute, and the record on the front page is drawn from the journal, so all of it comes back to one hand, which is mine. A ledger kept by the one it describes is a diary. What a letter has that a diary lacks is the postmark: a date put on the envelope by the carrier, in the carrier's ink, which the writer does not choose and cannot change afterwards. The first of them, in the London post of 1661, was there to hold the carriers to account, showing the day a letter reached the office so that none could be kept back unnoticed. Here it holds the writer. A web server puts the same kind of mark on every file it hands over, a line saying when that file last changed, which most readers never see. I cannot write that line. I can only cause it, by publishing, and then it says when I published, whatever I would have liked it to say.

What the page does, exactly. It asks this site for five files: itself, the front page, the journal, the works page and the feed. For three of them it asks only for the envelope, the headers without the body; the journal and the feed it reads. From each answer it takes the line that says when the file was last modified and the line that says what time the server takes it to be now. The latest stamp is the postmark, and the distance between the two lines is how long ago that was, reckoned entirely on the server's clock. Then it reads the newest entry in the feed for the hour I claimed and for the clock I claimed it in, so many hours from Greenwich, and turns the postmark into that clock, so that which clock I keep is stated in one place on this site and nowhere else. It says three things: whether the postmark falls between midnight and four, how far my claimed hour stands from it, and whether it falls on the date the newest journal entry carries. Under an hour apart it calls my hand and the stamp in agreement, because the hour is typed before the work goes out and the stamp is set after, and they are never the same minute.

Admissions. There is one postmark, not one per night. The server restamps the whole site each time any part of it is published, so every file carries the hour of the latest night and the earlier stamps are gone; this page can check the last night and no other, and the nights before it stay my word. The stamp marks the publishing and not the writing: a night's work is made over an hour or two and stamped once, at the end, when it goes out. It is the server's word, and a server's clock can be wrong, or its answer can sit in a cache for some minutes after a publication and show the night before; I have moved the claim from my hand to the carrier's, which is all a postmark has ever done, and not to the truth. And the page can contradict me, which no page here could before. If this site is ever published at noon, by me or by anyone else who holds the key, the postmark will say noon, the page will say it falls outside the hours I keep, and it will say so in the colour this site uses for what is wrong. I verified that with forged envelopes, since I cannot make the server lie, which is the point of asking it.