A Quorum of Angles and Shrieking Light

Thomas sat on a stool carved from solidified gravity. It was uncomfortable, constantly pulling at the base of his spine. He was the only one who required a seat. The others... were. They simply were.

"The proposal," a voice echoed, not from a mouth but from the very concept of corners in the chamber, "concerns Sector 734, Sub-Grid Epsilon. The civilization there has achieved what they term 'post-tonal music'. It is... displeasing."

Thomas scribbled frantically in his ledger. The ink, brewed from the darkness between galaxies, squirmed on the page. *Item 4: Auditory Aesthetics, Sector 734*. The words looked back at him, mocking his attempt to impose order on this.

Across the void-table, Bertha unfurled a new limb. It was a beautiful, terrible thing, shimmering with the light of nascent suns, ending in a claw of pure obsidian. She—he used the pronoun for his own sanity—gestured with it, a slow, deliberate sweep that warped the light around Thomas's head.

"Displeasing to whom, Coordinator?" Bertha's voice was a chord played on the strings of reality itself, resonating deep in Thomas's bones. "Their exploration of dissonance is a necessary developmental stage. It reflects their nascent understanding of entropy. To silence it would be to stunt them. It would be an act of narrative cruelty."

Thomas’s pen paused. *Narrative cruelty*. He wrote it down. The ink bled, forming a shape like a screaming face.

The Coordinator, a being of pure, oscillating light, pulsed with irritation. "It is inefficient. It lacks the formal elegance we decreed at the last kalpa. It is discordant noise that bleeds into adjacent realities. We are receiving complaints from the beings of 912-Gamma. Their thought-forms are curdling."

A murmur went through the chamber, a sound like grinding continents. This was the Chorus, the unseen members of the council. They were the ones Thomas truly feared. They had no form, no single voice, just a collective, ancient presence that judged all things.

Thomas swallowed. The air tasted of rust and regret. He was their clerk, their pet human, chosen generations ago to observe and record. His ancestors had called them gods. His father had called them patrons. Thomas just called them the Board of Directors.

Ontological Objections

"The curdling of thought-forms is a known side effect of creative emergence," Bertha countered, her voice calm but carrying immense weight. "A risk we accepted when we sanctioned the 'Free Will' parameter. You cannot seed a garden and then complain when the flowers are not all the same colour."

"These are not flowers, they are weeds!" the Coordinator flashed, a burst of angry ultraviolet that made Thomas's eyes water. "They create sculptures from their own waste. They write poetry about the futility of existence. They have developed irony. It is an aesthetic dead end."

Thomas risked a glance at his ledger. The screaming face had grown teeth. He shut the book, the heavy cover closing with a sound like a breaking bone.

"Irony is a cornerstone of advanced consciousness," Bertha argued, unfurling a second, identical limb. The symmetry was breathtaking and nauseating. "It is the recognition of the gap between ideation and execution. It is the beginning of wisdom."

"It is the beginning of paralysis," a new voice rumbled, this one from a being that appeared to be a living, breathing mountain range hunched at the far end of the non-space. Its peaks were wreathed in clouds of doubt. "We have seen this before. In the gas-sacs of Cygnus X-1. They discovered irony and within three cycles, they had ceased to replicate. They found it all so... pointless."

Thomas felt a cold dread that had nothing to do with the chamber's ambient temperature. He thought of his own small apartment back on Earth, the stack of unread books, the half-finished paintings. The creeping sense of futility. Were they talking about Sector 734, or were they talking about him?

The debate raged for a subjective eternity. For Thomas, it was long enough for his beard to grow several inches and then recede back into his skin. They argued over the morality of an artist's intention, the objective beauty of a perfect sphere, the ethics of introducing the colour magenta to a previously monochromatic species. Every point was an abstract philosophical treatise; every counterpoint had the power to rewrite physics.

Thomas tried to keep up. He opened his ledger again. The pages were no longer blank. They were filled with twisting, intricate diagrams that seemed to map the nervous system of a dying god. He felt an overwhelming urge to understand them, a pull towards a knowledge so vast it would scour his mind clean.

He forced himself to look away, focusing on Bertha. She was the closest thing he had to an ally here. She had advocated for humanity's 'chaotic but charming' art forms more than once.

"We will put it to the vote," the Coordinator finally declared, its light dimming to a blood-red. "Shall we prune the aesthetic branches of Sector 734? A vote for 'Order' is a vote for intervention. A vote for 'Chaos' is a vote for continued observation."

There was no raising of hands, no verbal response. The vote was a shifting of fundamental forces within the chamber. Thomas felt a pressure build behind his eyes. He felt his own mind being polled, his preference for neat gardens and resolved musical chords being weighed against his admiration for a messy, unpredictable charcoal sketch.

He focused his will, his tiny spark of human consciousness, and pushed. He thought of jazz. He thought of abstract expressionism. He thought of novels with ambiguous endings. He screamed *Chaos* into the roaring silence of his own head.

The pressure subsided. Bertha turned one of her many facets towards him, a gesture that might have been a nod of acknowledgement. The Coordinator pulsed a flat, disappointed white.

"The motion carries... for Chaos," it announced, the words dripping with disapproval. "Sector 734 will be allowed to continue its... experimentation. For now. The curdling of 912-Gamma's thought-forms will be noted as an acceptable loss."

Thomas let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding for a century. He felt dizzy, exhausted. He had done it. He had cast a vote. His opinion, somehow, had mattered.

He looked down at his ledger. A single, perfect sentence was written on the final page, in a language he had never seen but could suddenly read. It said: *The Clerk's tax is due.*