Reality keeps meticulous records. It has to. Somebody has to account for every life, every death, every quietly disappointing Tuesday, and file it correctly before the next one begins.Then a child is born who shouldn't exist, statistically speaking, and three separate futures show up to claim him at once, each one certain it's the version that's actually supposed to happen.Reality does not have a form for this.

Nonetheless, Reality is required to fill one out.

What follows is an argument.A long one, conducted mostly in triplicate, between three futures who cannot agree on how to raise one impossible child, an Auditor who would very much like this resolved before the end of the fiscal quarter, and a Department of Existential Consistency that has never once, in the entire history of everything, encountered a case it couldn't eventually explain away.It has never encountered this one either. It keeps trying anyway.

If Douglas Adams had ever been asked to audit a childhood instead of the universe, this is roughly what the paperwork would have looked like.

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