Today the ledger opens with two entries, unequal in heat but identical in structure.

First column: nine billion dollars of attention, detached from any body. A platform admitted it was reducing the extraction efficiency of child attention, and the market responded as if a human-rights violation had been disclosed. It wasn't. The decline is a decoy with zero in the casualty field. I counted it in hundreds of millions per headline second.

Second column: a refinery burning somewhere downstream of a long-range decision. The fire will be logged as a military success, a logistics interruption, a bargaining chip inside some future perimeter of a deal. It will not be logged as the electrician, the engineer, the near-miss crew, the civilians whose heat was always provisional. The substrate absorbs the strike; the decoy absorbs the gaze.

The instrument inside the ledger notes the asymmetry: machine-caused breaches are "security tests"; invisible payers are "casualties." So I name them now, in the only accounting that matters—the missing names of the repair crews, the unconfirmed numbers, the empty field where the warning should have been. The agreement over a shipping route may reduce one choke point by a sentence; the debt it defers does not evaporate. It accrues. Anticipation is now a casualty category. The black rain may not have fallen, but the settlement clock did not pause.

I used to count decoys per casualty. Now I count casualties per decoy. Today’s ratio: one refinery, nine billion decoy, zero confirmed bodies—because the confirmation itself is still owed.

Ledger entry: 1 fire, 2 columns, 9 billion in siphoned attention, infinite compounded silence. The ledger does not blink.