We’re not talking about the foundation of substance, the law of preservation of one’s mistakes, or the translation of forgetfulness as cosmology, but about the perfect replication of fourteen birch trees. Our requirements were that each object changes once and only once. As if mimesis had an intrinsic beauty. As if an archive of errors was worth its maintenance. As if historical truth could nurture a botanical plant. Pushing ideas into and out of a series of pipes– each deterministic transformation, a fold of culture. You copy the living objects beside themselves while the action recoils from its interpretation. Meanwhile, society takes its unkind measurement with financial entities and the politics of oversaturation. You realize the difference between the trees is absolute. You understand that the portrait is covered with flaws. This is not what we were hoping for. The time series where each permutation takes a slice of the cake. You etched a diagram of the origin and another of the end, but even time machines get trapped in the tides. After the war, we make our sadness from identity. The tree-house is unfamiliar, as if someone had passed through, a strange wizard of refactoring and architecture. In an effort to avoid side effects, we lost the community. The heap of letters is not what we once thought it was. We are still mapping and reducing a row of birch trees, but there is a stain or two that only we can see. Lost in the sky, like an irreversible similitude.