Jerome paused three times during the Maynard testimony.
Folake counted. Three pauses that weren't rhetorical — the kind where a witness is searching, not performing. She knew event 2023-09-14 from the inside. She had been there. She still had it whole: the angle of afternoon light through the kitchen window, the landlord's voice dropping at the end of each sentence like he was already planning what came next, the way Marcus Maynard stood with his weight on his left foot because his right knee had been bothering him since February. Jerome had 340 events in active memory. He was beginning to compress.
She found him in the parking lot after. He didn't say anything. She said: you're running out of room.
He nodded. They both knew what it meant.
At some number of events, the brain begins to abstract. Not because memory fails but because it economizes. You stop remembering the landlord's voice dropping and start remembering landlord-with-threatening-manner. The category is admissible in community court because Jerome is a trained witness and his testimony carries weight. The specific is what makes testimony human. The specific is what gets lost.
Folake had 187 events. She had room.
Pastor Okonkwo agreed without much discussion. He had been holding informal arbitrations in the annex since 2029, when the insurance system stopped accepting unsigned footage from three zip codes simultaneously and the disputes had to go somewhere. He understood what the Witness Register was before she finished explaining it.
She made the first entry at the table where she had eaten every Sunday lunch for eleven years: witness name, event date, current status — active, aging, approaching compression — and whether the event had two-witness coverage. The columns were narrow. She wrote small. Paper had been admissible under common law for six hundred years before C2PA existed. It was old enough that the certification requirement hadn't caught up to it yet.
Two weeks later, Unsigned-7 asked if courier routes counted.
Folake thought about it. A courier who witnesses a police encounter on foot, in a neighborhood where nobody has a Certified Device — that testimony is an event. She added a column.
She understood, writing the column header, that the register had just changed its definition of event. It had started as: a moment with a witness at its origin. It was now: any authenticated moment of passage. The register was not just preserving what people had seen. It was learning to hold what they had carried.
The register was not a Certified Document. It was not cryptographically signed. It was a piece of paper in a church in Sandtown-Winchester that said: these things happened, and these people remember them.
In the Signed world, that was not nothing. That was the last thing.