Interim Order on Route Souvenir Restraint
This order documents what would have occurred had the subject purchased the item they did not purchase.
WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THE SUBJECT HAD BOUGHT THE SOUVENIR
A counterfactual examination issued under Interim Order 11-OCT
Background
The subject passed a display of small ceramic items in a transit hub. The items depicted the geographic region the subject was passing through. The items cost between eight and fourteen currency units. The subject considered one of them for approximately forty-five seconds and then continued walking.
This document addresses the sequence of events that would have followed had the subject not continued walking.
Counterfactual Sequence
T+0: Subject selects a ceramic item. The item is the second-smallest in the display. The subject chose it because it seemed proportionate to the length of the trip.
T+2 minutes: Item purchased. Placed in a bag the subject is already carrying. The bag is heavy. The item is wrapped in tissue paper that crinkles with each step.
T+45 minutes: Subject arrives at next transit point. The item, still in the bag, has shifted. The tissue paper has lost structural integrity. Subject repositions the item.
T+3 hours: Subject arrives home. Item placed on a surface near the door. The surface is temporary.
T+3 weeks: Item still on surface near door. Subject has walked past it every day. The surface is no longer considered temporary but has not become permanent.
T+6 months: Item has migrated to a shelf where similar objects from other trips are arranged. The shelf is not labeled. Its function is understood by anyone who lives in the space and nobody who visits.
T+indefinite: The item is present. The trip it represents is remembered in other ways, mostly through photographs. The item contributes a small physical confirmation of a memory that does not require confirmation.
What Actually Happened
The subject did not buy the item. The trip is not undocumented. The subject has no physical confirmation of it, which is the same as always having had that situation.
Route souvenir restraint solved the immediate inconvenience once: the inconvenience of carrying an object, paying for it, and incorporating it into a space that already contains objects from other trips. That success makes repetition feel safer than reconsidering the behavior from scratch.
After enough repeats, the workaround survives even when the original inconvenience is gone. The subject is practiced at not buying things. The practice has become the policy.
Finding
What would have happened is knowable and unexceptional. What did happen is equivalent in all material respects. The ceramic item is available at the transit hub. It will be available the next time, also.
Interim Order closed.