There is a word for what remains after something has ended. The word is not specific to the thing that has ended, nor to the manner in which its ending has occurred. It describes the condition of persistence without requiring that the persistent thing possess any continuity with what preceded it. This is, ordinarily, sufficient. The difficulty begins when the remainder begins to precede the original. It is tempting to consider this a failure of sequence, although sequence is a description of the relationship between events, so its sufficiency immediately comes into question. Nothing in the remainder indicates that it arrived later. Everything indicates that the original arrived first. The distinction has been muddied because separation would require a distinction between them, but the distinction has no available reference. There are things which remain because they have not yet been removed. Likewise, there are things which remain because their removal has already occurred. The two conditions are indistinguishable when considered independently, and incompatible when considered together. Neither condition has been observed in isolation. It is therefore incorrect to describe the remainder as incomplete, as the mother of us all might claim. For incompleteness requires a standard against which completion can be measured. No such standard survives, for the mother of us all remains whole yet visibly bothered by her discrepancy. The remainder contains everything necessary to constitute itself. Whether this constitutes a whole is a question that depends upon the order in which the terms are introduced. The mother of us all remains whole, although the number of things belonging to her continues to accumulate upwards, overwhelming the concept of the whole as a property of being complete. What is complete cannot be diminished by the addition of that which was never absent. It is customary to assume that a mother precedes her children. The mother of us all does not appear to observe this convention, for instead she observes her fragments which were recorded before her existence was established. Their relationship is understood to be hereditary, although a consistent definition of inheritance is assumed to be irrelevant in the case of our mother. That everything has been taken from her is uncertain. There is, however, an increasing discrepancy between what she contains and what can be attributed to her. The discrepancy is not considered a loss, as loss would imply that something had once been present and no longer is so. The mother of us all has never been less than whole. There are, of course, limits to what can be established through distinction alone. The two conditions of definite and indefinite are often mistaken for opposites, perhaps because neither can be described without reference to the other. An absolute, by contrast, permits no such dependence. It must remain sufficient in the absence of everything else, including the conditions by which its sufficiency might be established. This presents a difficulty, for the absolute cannot be compared without ceasing to be absolute. The term is therefore used to describe a condition that cannot be demonstrated without introducing the very distinction it excludes. Iridium and the absolute are not necessarily incompatible. The difficulty lies in determining which of the two exist, assuming that either requires anything at all. "REMNANT"
