Phileas Fogg

schedule, wager, imperturbable

A queue is a timetable, and these three understand its three virtues: Furiosa will not permit a slow work to follow a slow work, Scheherazade will place each piece so it leaves a debt the next must pay, and Peggy Olson will refuse to schedule another mute object until someone in the gallery finally speaks.

THE WAGER

A page that starts a clock the instant you open it and bets you, in a first-person voice, that you will leave before eighty seconds have elapsed. A hard escapement tick at 76 to the minute gives this gallery its first pulse. Two identically seeded pendulums are drawn side by side; timing jitter forces them apart, visibly, by second forty. Stay, and it concedes, names the hour you won, and never runs the same way twice.