A Reasonable Man (short story)

 was the first story in The Boulevard: Volume One.

Summary
In the Boulevard of Alternate Brutalities, a fussy bald man flits through a carousel of accidental deaths throughout history, such as a tragedy in an operating theatre, or a wreck at a race course. He looks for small pleasures such as food and a broadsheet newspaper as things go wrong around him. For a few hours a day, he's allowed to rest in a normal bedroom before a naked Faction Paradox member comes to wake him up.

Earlier, in the Eleven-Day Empire, Faction Paradox are putting "Anon" on trial. A group of Faction members had decided to reverse engineer the premise of conceptual entities - instead of taking physical entities and reducing them to concepts, they would giving physical form to things that had only ever been concepts so they could be used as weapons. The court labels this group "idiots". The group had created the bald man, couldn't tell what to use him for, and released him into the Empire with Cousin Bran as his guardian. The bald man found the Empire's existence ridiculous and wished there was normal sunlight instead of the eternal red skies. One day, to the Faction's horror, sunlight broke through, and afterwards normal people from 18th century London begin appearing.

Faction Paradox discovered that the Gregorian Compact was failing due to basic logic and reason saying it shouldn't exist, and it's failing because of the bald man: the embodiment of the English legal principle of the Man on the Clapham Omnibus, the concept of how a reasonable man would react to a situation. As the Man and Bran watch, Vauxhall Building dissolves and causes Faction researchers to fall to their deaths onto an 18th century garden that has newly appeared. Bran drags the Man away from the disaster to give the Loa a chance to seal the breach. However, the entire Empire is starting to collapse and revert to historical London. Bran arrests the Man with the same statement "you are not obliged to say anything" used by police in popular culture, placing him in Newgate Gaol. The man tried to escape as the Empire's version of Newgate dissolved around him, but instead simply ran directly into a court hearing prepared for him.

At the court hearing, it's stated that by his mere existence the Man on the Clapham Omnibus will destroy the Empire and the Faction merely by observing them as ridiculous. The court hearing itself is something the Faction are forced to do because it's not reasonable to imprison the man without a trial, and under the rituals of the English justice system he is found guilty. Unable to let him into the Spiral Politic where an enemy could use him against them, they sentence him to the Boulevard to observe, as is "fair", all the legal cases where the 'Man on the Clapham Omnibus' was invoked for judgement.

In the Boulevard, the Man knocks a naked Paradox member out of his room's window, as any part of a body in the room is "sufficient to get you potted for burglary" and goes back to reading his paper. A message has been placed in it to be ready. Someone was coming to get him.

Characters

 * The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
 * Cousin Bran

Worldbuilding

 * The was introduced into English law in the 19th century, when Clapham was an ordinary suburb of London; the Man is bald due to journalist Walter Bagehot writing about the "bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus".
 * The Man on the Clapham Omnibus was created in the Empire's copy of the Vauxhall Building, HQ of MI6.
 * Bran uses a deliberately archaic version of English police warnings during arrest, rather than the later version that warns it could harm your defence if you don't mention something you later rely on in court. The story implies the later version is "fingers-behind-the-back double crossing" and that this would have made it less binding on the Man.

Continuity

 * The Gregorian Compact, an agreement that Faction Paradox can have the eleven days missing from the changeover from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one, is ridiculed by the Man. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
 * The court refers to Anarchitects and Shifts as being well known conceptual entities.