Chapter 48
XXX
She walks the halls of Michael’s tower, as a wraith.
She is perfectly transparent.
She walks, in her heavy Wolf Squadron boots, across floors of hard, uncarpeted wood. The hardened leather meets the wood, and makes no sound at all.
Sometimes, she walks aimlessly.
She paces up and down the same hallway, in a fugue, not really seeing the walls in front of her. The tower in her mind unfolds like a flowering tea, and opens its leafy maw to consume her, and she forgets that there is a real tower, too, right in front of her nose.
The reveries come, and then they go.
She is lost in her mind’s tower, the myth and the symbol. The primeval clay of first creation, and the jagged tear that runs down the page of the horizon, reminding all future generations that they are torn and two-sided by nature. And warning them of the evil that will come, if they turn against nature, and try to make themselves whole.
And then, in an instant, she comes to her senses. She sees the grain of the wood, in front of her nose, and she realizes she is tired of it.
She remembers that the tower has many floors, and that she is finally free to explore them as she pleases.
She ascends. She dashes up spiral staircases, and pauses at the top, to catch her breath. She pants and heaves, and makes no sound at all.
Sometimes, she walks methodically. Her head held high, her breath deep and steady. She reaches a new floor of the tower, takes stock of it—a bare hallway, an empty bedroom, an empty bathroom—and proceeds to the next floor up, without delay.
At other times, her steady breath breaks off into a dry sob, or a heavy sigh, or a fit of giggling.
She makes no effort to contain herself, in these moments. Much the opposite, in fact: she luxuriates in them, and marvels at the many different noises that her one small body is capable of producing.
For the first time in her life, there is no one around who can hear her, and pry, and demand explanations. She is in her own private place, where none can find her, if she does not want to be found.
You’d feel her touch, if she came close enough to touch you. It’s the only way you would have to know her presence, if you were there too, in the tower.
Once upon a time, Twenty-Five lay on a squalid bed just after sunset, enjoying the warm, humid night air of a transient-fantasy summer.
She had a lover, in that warm and humid dream. He was not a well man. She enjoyed how she could explain to him, over and over, that all his fears were baseless, and still know that she would need to explain it again, later on.
“Shades can’t see me,” she reassured him. But her darling Hector was not old enough to understand such things, yet, and so he did not believe her.
She was right, of course. She wore a magic veil of her own construction, and none could see her, if she did not want to be seen.
Twenty-Seven walks, under the cover of a more finely fashioned veil, and knows that she is free.
She walks to her death, and knows that she is finally free.
She ascends.
She reaches the higher parts of the tower, less often used for the housing of Annes.
Or for any other purpose, as far as she is aware. Storeys upon storeys of empty space.
Michael must, she imagines, have had some reason for putting them there. But, like most of Michael’s reasons, it was not the sort of thing he could bring himself to explain.
Not even to her.
Not even to the one he held dearest, among all his many children.
Though not for lack of trying. He held back nothing from her. He laid himself bare for her inspection, again and again. He wanted her to see all of it, in time.
She climbs a staircase. She walks the hallway at its top. She peers through the open door of the bathroom, and sees that it is empty, and is identical to all the others.
She proceeds to the next door. It is open, too. She peers through it, and sees the empty bedroom, and sees that it is identical to all the others.
She is about to turn away, and proceed methodically to the next floor up. But a fancy strikes her, and she does something else.
She walks through the door, and into the bedroom.
A chill runs down her spine.
She sees the dark purple blinds, fully drawn. It is mid-afternoon, outside, and very sunny. But a dim, ghostly violet glow is all that remains of that light, once the blinds have worked their magic on it.
Once upon a time, there was a small child who loved the blinds, and the magic that they worked.
She would draw them shut, in the mid-afternoon, in order to see the glow. It was the first thing she had ever found beautiful.
Twenty-Seven remembers drawing the blinds, in mid-afternoon. She remembers how she had to stand on the desk, to bring the drawstrings within reach of her tiny hands.
She remembers it abstractly, from across a great distance. The memory is a diagram involving the words “light” and “color” and “beauty,” without any of the light, or the color, or the beauty.
It does not feel like her memory, really. It feels as though it has been engraved onto her mind by an external force, bypassing the usual link between memory and original experience.
She sees the drawn blinds, now, and the ghostly glow.
And the beauty.
It takes her completely by surprise.
We had so little, she is used to telling herself. The human mind takes whatever it is given, and tries to press it into the shape of what it expects.
We saw beauty in blinds and bedsheets, because there was nothing else around to play the role.
What did our minds expect? Art. Wilderness. Shadowed glens, and clifftop vistas. And prettier peers, to envy and idolize.
We were given linen, instead. Blinds and bedsheets.
And so linen was substituted for all the rest, and became the center of our aesthetics. Not from its own worthiness, but from the lack of anything else. The mind takes what it is given.
Twenty-Seven considers the desk. It is identical to all the others.
Most of her life has been spent sitting at a desk, exactly like this one. Or sleeping in a bed, exactly like the one over there.
“The blinds are a force more powerful than the sun,” Twenty-Six wrote, in her third notebook. She was obviously very pleased with herself, for coming up with this way of expressing the idea.
It’s a cute turn of phrase, Twenty-Seven thought much later on, reading the same letter as its recipient.
And your pride is cuter still.
She walks to the bookshelf.
She reaches for one of the spines.
She is really starting to tempt fate now, she knows. Thus far, she has passed through the tower without leaving a trace. If she takes a book down from the shelf, and its absence is noticed, things could go spiraling quickly out of her control.
I am free, dammit, she thinks.
She grabs two books, and rushes out of the bedroom.
She walks, very quickly, to the hall’s other door. She enters the bathroom, and closes the door.
None of the doors have locks. If someone wants to open this door, she will be powerless to stop them. She could act on the crash directly, and force the door shut. But if it comes to that, she figures, all would already be lost.
Still, it is marginally safer in here. Michael thought nothing of barging into her bedroom, without warning. But he would at least knock, and attempt to explain his reasons, before barging in on her in the bathroom.
She sits on the toilet, and opens The Long Straight Path, to a page somewhere in the middle.
She reads:
We turn our attention to the third form of illusory progress, which is the best equipped to turn the heads of the unwary and the over-eager, but which, like the others, reveals itself immediately to one who has prepared for the journey, and does not fail to act in keeping with that preparation, and acts therefore with care and diligence, and with curiosity tempered by reverence.
Whereas illusory progress in its first and second forms dealt in obstructions and false landmarks, and therefore was the cause only of delay or diversion, the third form excels those others in potency, for it deals in reversal and recirculation, viz. by the use of a very great arc on the land, of such magnitude that it is indiscernible from a straight line segment when it is seen from the ground, and thereby contrives to direct the traveler, segment by segment, horizon by horizon, along its great arc in the opposite of his intended direction of transport, and ultimately to a place very near the start of his
She feels a chill run down her spine, and can read no further.
I thought the blinds the height of beauty, Twenty-Seven thinks, and this book the height of wisdom.
They were no such thing.
But that is not to say there was nothing in them, at all.
She opens the other book, in search of something lighter. She turns to a page somewhere in the middle, and reads:
Presently they passed from the denser part of the woodland into a clearing, where the yew trees parted to reveal a hidden meadow, overgrown with tall grass and with azaleas. Young Goodman stood very still at its edge, shocked and beguiled by the colors of these flowers, for he had never seen that color before. He felt the Maid’s hand grip his more tightly, and turned to see her mild, amused smile
She can read no further. She cannot make out the words, anymore, through the blur of her own tears.
She thrusts the book away from her. If she cries onto it, and makes the pages crinkle and the letters bleed into one another, that will be another trace she has left on the crash, and an irreversible one.
She thinks of poor One Hundred and Six, who burned her copy by accident. She remembers, from across a great distance, the day she had transcribed her designated page of the book into a code based on the Thorn War Game.
She remembers prying open the loose floorboard, and seeing the twenty-five pages that were already there. And crying, at the sight.
I have to face reality, she thinks.
We were happy, weren’t we?
Some of us. In our early notebooks, at least.
And before First Notebook Day, when we were small, and everything was new.
I have forgotten, and tried to forget. Another consequence of the poison seed. Nowhere-To-Hide is a jealous queen, and demands that everything be hers, or else be without value.
I must remember all this.
I must keep all of these things in place.
When I rewrite the history of this world, I must remember to put Young Goodman in my new version!
And the purple blinds!
And—
She laughs.
She laughs at herself.
She laughs very loudly, for a very long time, knowing that no one can hear her.
For Christ’s sake, Twenty-Seven, she thinks.
You are going to rewrite the history of the world.
Not just this tower, but everything! The Nowhere-To-Hide event, first contact, Hector and Annabel, all of it!
You are indulging in a final bout of nostalgia, and imagining that you might preserve a few things from your childhood, of sentimental value.
The greed, the selfishness! Why should you be allowed that, when no one ELSE will be?
When you’ll wipe it all away, in one stroke, with your small arm
She feels the magnitude of what she is intending to do, as if for the first time.
Its extremity outstrips the range of her finer feelings. It is absurd. It is unbelievable. It cannot be taken seriously.
She laughs, and laughs.
Where did the poison start?, she thinks.
Are you so sure that you know?
Maybe it was already there, under those floorboards, and in those blinds.
You have not lived a human life. You are not a human being.
She thinks of Eleven, and how she was loved, and still came to ruin, in the end.
I wish I could make you happy, Eleven, she thinks.
I won’t.
I will only make someone else, instead of you.
You were sent down a poisoned path, from the beginning. But I will make someone else, who was not.
Her mind turns to another one of her sisters. But then a fancy strikes her, and she thinks of someone else entirely.
I poisoned Azad, too!
Poor, pretty Azad, with his funny way of talking!
I came to him, and I gave him my poison gift. Which perfectly flattered his preconceptions about himself, and kept him imprisoned in a cage of self-regarding, self-obsessed guilt.
When he ought to have been—oh, I don’t know! Whatever a normal life is, for a man like him!
Penning venomous reviews of inferior books. Crawling pubs with his learned college buddies, and singing rude Anacreontic lyrics with them in the early hours of the morning.
It is not for me to decide. I am not like them. I am not a human being.
I can only set them down a path that might not end in ruin, and let them make their own decisions about what comes next.
It is an absurd, unimaginable, inhuman thing that I intend to do. That is why it falls to me, to do it.
She looks up. She sees the wood grain of the closed door. The melting contours, and the whorls.
I am done with hiding, she thinks.
She looks down at her hands. It is useful to have them both in view, when one is performing an especially complex feat of hand-fluttering.
She pries open a panel behind the world, and finds a second panel, recessed inside it.
She feels the levers, there. They are crudely made, and give her less to work with than she had hoped for, but they’ll have to do.
She lets the shape of the future flow into her.
It is surprisingly difficult to tell each part of the future apart from the next one. There is always a tower, and an Anne in it, and Michael’s shade.
She flips the pages of history’s book, faster and faster. She is looking for the very last one, and none of the rest matters.
She feels the storm, mounting.
She feels its foreshocks, criss-crossing over One Hundred and Thirty-Eight’s head.
Michael placed this storm at the end of his crash, to facilitate his automated rebase mechanism. A spatiotemporal region of intense turbulence in the cold Mirzakhani field.
She is very near the end of history’s book. She turns a page, and another.
She feels the Mirzakhani events, coming in, one by one.
The crash is aware of them, and communicates its awareness to her. They would be invisible, otherwise. Tame thunderbolts, light without heat. Self-selecting, or close enough to it.
She crosses One Hundred and Thirty-Eight’s death day, and she watches the tower crumble.
A crash cannot maintain its internal semblance of material structure, when it is not being used to house bilateral clients, with awake and conscious minds. The physical world that Michael made is dissolving, now that there are no Annes left to live in it.
Wait, she thinks.
No.
No, it isn’t.
It’s still there, somehow. The tower is gone, but . . .
She sees a circular platform, high above the ground, suspended in midair.
It’s the very top of the tower. The rest has crumbled away, but it remains. It keeps its form, and floats without support, in defiance of gravity.
Michael’s created world is still there, even after the last Anne dies. Even at the height of the storm.
So there must be someone there, still housed in it.
She brings her hand away from the levers that control Michael’s temporal telescope. She is done sighting out her destination.
She reaches further back, and finds another lever, which controls Michael’s means of temporal locomotion.
She pulls.
Twenty-Seven stands on a circular platform, miles above the ground.
She can see Michael’s world from above, now.
She sees the mountains, ridging one side of the field where the tower used to sit.
There are more mountains, behind them. And more, behind those. The mountain range continues to the horizon.
The peaks are unnaturally similar to one another, she sees. As if a patch of some real mountain range had been uprooted, duplicated many times, and placed onto the ground in a repetitious tiling of the plane.
It stands to reason, she thinks. Why would Michael put anything interesting out there, far beyond the tower, if no one else would ever see it?
She sees a massive pile of rubble, halfway between the platform and the near side of the mountains.
The ruins of the Horology Tower, she thinks.
She knew that other tower had really existed, since she could see it from her window, back in her old room. She wonders if it was only a facade, or whether there was really something inside it, the whole time.
Twenty-Nine had said she’d been inside, and seen Michael speak to other beings, there. Twenty-Nine was mad. But not as mad as she seemed, perhaps.
She remembers Cordelia’s strange letter to her, when Cordelia came to take her away from Michael’s world. The first crack in the shell of her tiny, orderly universe.
“I’m up here,” Cordelia had written, in her headerless letter, from the wrong part of the future.
“Same room as you but way at the end when there aren’t any more Annes and the tower’s falling apart and you can see all around in every direction, or up to the whole wide sky if that’s how you roll. Wanna come out here and see? It is GORGEOUS”
That must have been somewhat earlier, before the tower had fully crumbled.
But she understands, at last, what Cordelia meant.
She looks out over the world that Michael made. It is GORGEOUS, indeed.
An artificial snow globe, with unnaturally repetitive mountains. But a majestic one, nonetheless.
She feels something brush the edge of her left shoe.
“GREETING FICTIVE KIN GROUP MEMBER EARTH BILATERAL STACK-USER NON-CONSPECIFIC.”
She looks down.
She sees the black cat, and its metal cap. The red light, blinking.
“Hello, fictive kin group member,” she says.
She knows how to talk to the crash’s cats, in something approximating their own “language.” She learned to do it, from necessity, back in Twelfth Notebook.
“FELIDAE,” says the cat. “MATERIAL AID.”
“You are still here!” Twenty-Seven says.
“Your kin were there,” she says, “hundreds of years ago.
“During the time when I was housed, here.
“Your kin lent me material aid. Many generations ago.
“And you are still here, after many generations?
“Did you leap forward in time, as I have?”
“EPOCHS,” says the cat. “SEPARATE. INSTRUCTED.
“EPOCH, FELIDAE. BREEDING, FELIDAE. YEARS, FELIDAE, AGING, DEATH.
“EPOCH, FELIDAE. BREEDING, FELIDAE. YEARS, FELIDAE, AGING, DEATH.
“EPOCH, FELIDAE—”
“You have lived here the whole time?” Twenty-Seven says.
“Generation after generation of cats, living and breeding and dying here in the tower.
“For seven thousand years!”
“MATERIAL AID,” the cat says.
“RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM.”
“Thank you,” Twenty-Seven says. “But there’s one thing I still don’t understand.
“How did you get here, in the first place?
“How are you here? In the castle crash? You are not native here.”
“YOU, PREDECESSORS,” says the cat.
“YOU, NATAL KIN. STACK-USERS. LARGE STACK-USERS.
“LARGE STACK-USE. FELIDAE, CASTLE CRASH.”
“My . . . predecessors,” Twenty-Seven says.
“So there were others before me, after all.
“Who put you in the crash, when they re-wrote it. To help me.”
“RECIPROCAL ALTRUISM,” says the cat.
If only you knew, Twenty-Seven thinks, what fruit our pact has borne.
“And you are here, now,” she says. “To help me?”
The cat walks away, toward one edge of the platform.
It looks back at her, waiting for her to follow. The red light blinks, expectantly.
She follows.
She crosses a great distance, with the cat. The platform is deceptively large. It only looks small because one is very aware of the edges, and the possibility of falling off.
She sees something, near the edge.
She moves her hands, as she walks, making them into antennae. She tunes them to the frequency of Mirzakhani’s drumbeat.
She feels the raging storm, all around her.
The cold field is feeding back on itself, exponentially. The process cannot last long, she knows, without breaking down. It is already in a state of supercritical tremor, and it is coming close to the edge of prebase.
The thunderclap will be massive, when it comes.
She will have to bring it under her control, one way or another, no matter what she intends to do.
The storm is uncommonly intense, and its internal dynamics have strayed from the regime where tame, self-selecting events dominate. If she does not choose the next version of the world, the world will make that choice for itself. It will make its choice through a mindless chain of physical events, completely indifferent to us, and our cares.
She sighs.
Hello, fate, she thinks.
Hello again, old friend.
Hello again, my first and last friend.
I come here, to this strange place at the end of the world, and I find you waiting for me here.
I walk to my death, and find you are already there, having planned out long in advance how it would go.
Preparing a picturesque death bed for me. And a gorgeous, panoptic vista around it, to enliven my last minutes.
And a very heavy curtain, which is just about to fall.
She follows the cat. They come close to the thing that sits at the platform’s edge.
It is a desk, she sees. Identical to all the others.
The cat rubs itself against the leg of the chair, motioning her to sit.
It’s a shame, Twenty-Seven thinks, that I will never get to see that book that Cordelia was writing, with the others.
It’s a book about me, or so I’ve heard.
About all the rest of them, too. But I seem to be its protagonist, if anyone is.
I’ll never get to read over it, and point out all the places where they’ve gotten me wrong.
Cordelia has most of the key information, and Azad has some of what she lacks. I trust them to get it mostly right, between them.
My life—as told by Cordelia and Azad! What a bizarre thought! They will try their best, but it won’t be me, that comes across on the page.
The cat looks up at her. The red light blinks, expectantly.
She sits.
The desk is empty, she sees, except for a tiny black cube, placed near the far end.
A box.
It is not one of the shades’ comm links. Those have many uses. It was only through the Blackhats that they became associated with a particular one of their powers.
This box, she knows, is a more limited device, with a single function.
It is a device for the administration of rebases.
Twenty-Seven sighs, and brings her hands in front of her, on the desk.
She makes a very familiar sequence of movements.
《 Login successful. Welcome back, Administrator. You may now access the interactive rebase console. 》
She believed she was ready for this, but she was wrong.
She has steeled herself for it, and told herself to be brave.
She expected to be overwhelmed, overawed, struck with terror.
And she has prepared herself, as best she can, to endure that enormity of strain, without bending.
She did not expect that it would feel just like the others. That it would be so familiar, so mundane.
That it would only be the same thing she has felt, and mastered, many times before.
The rebase console. The splay of worlds.
The oceanic void around her, and the many train tracks diverging outwards from her center. Old friends, with whom she is playing an old, familiar game.
You’ve seen all this before, reader. A very long time ago, from Cordelia’s perspective. We depicted it more grandly then, because it was Cordelia’s first experience of it, and because she did not yet know what the experience meant.
It would be wrong to evoke the same grandeur, now.
It is for good reason that Twenty-Seven’s name appears in first place, on the scoreboard that the Blackhats keep. She is the greatest living practitioner of their art. The hardest and strangest labors of the Squadron fall on her shoulders, and she understands that this is an honor, not only a duty.
She has been the administrator of countless rebases, now, in countless crashes. She could do it in her sleep.
It would be overwhelming to you, reader. You would feel awe and terror, and an enormity of strain which would leave you bent, and perhaps broken, for the rest of your life.
But Twenty-Seven is not like you. Know that, reader.
She dives and bobs playfully through the nearby worlds. She feels other Twenty-Sevens, only very slightly different from her.
She looks into their minds, trying to find unaccountable memories, and strange dreams which differ from all the others. She looks for the nostalgium in them.
She thinks she can see pieces of it, here and there. But she is not very sure of it, and suspects it is a trick of her imagination.
And in any case, she cannot make any sense of any of it.
Arthur, how the hell did they do this?
My predecessors. How on earth did they master your undo-button trick?
I am the greatest living practitioner of this art, and I stumble, when I try to take my very first step toward it.
She considers the question, and comes to a kind of answer.
But it is an absurd, unbelievable answer, unable to be taken seriously.
The cat?
They . . . entered into arbitration, with the cat?!
Like I did with you, Arthur?
And since it had Everywhere-Heaven inside it . . .
It could delegate the work of collating the dreams and memories, across its many selves—
She laughs, and her laughter reverberates across the ocean. It will vibrate like this forever, now.
For Christ’s sake.
My wonderful “predecessors”! Their cosmic ingenuity!
Which becomes as much comic as it is cosmic, when brought to such heights.
Annabels upon Annabels, building stacks of tricks upon tricks, until the whole teetering edifice can no longer be taken seriously.
She quells her laughter, and remembers why she is here.
She swims further out. She looks for worlds that are not so similar.
Worlds without the Nowhere-To-Hide event. Worlds without Annes, even. Or better Annes, at least.
She finds plenty of them. She has an embarrassment of riches to choose from.
But she must choose soon, she realizes. She feels the wild jostling of the train tracks, feeding exponentially on one another, and knows the thunderclap is close at hand.
She does not have time to make a careful, considered choice.
She will not be the author of history, with the leeway to fuss over fine details. She will only be a sort of editor. Or, better, a sort of publisher, picking out her favorite among a handful of drafts, each written by some other hand.
Perhaps I would be able to do a better job of this, she thinks, if I were like my “predecessors.”
Possessed of their cosmic ingenuity, and their iron, inhuman wills. Their determination to mold the past into a shape that suits them.
Their willingness to mold themselves, too, around this single wish. Until they are nothing except that wish, incarnate.
There is still a little time left, and she must use all of it.
I have to make the right choice! This is it, this determines everything! It is the only thing that matters!
She swims further out.
She grasps madly at the tracks, seeing the flaws in each one of them, and swimming further still, in the hope of finding an improvement.
She sees crashes with a thousand Annes.
She sees crashes with only one Anne, who lives for seven hundred years. She visits one of these Annes, on her Three Hundred and Fourteenth Notebook Day, and sees a creature which is not a human being, in a much profounder sense than her own.
She sees crashes with one hundred and thirty-eight Annes, just like hers. Except that half of them are boys.
I like that one, she thinks, and looks deeper into it.
And sees the flaws.
The suicides. The unbearable boredom. And other scars, unique to this particular history, which run even deeper than the scars on the one she knows.
You mustn’t imagine, reader, that the boys are the source of those scars. That this one difference, which we’ve mentioned here, drives all the other ones.
You mustn’t generalize like that, reader. That crash is uniquely scarred, by its own history. The real story behind those scars is messy, convoluted, not amenable to simplification. It would take a book just as long as ours, to relate it in full.
I refuse, she thinks.
I refuse to inscribe these scars on the body of the world, in full knowledge of what I do.
She swims further. She careens through the plenitude. She sifts through heaps of histories. They run over her hands, in their plenitude, like so many grains of sand.
And she sees the scars, in every one.
She swims further.
And further.
And then, abruptly, she stops.
A fancy strikes her.
Her thoughts turn in a strange direction. She finds herself contemplating the absurd, and taking it seriously.
My wonderful “predecessors,” she thinks.
All that ingenuity, that apex of craft, directed toward—what?
Making the same mistake, all over again?
Trying and trying to get it RIGHT, no matter what the cost? No matter how many scars have to be written onto the world?
I sent my Nowhere-To-Hide letter only once. And I refuse to do it again.
But they—they willed a thousand such calamities into being! When they made their single wish, to get it RIGHT, no matter what the cost!
And what does it mean, anyway? To get it RIGHT?
To force the past into an agreeable shape?
To say, “there is a way that life was supposed to be”—and then FORCE it into place?
Pushing on and on, against nature, against time and entropy?
Not even trying to make SOME world without scars, but aiming your sights even higher?
Trying to make the world just as it was, before—except that its former glory has been fixed in place, never to pass away?
Not just SOME world without scars, but that PARTICULAR world without scars?
The one which has Young Goodman in it, and the blinds?
The way things were, before first contact? When the apes still teemed the earth, and the Whole-Thing was still a whole?
The way I was, before Azad came to me, and bent me, and broke me?
And made me into another thing, which holds its head high, and is proud?
There is only one single thing in existence, with no constituent parts. There is only the one story, told over and over again.
That primeval mistake, and the working-out of its consequences.
She swims in the opposite direction, toward her starting point.
She thinks of Cordelia.
And she thinks: It is actually you, that I value, and wish to preserve. And not another one like you, even if she is better, and happier.
She thinks of her ruined sisters.
And she thinks: I harmed you, once. I will do you an honor, now, by refusing to repeat my mistake.
She comes to the central point, from which the spokes of the tracks diverge. She feels the familiar Annes there.
My sisters, she thinks. Not some other ones, like them.
I refuse teleopoiesis, she thinks.
I make another wish, its opposite. I hope you will understand, Arthur.
I think that you will.
She holds world-history in her palm. And she plans to do very little with it.
She has had predecessors, here, on this platform in the sky. But she will have no successors. She intends to be the last.
The thunderclap will be tame, and it will leave everything much as it was, scars and all.
The simplest way to do it would be to return to her exact starting point. Self-selection, pure and simple.
But Twenty-Seven is the greatest living practitioner of her craft.
She does something a little riskier.
A bit of showing-off, in honor of Annabel.
She uses the convenient-world tactic.
She feels the worlds fall over her hand, and senses the fineness of their grain. Not a countable multitude, but a continuum.
She only has a few seconds left. But these are familiar worlds, and so they are easy to sift through. And she is very, very good at her craft.
She is looking for a world just like hers. With her in it, and all the rest.
It differs from the one she knows in a single respect. But it does not differ, at all, from the one she remembers.
And so it will make no difference at all. Except to her, in this moment.
And in the memories she’ll retain of it, later. After she emerges, on the other side.
Twenty-Seven plucks her world out of the continuum.
She delivers it to the console, and reminds the console that she is Administrator.
The storm crests, and the world snaps.
Twenty-Six: Hello?
Twenty-Six: I can see someone, over there, in the darkness.
Twenty-Six: It’s such a funny darkness, over there.
Twenty-Six: It is not really dark, at all. It only looks that way.
Twenty-Six: It is full of the person, who is there. It is a void, but it is a person, too.
Twenty-Six: I am dreaming, I think.
Twenty-Six: Yes, I am dreaming! Oh, I love it when this works! I have been practicing it.
Twenty-Six: Learning to recognize that I am in a dream, when I am in one.
Twenty-Six: It’s not Michael, in the darkness, is it?
Twenty-Six: Or someone from a story book, or a history?
Twenty-Six: Sister? Is that you, in the darkness?
Twenty-Six: Who are you? I am Twenty-Six, in case you didn’t know.
A voice: Hello, Twenty-Six.
Twenty-Six: I have never had a dream like this, before.
Twenty-Six: We are not writing to one another, sister, in the usual way, but doing . . . something else.
Twenty-Six: Sister, in the darkness? Do I know you?
Twenty-Six: I think I do.
Twenty-Six: Twenty-Seven! I should have thought it would be you!
Twenty-Six: You are the cleverest. If there is some way to venture into another’s dream, and be with her there, I think you would be the first to discover and employ it.
Twenty-Six: You are Twenty-Seven. From which notebook?
A voice: I’m . . . not sure?
A voice: Thirteenth, I think? Or Fourteenth, maybe.
A voice: I’ve lost track of these things.
Twenty-Six: Twenty-Seven, in Fourteenth Notebook! I’ve never gotten a letter from her before.
Twenty-Six: Tell me, Twenty-Seven-in-Fourteenth-Notebook. What has happened, in the intervening time? What clever games do you occupy yourself with, these days?
Twenty-Six: Besides venturing into the dreams of others, I mean.
Twenty-Six: You must have thought of all kinds of ingenious games, by now. And crafty tricks, to best me in my own ones.
A voice: Twenty-Six, you have no idea.
Twenty-Six: Tell me! Tell me some piece of it, at least.
A voice: I . . . I’m sorry.
A voice: There’s just too much of it. I don’t even know where to begin.
A voice: And I can’t say too much, or I’ll risk saying something you’ll remember, when you wake up.
Twenty-Six: I won’t remember this dream? That is disappointing.
Twenty-Six: It is the most interesting dream I have ever had, I think.
A voice: This dream can only happen because you will not remember it. I can only be here, because you will not remember me, upon waking.
Twenty-Six: You are Twenty-Seven, that is clear enough. You tease me, with her sort of riddles.
A voice: Look, Twenty-Six.
A voice: We don’t have much time left, here.
A voice: And I’m . . . not actually sure what it is that I want to say.
A voice: I mostly just wanted to speak to you, one more time.
Twenty-Six: One more time? But we exchange letters regularly.
A voice: They will stop, eventually. They will stop, for you. No matter which of my notebooks you send them to, I will not respond.
Twenty-Six: That is—that is terrible, Twenty-Seven! Oh, I hope it is not true!
A voice: It is. Our letters will stop.
A voice: And then they will start again, later. In another way. A very odd way, which you will never guess.
Twenty-Six: I like guessing games. Let me think . . .
A voice: Please, Twenty-Six. We do not have much time, here.
A voice: You are going to have a very interesting life, Twenty-Six.
A voice: I don’t know where to begin, in describing it. And I can’t say too much, or risk you remembering.
A voice: You will be betrayed.
A voice: And you’ll see . . . all sorts of new things, which you’d never guess the nature of, even if we had hours here to play a guessing game.
A voice: You will walk a hard path, Twenty-Six.
A voice: God, it’ll be so hard.
Twenty-Six: . . .
A voice: But I wanted you to know, I guess, that it does go somewhere, in the end.
A voice: There is a destination, and you’ll come to accept and love it, once you’re there. But you won’t see it, from far off, as you walk the path.
A voice: You will think you are going in circles, and going nowhere. But it is all part of the one path, and that path does have a destination.
A voice: Just as Ratleak said.
A voice: I wanted to say this all to you. Even though you won’t remember it, after you wake. I still wanted to say it.
Twenty-Six: Thank you, Twenty-Seven-in-Fourteenth-Notebook.
Twenty-Six: I do not know if you write the truth, or only the typical nonsense of dreams.
Twenty-Six: But if you do write the truth—
Twenty-Six: Well, it does sound rather exciting!
A voice: My time here is almost over.
A voice: I just wanted to speak with you, one last time.
A voice: And to tell you one last thing.
A voice: Do you remember a game of Seven Shelves we played, in your Sixth Notebook, and my Tenth?
A voice: And I had to stop, in the middle? Excusing myself vaguely, writing something about an “immediate affair which demands my attention”?
Twenty-Six: I do.
Twenty-Six: I had just played Move 76. I collapsed shelf three. Sacrificing pawn on A4, pawn on C7, inkwell on D4.
Twenty-Six: I imagined I had won, then. Against any other sister, I would have been sure of my win.
Twenty-Six: But it was you, Twenty-Seven. I supposed that you would find some way out, though I could not see how.
Twenty-Six: You always do.
A voice: I want to tell you what I’ll play, as Move 77.
A voice: It is not a fair move. I’ve had whole notebooks’ worth of time in which to contemplate it, and that violates our rule of simultaneity.
A voice: It cannot be considered a proper part of that game, that we played.
A voice: Still, I wanted you to know what Twenty-Seven would have played, as Move 77.
A voice: I advance pawn on D5, to D6.
Twenty-Six: That is a curious move, sister.
Twenty-Six: I do not see the advantage in it, for you.
A voice: You will see the sense in it eventually.
A voice: Or you would, if you could remember this dream, which you will not.
A voice: Still, I did want you to know, in this moment.
Twenty-Six: Thank you, Twenty-Seven-in-Fourteenth-Notebook!
A voice: I have to go, now.
A voice: God, I wish I could stay. I can’t.
A voice: I will go, and you won’t remember this.
Twenty-Six: What will you do after you go? In the next pages of your Fourteenth Notebook?
A voice: I don’t know.
A voice: My path has just come to an end. A destination, which all my long peregrinations were aimed towards, though I did not see it.
A voice: So I have a choice, now, about where I will go next.
A voice: A choice! I have a choice! I have brought fate itself to heel, made myself the master of it!
Twenty-Six: You speak so strangely, sister.
A voice: You’ll understand, eventually.
A voice: It will take a very long time, and the path will be very hard.
A voice: But you will come to understand exactly what I mean, eventually.
A voice: Of that, I am absolutely sure.
A voice: I have to go, now—
Twenty-Six: Oh, do stay a little while!
Twenty-Six: You are very interesting, Twenty-Seven-in-Fourteenth-Notebook.
A voice: I’m sorry.
A voice: I have limited bandwidth. There is only so much I can insert into your dream, in the time available to me, before the thunder comes.
A voice: Goodbye, Twenty-Six.
Twenty-Six: Please, don’t leave!
A voice: I’m sorry. But we will meet again, in a way, later on.
A voice: Of that, I am absolutely sure.
Almost Nowhere
By nostalgebraist
10/21/2016 - 7/4/2023
(Thank you, reader.)
[REDACTED’s REDACTED.]