posted 2020-08-11 07:42:52
And Jones watches over the grid, thin lines on white with a black point at the origin. Jones has no memory of another place nor time before, no awareness of the lack of memory. Awareness of this only. Lines on white nothingness running off to infinity in two dimensions. Like the backdrop for a computer model scientists use to describe gravity and the laws of stuff happening. He perceives that the lines inch toward one another, or perhaps that he (though there is no sense of motion) is slowly moving away from the origin.
Pain, suddenly. He flails in space, grasping at walls that aren't there. Now he's infinitesimal and everywhere, inside himself, inside all places, all people, all variations merging from infinite wideness to infinite collapse. All fractal variations of everything leading up to the realization that everything happens because that's how it happens here, in this instance, in this variation.
He knows: an infinite number of ways to get to only a single possible destination.
The new knowledge that reality is just a four-dimensional funnel places him above space, the cosmos, the multiverse, the Every, all Size and When, Existence itself. The singularity. The nexus. The grid. Now he's infinite and everywhere. Now he touches the grid, assimilates the grid, becomes the nexus.
Kieth is opening her eyes looking around the alley and the refuse she's slumped in. She is feeling in her pocket the extra needle she'd left there, hoping she hasn't already used and forgotten. She is needing it because she is feeling him in her head again. With every cell she is feeling him, needing him, needing – the needle cracks the skin –
He becomes aware of the crack and what it means, puts forth his will, tears it open –