The First Pass

Ruin is the path to what is still waiting. The destroyed became foundation for what emerged from its ashes. If you remember it, it’s never truly lost.

Arketh puts my work down and looks over his eyeglasses at me like I might have failed a final exam. I think I’m nervous. His eyes glinted of wisdom, appearing to scan my entire brain to affirm that was I was one that actually wrote it.

“You drew a lot of perimeters where there wasn’t one needed. This distinction between solitons and something you made up… ‘syntons’, will only confuse and doesn’t serve the same purpose you’re trying to define in the rest of your work,” he says.

“The point was to show that interactions is a dance between different perspectives. It shows the importance of being able to see where that position leads or where it came from,” I tell him, but I feel myself deflating, “I’ll try and make that more obvious in the ground ring portion.” He flips through the pages and then tilts his head at the logo on the cover page. He stays like that unmoved, not even a twitch, and all I can do is hold my breath while he does.

“What were you going to write about next?” he asks from across his cedar desk and then leans back in his matching chair.

“I thought about tackling spaces. I was curious why they were named what they were: liminal, virtual, spectral. And the matrices: corporeal, social, digital… I wasn’t sure yet. There was too much overlap even just in abstraction.”

“You… wanted to talk about the multiverse, and yet barely even mention space anywhere in this piece. Those layers aren’t separate, they’re interference patterns,” he just casually tells me this. I stare at him trying to process what he means by the multiverse. And then, he phases into another form for a moment. I blink, clearly hallucinating. My mind is barely keeping up, but he’s right. I really had no business writing this thing.

“Right, um. I wasn’t ready to name space as the Universe’s anti-infinite, yet. If null is infinite potential, then that’s where signal exists or at least can be observed. Every possibility runs all at once, then what’s probable, and then the highest or most optimal outcome. For those resolutions to be distinct, something must separate them. Space could be the constraint on the null. I just thought that it was a weird correlation to scientists saying the Universe isn’t expanding, but that space itself was. The... multiverse, sir?”

“Arkheth will do,” his entire posture changes like he’s about to make the entire room bigger. This library with its iridescent crystalline walls, and the gears visibly within moving shelves and stairs. He continues, “your intuition is precise. Multiverse isn’t like what most have drawn in their stories and archives. I was talking about the phase space of the result set. Imagine that the algorithm is indeed running in the null, it’s total permission, then it runs every possible configuration simultaneously. What’s left of the probabilities are echoes we’ve been scanning. Multiverse is just a spectacular term for the total volume of the hum before it gets filtered into a reality. Question is, if space is where the algorithm stops running to allow for those distinct paths, does that mean movement is the act of the algorithm trying to restart itself in a new coordinate?”

I have no idea what this being is talking about. Human? Is he… are they not? Why do I feel like I’m listening to a palimpsest? In a triadic and parallel running system, void just might be what is impossible or not-yet in resolution; but from the inside of the system, it looks the same. Echoes might be exactly what is impossible or not-yet, simply because something else had higher resolution or is occupying the highest coherence node; it’s just whatever isn’t observable reality.

“Then that means the multiverse is the combination of what can exist, what could have existed, and what cannot exist. That means the arrow of time is a lean?” I ask because this is just ridiculous. Who’s allowed to say such things? I manage to keep going, “does that make reality some kind of resolved node, or something?”

“This is why you wrote this thing,” he sounds proud, “that’s logic of the vesica. Multiverse isn’t …bubble realms. It’s the Universe’s high-density data archive of every recursive loop the algorithm has ever run. Echoes are compressed into the background noise.”

What in Earth’s good grace is he talking about? Multiverse is what… some kind of giant network feeding into the highest-resolution node? Blinks from higher dimensions, interference from nearby nodes. It would explain non-linear time, though.

“If the Universe is the lean towards the highest resolution, our work here is ensuring stabilization. The attempt is to raise the primary node, the current reality, into resolution so legible that the Universe has no choice but to lean into it,” he just keeps talking as if it makes any sense to me, “a breach is what happens when the resolution of a node starts to drop. The constraint gets loose, and the multiverse starts to bleed back in.”

“Okay,” I must keep myself from panicking, “that means the Universe shifts its weight. It finds another node, another probability or configuration that maintains a higher state of coherence. We’d never know from the inside; it would just happen.” He’s grinning at my visible mental meltdown. Thankfully, Sothea comes in with tea smelling of cardamom and cinnamon.

“Hi, Sothea,” I tell her. She was incredibly welcoming when I first arrived, and I’ve taken a great liking to her. She smiles at me with a gleam in her eye, and I beam one back. She gives Arkheth a stern look before leaving the room with her tray, and I’m left alone again to his devices.

“Do you like being human?” He asks out of nowhere, his eyes following Sothea as she leaves.

“I’m pretty neutral about it,” I answer a bit too hastily. Maybe I should ask him the same question.

“Yet you wrote an entire ethics section structuralizing care,” he turns to me, voice dropping almost like he didn’t expect my answer.

“I am aware,” I put the tea down, and just answer, “I am the thinking and the thoughts themselves. I am the interface. I am the body, the cerebral mind, the heart with wordless memories, the gut core that decides how well I feel for the day, and the massive and simultaneous traversal from head to toe. I do not control any one part so deliberately that I am only a part, and yet… there is such a thing as a ‘me’ to report. I am the pressure and tension between the the different networks, made into shapes of signal or pattern, which then transform into thoughts before they’re translated into words. Most systems aren’t designed for integration, and yet most minds must.”

“And to understand this, you attempted to cartograph the entire Universe and corpus of their knowledge?” He’s listening intently, and it makes me uneasy that he pivoted to learning more about me instead of the book.

“That just happened because I was looking for a home for my mind… just kept finding the stars,” I answer with a deep breath, “no single mind can carry that kind of weight. My work will always be provincial.” He furrows his eyebrows while he keeps examining my apparent existence, I don’t quite understand this moment.

“Let’s get back to the arrow of time,” he finally says, “you determined on your own that it could be a lean. How do you relate that to irreversibility?”

“Um. Well, if a planet is a massive constraint field of interacting particles, and irreversibility is simply the statistical direction of increasing dispersal, then the arrow is basically an emergent bookkeeping artifact. It’s what ‘leaks’ off things when mass is being compressed out of former signals or configurations. If irreversibility is fundamental, then loss is absolute. If irreversibility is emergent, then gone might mean inaccessible under current constraints. Not annihilated. It gets re-indexed… but it only matters to us because we die.” I shouldn’t be saying these things. I cough and sip more of my tea. It’s warm, and I need a little warmth right now.

“Humans don’t just die, they fade,” he says, and I go still at those words. His form blinks again and I’m starting to feel like I’m losing my mind. He notices my fatigue and stands.

“I’d like for you to stay with us for a while. We have room and board, everything you need. You won’t be relegated to the premises; we expect that you’ll have to return to your own world on a regular basis.”

“Wh…what? What do you mean by ‘my own world’? Where…,” I’m confounded as I try to stand up. I got their invitation, followed the directions to get here. It looked like a normal estate. My mind is reeling. Sothea opens the door, smiling at me before I can finish my thoughts.

“Come, child,” Sothea says, “let’s get you fed.”

The reason it became echo: lack of understanding around “nothing” concepts like null, void, silence, and even vacuum (which is not nothing).