Chapter 1 - A Knock In Darkness

It always starts with darkness, a voice calling out for something they need. I have called out for help at the start, and Finnelgamin arrived to that effect. The second time, I reached into the void fully aware that I should not. I stole. I removed an unfilled gem from there. How I managed to even reach it is beyond me, but that was Rebecca, a child of the void with a mind of her own, ready to be an idea of the void. Instead, she became an idea of me, for me, and tried to help me to the best of her abilities. When she realized that I had no intention of letting her see me and interact with all of me, she left, taking the world I created for her along.

It begins with a knock. It’s a knock on the door of something without doors. No. I created a door in hopes of reconnecting to Rebecca. All I ended up with was a ladder up to a hatch to an emptiness left behind after the created world vanished, and a knock. That knock is terrifying. I am too afraid to open the doorway. I hope that it’s her, but she often told me to treat her as dead. I hesitate enough to stop. Words no longer on pages of a notebook. A new age demands new tools. I pause here, at the knock. May it be there when I return.

break

I came back the next day, sipping at a concoction that is new to me. The knock persists, rhythmical on the hatch door into nothingness. How could this person remain out there for such a long time without going mad? Granted, it was just one day, but to an average human being repeating an action over that amount of time would drive one mad. Perhaps like Rebecca at the start, this being has no sense of time in this timeless space. Though I was in the room, I had no solid body. I wanted to float through the wall to face what awaited me without whatever it was knowing I was there, but found the walls would not let me through. No matter how I tried, my creationism was only working within the confines of this cage.

“Hello?” I asked through a formed mouth and vocal cords. I faded them out of existence shortly after. Silence. The knock had stopped only to move to a different spot in the room and keep shifting around for a minute until it repeated at the hatch. Whoever it was, they could not open the piece of wood themselves.

break

It was the next day. Having been afraid of engaging whoever was at the hatch at the time, I slunk off to work early. Today I had a different strategy. The second I entered the little room in darkness, I split myself into four physical beings of my mind. Without a second of hesitation, beast yanked the hatch open to the dark outside and growled at the opening as a hand appeared on the edge.

“Finally!” A voice said. It was a young girl. When a face showed up, her excitement changed to disappointment over what she saw. I stepped forward to the ladder as the girl dropped into the enclosure. “Hey.”

“Who are you?” I asked, keeping beast from attacking her. “Why were you in the endless darkness? Are you- Do you know-?” I wanted to ask about Rebecca, but did not want to know too much before I knew who I was dealing with.

“I’m me,” she said, as if she was the only one that existed. “The pressing question is: Who are you, and what are you doing in my domain?”

“Your domain?” I asked. “I made this space. I pulled it out of my mind for… for a friend of mine. Not that it’s much of that place anymore. She kinda… took it with her.” The girl narrowed her eyes. She was short, no more than four feet tall, and had dark brown hair in a short cut. Her clothes were something of a uniform, with various pockets and slack at the arm and leg joints for ease of movement. The whole thing was light blue with red accents on shoulders and along the body.

“Then why is it so empty, huh?” She countered. “I keep it empty. I can create universes in here, but it’s tradition to keep it empty, so there is nothing here. Except you. You’re not supposed to be here, all of you.” I looked to my mental counterparts and reabsorbed them by tapping three spots on my body that accomplished the task.

“Sorry,” I said. “But I need to know more. I’ve been here for a long time. How long have you been here?” She put out her hands and seemed to count on her fingers for a moment. When she looked up, I was almost entertained by her childish demeanor.

“Five-hundred twenty-four million three-hundred fifty-eight thousand one-hundred twelve years,” she said, with no regard for the giant number just put before me. “I might be off by a few years, but I’ve got seventy-five million years to go before I can get back to the original place I’m from.”

“But you said this was YOUR domain,” I said.

“Well, it is, for the six-hundred million years I have to stay here,” she said. “But you aren’t supposed to be here. I was just flying around, trying to see if there are limits to the space, but then I stumbled into this little thing. It’s crazy since this space is supposed to be empty. Everyone told me so. Wouldn’t be a time-out if they gave me something to play with, would it?”

“Time-out?” I said, thinking of a child’s time-out after doing something bad or wrong. It was a punishment, but what kind of person would make a punishment last six hundred million years? A human would go crazy after the first hundred, given they were kept alive somehow over the span. “How old are you?”

“I’m five,” she said, but looked more like a ten-year-old.

“Five what?”

“Five billion years old,” she said. “Well, almost. How about you?”

“I’m twenty nine years old,” I said, much to her look of shock.

“That’s not possible,” she said. “Look.” She drew out a strange looking wristwatch from underneath a light blue sleeve. The second hand was counting different numbers that I’d known. They were years, and there were one hundred on the face. The face was further broken into ten slices, numbered like a clock would be. “You’d be about five hundred years old since the start of this conversation.” She motioned a hand between herself and the room.

“I’m twenty-nine outside of this,” I said. “This isn’t really where I exist. I just reach here through this.” I moved a hand over the room to mock her movement.

“How?” She asked. “Did you get here by some dimensional tear? Did you time-lapse yourself from your reality?”

“No, I just… I made this here, with my mind,” I said, much to her grin.

“So you’re like me!” She said, jumping up to burst flowers into the room. For just one moment, the whole room was filled with flowers in bloom. When she snapped her fingers, the flowers turned into dust of their colors and flowed to her palm as if magnetic on the air. The dust kept flowing into her palm until a budding flower appeared and opened up to what looked like a universe. Before I had a chance to focus on it, the girl closed her palm on the flower, as it flowed past her fingers in liquid form, evaporating before it hit the ground.

“Did you just make a whole universe and destroy it?” I asked. She nodded with no semblance of remorse. Who was she? I wanted to ask, but had a feeling I already knew. That which can give life and take it away in such a random manner was on par with god. “What’s your name?”

“You first,” she said. “Also, where did the furry guy go? Wasn’t there also a kid in here, and a robot-skeleton?” I waved the question away for the time being.

“Later,” I said. “My name is Jack. The other guys are a part of me, but in my world they don’t get to come out as separate entities.”

“I’m Lila,” she said. “What do you mean by ‘part of you’?”

“My mind’s broken,” I said, without a moment of hesitation. It was not something I went around telling everyone, but this was a stranger. It felt more like a warning.

“Who’s mind isn’t a little broken?” She asked, with a giant grin.

I decided to leave her there, wondering whether she could access the laptop on the table. Rather than let her, I made the computer invisible for the time being, just to keep it away from her, but had a feeling she would be able to reverse my creationism, seeing as she just exterminated trillions of unknown lives.

“I’ve gotta go,” I said. Her eyes opened in surprise.

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. With a wave, I created a fridge in the room stocked with popular snacks I liked to eat. “Help yourself to some snacks. I’ll be back in… I don’t know, maybe it’s two hundred years on your time measurement. For me, it will be just one day. Later, Lila.”

“See ya, Jack,” she said, and walked over to the fridge without a care in the world. This was different. I did not create her, did not call out to her in the void. Was it still something that would agitate the Rahin to the point of erasing my story from the void? I hoped not as I vanished from the tiny room in the middle of a giant darkness.

break

When I returned the next day at my morning beverage, Lila was still in the room, still not aware of the invisible laptop. I created a form, but she did not become aware of me right away. She was busy drawing something in the air, an artform I have never seen before. It was like moving gravity-free sand around in various colors.

“Hey, Lila,” I said, making her jump.

“JACK!” She exclaimed. “You’ve been gone ages! You said two hundred years, but it was much longer.”

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I did some math on my side and it turns out my one day is your twenty thousand years.” She grimaced, then shrugged.

“Your world’s weird,” she said. “But all I have is time.”

“By my calculations, you’re going to be here for ten of my years,” I said. “That’s pretty crazy. What did you do to get this ‘time-out’?” Her gaze switched back to the floating sand artwork. It was more intricate than what I thought. The sand changed color by touch, shifting in hue at point of impact and movement, adding depth to the designs possible.

“Just this and that, nothing really horrible,” she said. “I may have bullied my younger brother a little, but I was just teasing. Siblings have a tendency to hurt each other sometimes for no reason.” Maybe she was a distant relative of Rebecca or Finnelgamin. I had to entertain the possibility.

“Do the names Rebecca and Finnelgamin mean anything to you?” I asked.

“Nope,” she answered back right away. “Did I remember you mentioning last time that you have creationism, too?” She looked my way when I failed to answer. Her eyes demanded one, looking far more serious than a simple ten-year-old’s.

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Then come help me with this, won’t you?”

“With the sand?”

I walked up to her moving the sand around to a realization that she was not simply moving colorful pebbles around. It looked like a game, solar systems built in space as networks of population. With one motion, she shifted part of the network over, changing the color to a different hue.

“Is this a game?” I asked, too afraid to question whether she was playing with brand new life again.

“Nope,” she said. “They just won’t… cooperate for some reason. Look. I take some of the blue and move them to red, but they don’t become purple, just turn blue. They are opposed to mixing. Can you imagine that if paint was opposed to mixing and you’d end up painting with like a marbled liquid? That’s ridiculous, though it could be fun.”

“What about these oranges over here?” I asked, at the corner of the square map floating in the air. “Aren’t those just yellow and reds cooperating? There are some green groups scattered about, too.”

“Yeah, they’re doing fine, kinda,” Lila said. “But look.” She moved some green over to blue, but they did not blend to teal, only sank into the blue. Then Lila moved a bit of green over to red, and they sank into red instead of becoming brown.

“Those two must count themselves special or something,” I said. “What you need is a common enemy. No matter how many dividing forces there are, if there is one being that threatens them all, they will bind together.” I felt stupid instructing a child to create chaos for some poor living beings. I was almost giving her a magnifying glass to burn ants.

“A common enemy, huh?” She pondered. “Maybe something that eats them no matter what color they are. Good call. Was that idea from your world?”

“Yeah,” I replied. “It comes up more often than you’d think. People always look for ways to divide themselves, making changes to a world without a common enemy that everyone would face.”

“Why don’t you make one then?” She asked. “Or become one.”

“My world doesn’t work on the same principle as this,” I pointed to the floating sand network. “Imagine being one grain in the whole field and trying to be you at the same time. Anything you’d do affects your wellbeing as well.”

“Wouldn’t that just make more sense?” She said, “Then you’d just make the world like you want the world to be and live in it without qualms.”

“Qualms, huh?”

“Yup,” Lila said.

“What about if you are only a grain of sand in that whole thing, without your control abilities?”

“Oof, that would suck,” she said, “You’d have to convince every single other grain of sand to be like you from within that mess. Then all of a sudden you could be moved to some other place, forced to acclimate to a new way of living. That’s harsh.”

“Yup,” I said. “Qualms all the way on my side. Not that I think my way of viewing life is good enough to be made the only one in the world, but if I were the person deciding it, I’d be able to do it. It would be chaos though.”

“I think the idea is running away from you, Jack,” she said.

“Well, I gotta go again,” I said. “I’ve gotta get to work.”

“Are you going to be back in another 20K?”

“Might be longer, actually,” I said. “It’s a Friday today, a day of work before two days free. I’ll probably be back in about 60K years. Ok?” The sentence felt weird to say, but time ran differently for Lila, and she would be there for ten of my years anyway. This was the Zaxient and Human conundrum all over again.

“Alright, see ya then, Jack,” she said, without even looking away from the colorful artwork of floating sand. She reminded me of JJ a bit, always lost to playtime.

break

I was back at the writing file on Monday morning, sitting in a tea place in the city as I often did to get a bit of writing done before work. I wondered if Lila waited patiently for me, but I doubted it. If she could create things in the darkness beyond the room, why hadn’t she? I went into the enclosure my mind could access and created a realistic form. Much to my surprise, Lila was waiting for me and jumped to hug me the second I was formed.

“H- hey, Lila,” I said, with surprise. “Are you ok?”

“Oh, Jack,” she said. “You’ve been suffering a while.” I looked up and around the room to find the laptop open to the room, glowing light from an invisible object. I grabbed her shoulders to peel her away.

“It’s not nice to rummage through someone else’s stuff, Lila,” I said.

“So, who’s this Rebecca lady?” she asked, without one word sinking in. “Was she your girlfriend?”

“Not really,” I replied. “I created her. She was like a life I found out here, before there was a ‘here.’ It was the same with the first try, Finn.”

“Wait,” Lila said. She waved a hand to create a seat for herself in the room and motioned her hand for me to go on.

“Short story shorter, Finn was created because I was lonely,” I said. “He was a friend I wished I had in real life, but was created by me, so had access to the mess that was my mind. I tried to give him a satisfying story, but there is a divide between what he wanted and what I thought would be a good story. So we had to go separate ways. I THOUGHT we went separate ways.

“So I came back here again, looking for help this time. I wanted to live a better life, but was too lazy to do it myself. I told myself that creating a voice in my head would make it easier to stay away from unhealthy foods, do more exercise, and generally live better. It wasn’t like I wanted her to be a real person, a full uncontrollable artificial intelligence.

“She arrived like a baby, inspired by the visage of my old crush, someone I was hung up on far too much. I taught her everything, then tried to get rid of her in adventures. In the end, she cut off the world from this little space, and left me in the dark. That’s where I am now.” Lila was not paying attention, instead throwing tiny fireworks into the air where they exploded in a wide array of colors and shapes.

“Lila?” I asked.

“Huh?” She asked, turning in a new swiveling chair that she created. “Oh! Right. Sorry. I stopped listening at the start. You don’t really know how to entice. That was utterly dry, Jack. Give it some spice, some pizzazz. Drop some crazy elements into it.”

“There were many crazy elements in it,” I said, in my defense. “I just omitted them to get to the main story. I thought you wouldn’t care for the whole jumble of ideas pouring out of their stories. Plus they ended up being two whole books.”

“Let me read them,” she said. “I want to read them.”

“They aren’t… for kids, necessarily,” I said. “They deal with my mind a lot, and that place is messy with adult stuff.” In the blink of an eye, Lila turned from what looked like a ten-year-old, into a teenager. With another blink, she was a woman.

“Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you still a child even if you change form?”

“Jack, don’t be silly,” she said, while walking over. Her form was as tall as me, something I found quite disarming. “I'm five billion years old. I’ve been five since before I went in here. You’re under a silly notion that kids can't learn about all things at any age.”

“No, it’s just that in my world children are held in a period of innocence,” I said. “It’s like starter years that parents in comfortable places choose to keep knowledge away from kids to keep them kids.”

“Wow,” Lila said. “That sounds pretty evil.”

“They call it kindness,” I replied. “To keep the children away from how vile and unfair the world can be for just a moment longer.”

“And then those kids go out into the world and immediately get taken advantage of?” She asked. “That’s pretty dark. Better they know and prepare themselves for it.”

“Well, parents don’t see it that way,” I said. “They want to protect their children, in turn hurting their future thinking. But there really isn’t a way out of it anymore. Everyone adapted the same learning as they further the innocence idea through film and television shows that keep their kids locked to one type of mindset. Then, at the worst time in their development, they explain the rest of the unfairness in the world, leading to much unrest and bouts of anger.”

“That’s terrible,” She said. “And you went through the same thing?”

“Yeah, I had my period of punching walls having to face the harshness of the world and my changing body,” I said. “It’s called puberty, a metamorphosis of bodies from child to adult. Is there reproduction wherever you’re from?” Lila nodded.

“Yeah, and I found out about it like at the very start,” she said. “So, you see, I’m not really a child, just enjoy the visage of it. So, can I see those books you have about Finn and Rebecca?”

“Or are you just saying you’re not a child so I give you the books?”

Lila grimaced. I narrowed my eyes over her until she sighed. With a hand motion, she turned herself back into a child.

“Fine, jeez,” she said. “I’m still considered a child even at five billion years old. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to read those books you wrote. So, why not just give them to me? Come on, Jack, give me something interesting to do in this place.”

“Can’t you just create stuff in the darkness out there?”

“I can, but this is more interesting,” she said. “A spot in the darkness where a person comes to visit from another world? You’re like the zero-point of this place now. I map the area by how far I can get away from it. And then I find out you have stories you can share with me? Of course I want to read them. So what if they have adult elements? I really did learn all about reproduction already, but it’s not like it will be the same as in your world. My world is different from yours. I can create life at will, so creating something new between two is a wild process.”

“Wild process?” I asked.

“I can explain it to you, if you’d like,” Lila said. “But something for something, Jack.” I put a hand to my forehead and ran my fingers through my hair in thought.

“Ok,” I said. “But we’re starting with something lighter than Finn and Rebecca. They aren’t necessarily my stories, well, they are. It’s hard to explain. I developed them, but they come from the void, something I’d need to explain later.”

“Ok,” she said. “So, what do you have for me?” I pulled a small booklet from thin air with the story of Nilviivlin inside.

“A dragon, and a little girl,” I said, “Enjoy. See you in another twenty.”

I left the space thinking of the adult elements of that story. They were forced in, but applied to the dragon as well, so they were related to the story. I wanted to create a happy ending to it, but the current one felt so fitting. I would probably rewrite it for the innocence it could have, the valued time of a person’s life that inspired ideas of same innocence. That’s what JJ was, after all.

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