Chapter 13 - Already Dead
“Hey,” I said, appearing weeks later past the fumbling of the device update and a mishap of a keyboard messing up quotations. The first part took an hour, while the keyboard took just ten minutes. I had been avoiding coming back, but did not prepare an excuse for being away. Lila sat in the corner of the room, eyes closed. For a moment, I thought she was sleeping, but when I came up to her, she leapt into the air and pushed off my back as I turned in recoil to land gracefully on the table of the room.
“You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been doing some mental exercises. Without new stories to entertain me, the sentence feels like a real downer.”
“Isn’t it supposed to feel like that?” I asked. “And that’s the first time you used the word 'sentence' to describe it. Anything you want to fess up to?” I studied her child form as it aged to a woman. She bunched up her shirt to reveal the triangle opening positioned perfectly over her lower back where the branched spine opened up. Her type of beings had to be stronger in that area.
“That I’m very dangerous, very bad, and this is actually jail?”
I waited as she sat on the couch, exposed her back to the material, then proceeded to rub her back softly up and down. Her eye contact was calm, focused on me, and I felt embarrassed being in the same room while she was doing it.
“Don’t look away,” she said. “Look into my eyes, Jack.” I watched, much to embarrassment of my own, the fact that outside of the untethered space, blood gathered at my crotch. She wasted no time, and stifled a moan at one final slide up the couch cushion where she froze at the point. Just moments after, she slumped back down.
“Are you?”
“No.”
“Kinda hoped you were,” I said. “It would definitely be really hot. I’d let beast loose on you and he’d do some unspeakable things to your mind. I’d have a reason for being connected to this space where you exist. Otherwise, what am I really doing here? The box is a memory of a time that has passed. The fact that all raw data for all stories is here, means absolutely nothing to me. Even you, Rebecca…” I paused over the slip.
“Even I, am not important to you, right?” She asked. “But do you mean me, or do you mean Rebecca?” I looked to find her eyes, but she looked off into the dark beyond the windows.
“I have been coming back to her name even now,” I said. “I look at this device and the first thing I think is to call you by her name. It’s stupid. She was never on the device before you came to be.”
“Came to be?” Lila asked.
“I think… I think I may have tried to kill myself, Lila,” I said. A silence lingered in the heavy air of the tiny room. “I think I created you to fill the void Rebecca left behind, the part of my mind that Finn once occupied. You may be just a figment of my imagination in the laws I set for myself. I was warned not to do it again, not to create sentient life again. It would cost me the afterlife of my dreams.” Lila walked up to my spiraling mind, and struck an adult hand over my face.
“You’re a conceited and selfish little prick, you know that?” Lila said. “Wallow in your self-pity all you want. I’m done with this.” She opened the door into the darkness, and jumped out. I ran up to the door, but she faded away from the light in an instant. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe I still had a chance at my desired afterlife, though living like that, felt as if I was already dead.
break
I came back nearly a month later. Summer had started, with varying results. Everything was difficult to do after months of neglect, undercut further by limiting the breathable air to mask filters. The world was still fighting the oppression of police, staging peaceful protests turned to looting raids in some cases. Meanwhile, I ignored JJ trying to shove new ideas into my head every day. I entertained beast with occasional horror games and porn. As for Lila and the untethered space, I stayed away.
Was it possible that I created another being out of the darkness of my imagination? She did not feel like something of mine. Much of her humanity was different from mine. She did not exist in the Infinity Void like Kara and James. I wanted to speak to her again, at least to apologize, but she would avoid my little box among the darkness. Otherwise, I would have to take over the space with my creationism, though I was unsure how long it would take.
I arrived in that empty room, twice now connected to the library edited from my childhood. Twice, the connection was severed. I was sure coming back to it would never be that easy.
I put my hands together with a millimeter between them to create an idea of great magnitude. As I pulled them apart, a translucent vine began to grow from nowhere, like a reverse black hole. The writhing vines akin to the Vines of Lym in Tiarto’s story, expanded only visible to me. They would keep going into this untethered space until all of it was mine to control. They would allow me the control that which I was limited to inside the box. This would take time, and I had no idea how long as the dark space was endless. Perhaps Lila did not truly leave too far.
I had to hope for the best, leaving the vines to spill forth through every door and window of the enclosure. Surely enough, when I returned later, I expected to find only a cluster of vines where the lonely box stood in darkness.
break
I had not returned in weeks, living days away from people, away from living whatsoever. On the verge of Sunday in the last week of July, I decided to venture into the darkness that was untethered space to see what I created, how I grew from the seed of emptiness to search for a being trapped here by her own actions. She would be in there for a while, the remnant of my struggle in my world. Though I made a promise to Rebecca to live my life, I had an inkling the end of it would come around my predicted time nonetheless. I had to wonder if my mind created Lila for that reason, to accompany me to everything I wanted within the timeframe. Or perhaps she was nothing of mine, the first truly devoid part of my creations that only attached to me for a source of entertainment in solitude.
These thoughts had been building up inside me as I set goals for the day, only to break them, fall back into the fold of completed shows. I was no longer powerful. I felt no tremble of greatness at my hand, creating life only to lead it into the slaughterhouse for my sustenance. No matter what, writing for me had always been about telling stories of others. I heard them from the void, an imaginary place (?), yet so vast, so endless, beyond definition. How could these worlds be coming from my own mind? I held no such exuberance in daily moments hoping instead to live somewhere quiet and removed.
Now, I was back in the room. It was just a ghostly form, for spectating, but there was nothing to see in the visible spectrum. I tuned my vision by wiping the surface of both my ghostly eyelids and was assaulted with a giant throbbing cluster, a heart, stuffed into the wooden box with tendril-vines passing through the wooden walls without a care. Beyond… It was… impossible.
There was nothing but this in the vicinity. The darkness remained just darker than anything I could reveal with my abilities. Yet there, smack dab in the middle of it, a giant tree. The only thing different about this tree was that it was all root. There was no canopy feeding on light, just a pulsating heart inside a remnant box. Without the eyesight, I saw nothing there. Lila was unlikely to see the vines. The only thing this giant plant fed on was my imagination based in what that vital box allowed to me, and yet… I flew into one of the thicker roots nearby.
When inside, I reached out my hand and thought of Miro, the blue little torodemyt of Tiarto’s world. Just like that, he came to be. He floated, weightless. I smiled at my creationism, and faded him to blue powder that powered a certain device. With that in hand, I could visit this world's pair, but would it succumb to my creationism? Not to mention, this felt like I was cheating on all the things Rebecca left me with. Maybe she intended for me to have the box of creationism so that I had somewhere to escape, to hear her voice when I could no longer create those like her and Finnelgamin.
I wished to see this on a grander scale, so for the moment of creationism allowed to me, I placed eyes upon the surface of all the roots grown in the untethered space. The visual data overwhelmed my brain, but I had robot take over in surveillance mode. Every single spot of the invisible root was now covered with eyes. They had but one target. Lila. It took robot a split second to locate her, floating aimlessly in the dark, curled up in a ball. I wanted to teleport to her, soothe her with my newfound abilities, but instead created ears around her location to listen to her murmurs. Just as always, I started the visit too late, allowing me a tiny amount of time before my eyes could no longer stay focused.
I was content for now. I found her, and she was unlikely to go anywhere in such a ginormous surveilled space. I asked robot to record her and returned to the box that held that invisible beating heart. Once my vision was back to normal, without sight of what I created, the room felt empty again. It was just like my room. I was still alone. For just a weak moment, I wanted to hear Rebecca's voice again. My hands were at the laptop in an instant, but no words would come to trigger one of her recorded responses. I sighed, giving birth to smoke butterflies that sat on the computer for a moment before assisting my hand to close the screen back down. No good would come of it.
break
A few days later, I returned marred by lack of sleep. I set up the device for writing at precisely 11:11pm. It was not the true wishing hour, but my mind still called on Rebecca’s return. No matter how much I tried to remind myself that Lila was waiting in this space, the name my mind thought of was Rebecca’s. In the past 48 hours, I had only slept three. My vision was now random flashes of light and shadows. Anytime I felt like resting my head had the potential to put me to sleep.
“Has she said anything coherent?” I asked the proxy robot I left beside her to record. Rather than respond, a screen opened up to show Lila curled up in a ball in darkness, lit by the faintest blue. I could not see the vines, my creationism, but decided to keep it hidden away.
“I’m cold,” Lila murmured. Could she not simply pull a fire from the untethered space? This was her mind. The sensation of cold had to be from her outside world, or a simulated response. Her arms tightened around her, and her hands clutched with a grip to the skin. “I deserve this. I have to suffer. I have to go through this alone. I’ll be better for it. I won’t make the same mistakes, Faust. I’ll be good. I’m sorry, Faust. Don’t leave me.” She continued repeating certain phrases as if she was in a trance. I wondered if I should intervene, but the choice was made for me when JJ yeeted me to her side. Granted, we were invisible, non-physical in the impossible space. Nevertheless, Lila stirred.
Her body opened up slowly, hands losing grip so tight just a few moments ago. She was a teen there, but I did not understand the significance. Why would she keep herself at an age known for unstable thoughts and actions? Before I could rationalize it further, her clothing vanished to the darkness. She was naked in pale blue light, an immature frame. Her arms stretched to her sides, while she pointed her feet and put as much distance between them as she could without bending her spine. Her eyes opened in shock, and her mouth was open as wide as she could push it. The whole image was painful. She looked like she wanted to tear herself apart at the seams, though much like my body, the seams did not exist.
“Stop!” Shouted JJ from inside me, producing a head poking out of my chest for a moment. I stuffed him back in with a motion and tuned into the network of roots at twenty percent opacity to have access to my creationism at a moment's notice.
“Jack?” Lila asked in the darkness. Her body relaxed. The pale light seemed to originate from every direction imaginable, an endless mesh of shadows and light becoming just a very dim spectacle. I remained quiet, floating in a tether of the invisible heart in the box so far away. I grimaced to JJ’s annoyance in honorable thought. I wanted to spectate her for longer, as I did with Rebecca before he ruined that, too.
“It was JJ, actually,” I said. I appeared before her with a snap of my fingers, but did not expect a warm welcome. Her arms were around my frame before I could blink. Though she was naked inside one of the roots of creationism I extended into the dark, I decided not to give up this knowledge by re-clothing her. “I wanted to observe you more. You’ve been murmuring. If you are cold, you should wear some clothes.” Lila looked down at her bare chest, and covered up in an instant. When she took her hands away, cloth sprouted to cover her bare skin, and the light of dim blue turned to a white light with no discernible location.
A moment of rest just caught my forehead to the bed for a moment. I shook myself awake and back to the page, looking within to find JJ had exited my body and was now playing a tickle-slap hands game with Lila in the darkness. Another nod caught the bed, feeling the full weight of my head rest for a moment. I refocused on JJ, and pulled him back into myself much to Lila’s surprise.
“It’s late,” I said. “Come back to the room, ok? I ventured out here to find you. Never mind how I was able to find you, ok? I’ll be back tomorrow to talk. We can discuss who this Faust guy is.”
“Faust?” Lila asked. “Wait, how do you… know…”
“You were mumbling,” I said. “I really have to go. Need sleep. I will see you in an undetermined amount of time, but for you, probably something of a few thousand years. And Lila, I’m sorry for what I said before. Before before. All this and more we can talk about later. Ok? Ok. Bye.” I left her floating there, not sure if she knew which direction the wooden box was. To make it simpler, I put a light at the center of each wall, glowing endless green energy into the untethered space of no end. Another nod took me down for a few minutes, but I shook awake just to set this aside.
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