Chapter 15 - To Many Unhappy Returns
After a few weeks spent playing an old game into hours of morning, I came back to the box growing the ever-expanding creationism network within untethered space. Though I still had connections to the Infinity Void with ideas for stories I wanted to realize, I was less than enthusiastic in trying to bring any of them to life.
“Hello,” I said to the empty room. How could Lila entertain herself in the time I spent away? The perception of time had to be skewed for her in some shape or form. If she would be there for ten of my human years, it was difficult to think I could always come around to entertain her. At least the edits of the calendars and passing of day was no longer in effect when the library upstairs was scuttled. “Lila?” A knock on the ceiling shifted my focus. Since the room and the general surroundings were now under my “control”, I floated out into the great darkness to find her sitting on the top of the wooden box.
“Hey, you’ve been gone for a while,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to lie that I did something productive with my time, but it felt like a waste for the most part. Playing a game, albeit rewarding, was being entertained by the works of others. There had to be limits to being entertained, otherwise it became a mode of living quite unsustainable. “I’ve been playing this game that absorbs time well. I guess I’ve had too much time on my hands, and this leveled me out.”
“What kind of game?”
“It’s this online game where you play with others all over the world. Sometimes they live close to you, and sometimes they are very far.”
“Oh, like a vitral game,” she said.
“You mean virtual?” I asked.
“What’s virtual?”
“Oh, guess not,” I replied. “So what’s a ‘vitral’ game?”
“My world has this thing that you put on and enter a sort of mind space,” Lila said. “In this mind space, you can choose to look differently, do things otherwise not possible. It’s like a gathering of people who don’t really know how to just be themselves in reality.”
“So it’s a bit like the game I play,” I said, contemplating if that remark applied to me. “It’s less advanced though. We use screens that display the game, and operate it with either a plethora of keys or a controller module.”
“So, it’s just a screen that you look at?” Lila asked, created a bauble, and threw it into the dark. It hung there for a moment, then burst like a firework, spiraling flame like a snake that split into a wriggling mass of fire, alternating colors until they faded to the dark again. “How archaic. Using screens has been phased out in my world a long time ago. There are still some period pieces that use them though.”
I decided to play her game, given my creationism was working. I brought a bubble into existence, an explosive soap orb that floated away into the distance until we could no longer see it. With the snap of my fingers the bubble burst, spilling colorful contents into the air like a one-hundred twenty-nine-thousand six-hundred degree geyser self-lit from the inside. It dazzled out until it froze into a solid form, still brightly lit inside with a variety of colors. With another snap, the form fractured from the center, shifting glowing crystals into the darkness of untethered space. They hung there, breaking apart further as time went by.
“That’s how the Infinity Void looks,” I said. “A meager representation. The actual one is endless, with gems clustered in some areas and drifting free in others. Each of the gems are a story, a life, once lived somewhere in existence, saved as a memory, data for others to reach and discover. What do you think of that?”
“I think it’s a very positive outlook,” Lila said, while watching the glowing ice crystals fade into the dark like stars. “Something that should be shared with others, but also dangerous. If you make it too positive, won’t some people choose to go there rather than struggle in life?”
“What do you mean by ‘MAKE it positive’?” I asked.
“It’s one thought, an idea,” Lila replied. “Don’t expect everyone to just get on board with it and accept it. My world had stuff like that as well. While your interpretation is kind to people, it also beckons them to the afterlife. Some people would see that as being against struggling through stuff, living life even when it’s the hardest.”
“How can you not believe me?” I asked. “This is possible only because I messed with the very space I know to exist.”
“But you already mused that all of it may just be happening inside your mind, that you just did it to hurt yourself, or give a kinder future of a loved one you lost. You wondered whether I am just a figment of your imagination, so that idea of the Infinity Void could very well be… an idea.” I felt upset, conflicted. Was this my mind trying to eat its tail to move on from this?
“But if it’s not real, then where does it all come from?” I asked. “Why do I wake up in the middle of the night to write down an idea, a vision of a world so different from mine? Why do I sometimes feel a downpour of information streaming into my brain like a torrent of water I can’t escape? It’s like torture to have access to so much, yet ability to do so little.”
“Maybe that’s exactly why you are here,” Lila said, jumped off the roof and landed gracefully in the darkness. “Maybe you’re trying to figure out where it all comes from, but for the lack of answers you decided to create your own. And maybe, just maybe, this somehow opened the way to this place I happen to occupy temporarily. Maybe we’re like kindred spirits of the endless source to everything.”
“Then why should I continue?” I asked.
“You don’t want to?”
“I do.”
“That’s all the reason you need,” Lila said, then waved a hand to create a hawk glider with blue and yellow stripes knotted into each other. “But it’s also entertaining to be a part of your thinking. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot, but I’m enjoying the time I was supposed to spend contemplating my misgivings.”
“Misgivings?” I asked, but Lila was already somewhere in the dark, riding an impossible wind that kept her aloft. I felt very confused with the talk, but the device was dying, so I could not elaborate on my thoughts in writing. There had to be something feeding me ideas, though I feared it was not of the healthy sort in my reality.
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