Chapter 3 - The Expansion
That wasn’t just one story,” Lila said the second I formed up in the untethered space. “It was like five separate stories that intertwined.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s what most stories are. What do you think of secondary characters otherwise? Do they just serve the purpose of the main? Don’t they have their own paths that led them to interact with the lead?” Lila rubbed her temples in thought. It was a lot to understand that each tethered story she put together had dozens cast off from the central one. Those were often left untold.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “You mean each of the other ones had other stories in it, but never tethered because the thread stitched together the main’s story?”
“If you want to think of it that way, yes,” I said. “But it’s ok, Lila. Those stories are often omitted. Like the drunk man in the samurai story. Didn’t he seem like a small character for Dokuto? All he did was ask whether he had a family. They talked for a brief moment, but what if the old man had a full story of coming to the world by accident and almost dying in the snows of winter night? That’s a story of survival, which could have parts integrated into the main later.”
“But you gave me one idea,” she said, confused. “One idea stitches together into one story.”
“There is no ‘one story’, Lils,” I said. “Only a weave. It’s hard to understand here, but the world, at least mine, is like a bundle of lives interlacing and weaving into the fabric of reality. There are millions of stories running alongside each other, and within their minds, millions more churn in unlimited space, the imagination. I think untethered space IS a punishment. It cuts you off from the world. Isolation moves your mind, but disavows sharing. You end up like me, unable to trust anyone beyond my mind. What do you do then?” Lila came up as I sat down. Her hugs were weak, but warm. It was nice to pretend they helped.
“But you do trust some,” she said. “I’m beyond your mind, Jack.”
“How would that be possible?” I asked. “I’m talking to you while typing on a computer screen. You might as well be the figment of imagination that takes me from a positive afterlife into the darkness. There is no proof. Same goes for Rebecca and Finnelgamin. They were real to me, but to those reading this, if ever, they are just words on a page. As are you.” Lila said nothing for a few minutes, pacing the room in thought.
“I know,” she said. “When I leave here, I will find a way to get to your world somehow and show them. Somehow.”
“You’re going to be here for ten more of my years,” I said. “By then, there won’t be a point.” Lila tilted her head confused.
“Why?” She asked.
“I’ll be dead by then,” I said. If this was Rebecca, I would hide it. If this was Finnelgamin, he would celebrate it. “Or so I believe.”
“Why?” She repeated herself. “I mean, how do you know? That’s not something a person knows, unless you’re dying from something.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But I did hear my author talk about it, at night, right before I drifted off to sleep.”
“And you don’t think that was just your subconscious being a dummy?” She asked. “Why did you immediately go thinking it was the person writing your story?” I leaned back on the couch and looked up to the wooden ceiling. I wanted to say it felt like it, but Lila was attacking the idea too heavily. Most people would consider me insane, and I was on the precipice of her thinking that about me.
“I don’t know, maybe you’re right,” I said, but still believed what I heard those times I was hopeful. Who else would step in when their character had too much hope for the future to dash those hopes, to have them fight for something instead. It was best to live in the moment, is what I wanted him to mean. It felt more like he wanted to take out his own frustrations on a story, but then realized this, and resisted his crap. Was it to make me stronger? There were hundreds of interpretations, all grounded in imagination of what Alexander Virtu’s life was like. “Maybe I just wanted it to be that way because I’m not living my best life.
“Getting somewhere requires effort, but I don’t have a competitor’s heart. I love the game, not the winning. Losing teaches far more lessons anyways, but when I ignore the triumphs, I also ignore the pitfalls to such a degree that I never correct them.” I looked over to Lila sitting in a chair she created next to the couch with a notepad and pen in hand. The final touch was the pink glasses lowered to the tip of her nose to look down upon me from her seat.
“Go on,” she said, completing the scene. I burst out laughing. I had never considered therapy. Most poor people got by without it, or died. Medicine was restricted in my country. Mental health was a low priority to healthcare providers, because people were dumb enough to keep getting hurt and sick physically more often. Not even once did they consider that it was the mental that preceded the physical.
“I’m not going to have you as my therapist, Lila,” I said. “What did you think of Faelight and Brimstoll? Who was your favorite character?”
“Daphne, obviously,” she fired back, while changing her look in an instant. “Eventually, Rafal finds a better source of magic, and Daphne falls in love with him for the good deeds he had done thanks to her being trapped inside the gemstone. It’s amazing.”
“Huh,” I said. “Thought it would be Faelor, the black unicorn.”
“Unicorns are supposed to be all rainbows and sparkles,” she argued. “Even I know that. Faelor’s mutation isn’t necessary. All you had to do was maybe change his horn black from the cursed spirit of the broken sword. That way he is still unique, but not absolutely different from the unicorns. That’s how I’d have written it.”
“What stops you from rewriting?” I asked.
“Well, it’s your idea,” she argued. “I mean… nothing, I guess.”
“Alright,” I said. “So next time I come back you’ll have your version of it ready, yeah? Maybe we could even go inside it with untethered space. We could be the authors going inside the story to see it happen firsthand.”
“Ok,” Lila said, then swiped a hand to make five books disappear to nothing.
“Were those…?” I asked, pointing to the motion.
“Oh, sorry,” she said. “Did you want to keep them? I thought the idea was to keep my version instead.”
“Well… it was, I guess,” I said. I was disappointed I did not get to read the whole story in my own voice, stitched the way I would have written it. “It’s ok. It’s fine. I don’t need them to be here.”
“It’s not a big deal, look,” Lila said, and rewound herself to produce the books again. “Here you go. You can keep that version, but mine will be much better, you’ll see. Now, away with you. I need to put myself into the zone.”
I was going to ask whether she would be creating anything since the untethered space had it all ready, but I left without making the joke. The device was at the final ten percent of power and I was low on time before work anyway. Without another word, I dissipated into the air and out of there.
break
I arrived at the room with eight percent of energy left on the device, having forgotten to charge throughout the busy work day. Now seven. It was dying fast, since it had been cold and windy outside.
“Hey,” I said to an empty room. Lila was not there. As I did not have time to look for her, creationism would have to be my assistant, but was I able to create out in the untethered space enough to get her attention? I thought for a moment and borrowed JJ’s instant ingenuity to create a giant lavender raven sitting atop the wooden box in the darkness. I had no idea if there was some sort of world or something beyond the windows, but it looked dark. The raven squawked loudly above, like a battle siren of warning. I hoped that was enough to find Lila.
“Hey, Jack!” She said, throwing her arms around me with force of momentum. “That bird is so cool! Is it from a story?”
“No, It’s JJ’s creation,” I said. “Which is to say it might be from a story, but it came to him like an idea without anything else. Listen, I’m running out of battery on the device I’m writing this on. I was going to charge it yesterday, but I forgot. If you have something to tell me about the rewrite, it might have to wait.” Lila grimaced.
“Yeah, the rewrite,” she said. “That went poorly. Your version was cool, but making a change seemed like I was just countering all the surprising events of the original. I changed the parts I wanted changed, but the story changes got out of control, but yeah, we can talk about it another time.”
“Chin up,” I said. “I got a new story for you to bookize.” Her eyes lit up, smiling.
“Is it about another girl?” She asked. “What’s with that, anyway?”
“I like empowering women and girls,” I said. “It’s a theme, but I also think the world would be in better hands with them in charge. My world treats girls and women differently for some reason. It’s stupid.”
“That is stupid,” she said. “So what’s the story?”
“I’ve already started working on it, and the story is mainly done, but I think you might like it,” I said. “The Crimson Butterfly.” I produced a booklet at four percent of battery and threw it over to her while disappearing from the room.
break
“Hey,” I said to an empty room while forming up. Given new stories, Lila would not just stay in the room among the darkness. The untethered space welcomed ideas in solid form. As long as it was disconnected from the Infinity Void, I was happy it existed. It was like an external imagination, something existing beyond the bounds of physical life.
I did a quick three-sixty at the windows to find one side bright in sunlight. To alleviate the idea of each array facing into a different story, I placed four doors in each wall in case such a thing were to arise. JJ was in favor of being able to go from one story to another by a vestibule room that started it all. The door opened onto a wasteland, and a kingdom of stone structures in the distance. The buildings looked more modern than what I would expect from their world. They curved closed at the top with circular glass windows. Was that my original design, or did she rewrite Crimson Butterfly, too?
I stepped out onto the heat of the sun, but there was no heat. The light did not bother me either, as it often did in reality. This was a story after all. You would only feel the things you imagined or were described to you in begrudging detail. When I was writing the first few paragraphs of the story myself, I could feel the hot sun and smell the rotting of death in the bloody battlefields. Was Lila all the way in the city? I had to put some sort of tracker on her to find her easier. A present. It was not as though she could read my mind. As far as I knew, Lila was not a creationist, just a kid in an untethered space that could piece ideas into stories among the dark.
“LILA!” I called out into the wasteland environment without a single cloud in the sky. I had to wonder if this space could be manipulated spatially, or if it existed at the distance it appeared.
“Hey, Jack,” she said, from above. She was sitting on top of the wooden room admiring the scene ahead of her. “Crimson Butterfly was fun. I also managed to rewrite Faelight and Brimstoll. It’s called ‘The Sword of Darkness’ now, as it centers around the broken sword and the curse inside it.”
“Any room for sequels?” I asked. “I mean more books in the series.”
“Oh, there are four books,” she said, jumping off the wooden box. “‘The Sword of Darkness’, ‘The Princess and the Wizard’, ‘Faelight and Brimstoll’, and ‘Faelor of the Fae’.”
“So you split the stories up?” I asked. “Can I see?” Lila motioned to the books inside the wooden room. From the first page, I was glued to it until the chapter finished. It posed the whole idea from the very start, before the sword was broken, before it was cursed. It pretty much flipped the story on end, but it was done so well. I wanted to bring this into my physical world, but was that even my writing?
“You’re brilliant!” I said, “This deserves some kind of award.”
“I told you, didn’t I?” She asked. “The stories stitch themselves. I just position the skeleton of an idea and off it goes. It was fun reading it though.” I considered what type of present she could not create herself in this space, then felt conflicted that it was meant as a trick so I could find her. How would locators work in this space with no directions or indicators anyway? The room would have to be the zero point, and I could use the directions outlined by my physical world. They were inaccurate, but I did not need accuracy, only indication from the center.
“Here,” I said, motioning in the air to create a tiny swirling universe on a bracelet. It was a half bubble of glass with an actual universe vaguely shifting around with stars and galaxies. The underside had a compartment with the locator. With this on her, I could at least know which way she was in the darkness, in which direction to call out her name. “I know you can probably create those kinds of things yourself, but this one is a gift from me to you. Please don’t torture this universe, but if you ever want to enter it, press down on the bauble and it will put you there in your mind. Test it out.” I watched Lila press the glass hemisphere and go still. In that brief moment, I marked the inside of the wooden room with a compass of directions, choosing the one with the open door as north.
“Wow,” she said. “That’s fun. Too bad I can’t move around inside it.”
“That view is just a snapshot of a scene,” I said. “Making it a scene would make it much harder to maintain in my head.” I watched as Lila put the bracelet on and smiled. I felt a bit bad about it, feeling it would eventually bite me in the ass, but if it worked for now, then it was worth it.
“Alright, I gotta go,” I said. “I know it was short, but I got work to do and some stuff to buy before I go on my trip.”
“Trip?”
“Oh, right,” I said. “I’m going to be flying to see my Mom in another country. Do you have countries? It’s like a part of the world that isn’t like another part. They draw borders and use different money. It’s really stupid, but that’s how the world is here.”
“Nice that you get to see your mom,” Lila said. “When are you going?”
“After we talk tomorrow,” I said. “Well, really after work, but tomorrow after we speak, we might not speak for…” I paused to do a few calculations in my head. “Around two-hundred thousand years by your measure. For me it will be a week.”
“Hmm,” she said, with a grimace. “I wish I had more writing of yours somehow. Or I wish I could write more of your ideas down in here for you. You should know, you’re the most entertaining thing here since I was here last time.”
“Last time?”
“Another time,” she said. “I’m sure you have to go now. I’ll tell you about it after you come back. Not tomorrow. Do you have another story for me for now?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But this one is mostly fleshed out. I wanted to rewrite it, but haven’t been able to find time. There are always about four new ideas per day, and they can’t all go at the same time.”
“Alright,” she said. “Who is it about? Another girl?”
“Well… I guess so,” I said. “But it starts with a guy, a kid who ends up wasting his life away until the girl breaks him out of it.”
“So it is the story of a girl,” Lila said. “I’m sensing a theme, Jack. Alright. Gimme.” I tossed a tome into the air while disappearing from the wooden room.
break
When I came back to the room, the only door open was to the south. Beyond the door was a light leading to an enclosure I never thought I would see again. It was the library from my childhood, the edited library room that Tiarto and Sana spent so much time in. This was the place where my mind was an open book to Rebecca, where Finn and I fought as mice and men. The enclosure held such emotional value to me, but Lila did not know any of that. I was not sure I wanted her to. She would be with me for ten years, until she was let out of the untethered space.
“Hey,” she said, while sitting at the desk with a book open in front of her. I wondered what filled the books here, if it was not entirely defined in the story. Could those shelves still be occupied by pieces of my mind? “Well, it wasn’t a book you gave me, Jack.”
“Huh?”
“It wasn’t even a series,” she added. “It’s a full-on epic.” She motioned to the bookshelf closest to her.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Tiarto and Sana?” She asked. “It’s not that simple. You’re focusing on an unlikely pairing of troubled souls in such a rich environment. All those tomes are filled with stories of people in that world. Andrew Torslet? I mean, come on! There are like forty books in that world. Not a complaint, since I read them all, cover to cover.”
“It was the first story I put a lot of effort into,” I said, walking over to the bookshelf. I pulled a random book from a middle shelf and opened it to find Percy and Cynthia’s exploration of Atta Nilla. Another had the retelling of the Ewatineru tribes struggle to unite against the invasion of humans popping into their world. Yet another had a stark look inside the mind of Jeremy LeWsyd, the main villain of the world. “There is so much. Did Tiarto at least play some kind of role in defeating LeWsyd?”
“That’s what I DO have a complaint about,” Lila said. “You put it in a dream? It’s right there in the very first story. You kill him off in the first book? And in the worst way possible, too. Why?” I smiled. The old me had it out for me.
“I was imagining Tiarto to be myself back when I started it,” I said. “A lot has changed since then. I’ve killed Tiarto after I wrote the full summary of his story in the everbook, but haven’t really written anything past that first to progress it there. That dream, it’s a semblance of the past. Do you think if he didn’t see that vision, the story would change a lot?”
“Of course,” she said. “But it’s poetic that the one person who worked so hard to overcome his damaged mind and lazy roots in a house of a man who barely noticed him, to disappear into dust while being forgotten. It’s cruel really.”
“It is,” I said, lowering my head. “I wrote it before I had better control of beast, the furry guy you saw. You don’t need to know about him. Just know that he’s the reason it turned out that way. Does the story progress past his death?” Lila nodded, skipped up and pulled a book from the bottom shelf.
“There is a story of Sana looking for the unknown person,” she said. “Then there are stories of Dalia finding herself again after being taken over by Jeremy. And of course Rassot has a story of his rise to power in the advancing society. There is one short story for Foradim’s funeral, also from Sana’a point of view. Nico has a full adventure excursion which is quite fun and low on drama.”
“So basically a lot of it happens after he dies,” I said. “Like you said, I focused on a pairing of troubled individuals, as that story started when I was really troubled. Wow. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I’m so glad I got to meet you in this untethered space where you can write stories up so much faster in my tone and writing voice. It leaves me a lifetime of transcribing these texts into stories in my reality. This place, however, brings back so many memories. The room you found at the start was connected to a structure much like this. In fact-“ I walked over to the spot where the spawn chamber was. “It was here. That top hatch you knocked on in the dark was right here. It’s so… melancholy.” I looked off to the tall windows looking out onto the darkness.
“Close your eyes,” Lila said, walking up and taking my hands. “Come on, down go the lids.” I closed my eyes hesitantly, and felt a rumble around me. “Now open them. Ta-Da!” I found that hatch underneath me again. The conjured world from the open door was no longer there. The whole library structure was connected to the room underneath now. It was apt, as Lila was writing so many of the stories out that she would need a bunch of shelves to put them onto. Any time I wanted to write something new, I would simply go to the library and transcribe. There was a certain sadness to that method however. They were written, could be read in my head, but sharing them with someone in the physical space where my body existed would take transcribing.
“Thanks, Rebecca,” I said, and grit my teeth at the Freudian slip. “I mean, thank you, Lila. I’m sorry I said ‘Rebecca.’ She’s just…”
“She did a number on you, huh?” Lila asked.
“It was well deserved,” I said, but I needed to change topics. “So can you use creationism here like me? I created a metal orb floating in the air and then disappeared it. Lila mimicked the creation, but her metal ball dropped into the library right away. The fall made a fracture in the library floor, but when she waved a hand the ball was gone and the floor was restored.
“Seems it’s different,” she said. “You can make things and have them solitary, as if in a pocket dimension, but when I make something it becomes part of the environment. Like with the floor, I didn’t really fix it, just restored it to before the ball hit it. I guess I can manipulate the untethered space, but not really do your type of creationism.” I smiled.
“Rebecca had it, too,” I said. “Finn was able to do it, but much less. It’s creating something out of nothing, but I didn’t want to call it a godly power. Even though it is godly to the ones I create, so I’m glad you’re not my creation.” Lila grimaced.
“I’d be proud to be your creation,” she said. “You’ve written such beautiful things, such compelling stories.”
“I haven’t written them yet,” I said. “Remember? There is no way I can show those to people around my world. Unless I can take them into my head, but beast would hurt them.” Lila held my hand again, looking up into my eyes.
“You’re stronger than you realize,” she said. I felt the words pierce through the untethered space and into my brain in the physical. I started tearing up at the thought. Since I was in a public space, I held it back, but had I been in a private setting, I would be bawling. “No matter what, I’m going to support you. I want to help you get your stories across to the people in your world. Jack, and this sounds weird to say, but you’ve got a friend in me. Always.” The reference connected in my head, but she had not seen those movies about toys.
“Thank you, Lila,” I said. “I have to go to work, then I’m going on the trip I mentioned. If you want, rewrite Tiarto’s world without him dying. I’d love to see that. I’ll try to get back to see you on the trip, but it may not happen. If I don’t see you until I’m back, I’m sorry.”
“No problem,” she said, and held out a fist right from the story. I fist-bumped her and disintegrated from the library with a smile. I hoped the library would be there after I came back.
break
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