💾 Archived View for r2aze.observer › archive › 2011-10-05-brilliant-star.gmi captured on 2022-06-03 at 23:31:35. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A faint smile. A sharp gaze of the deep green eyes, reflecting things that aren’t here. Everything else is a bit of a blur in the harsh glow of 650 nanometer red light. Thoughts bouncing off the walls as if they were sound. A very real sound of footsteps in the darkness and silence.
Thoughts about people.
_There is nothing in the world, except people._
Pick anything that is not a person, anything at all, pull on the chain, and a person will emerge on the other end. Anything that is done, anything that is known, anything that is said, anything that is learned, everything is either by people, for people, or both at once. Even when studying the furthest reaches of the Universe or the depths of the atom, or the most complicated mathematical construct, it is done to satisfy the curiosity of people, to solicit approval from people, to improve the lives of people. People are on the other end of the chain. Nothing of matter is ever of interest, until it can feed people, make things for people, endanger people, answer the questions of people – and what is not part of the known world, cannot be believed to exist. What the world is, is derived from people, and only people can be said to exist. There is nothing else.
_There is nothing in the world, except words._
People cannot be known directly, for if one could say that they know everything at all about a person, they would be that person, and there would be no _other_ person to know. Everything that originates with people is, in fact, words – of languages spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten, symbolic and factual, drawn on paper and drawn out of a heart, something communicated to others to notify them of own existence. Words are the only thing ever seen in this world, are the only thing people can know each other by, so only the words of people can be said to exist. There is nothing else.
_There is nothing in the world, except time._
Time is that which prevents things from happening simultaneously, that which allows the arrangement of a set of symbols into a sequence. For without a sequence, any and all words would be nothing but noise, obscuring the meaning of each other. Without splitting anything into the minimal units of meaning and ascertaining their relationship, nothing can ever be studied and nothing can be seen – and any arrangement of units is a sequence. And thus, sequences are the only true content of the world. There is nothing else.
Therefore, the world is a story – a sequence of words originating with people. A _story about people, told through words, across time._
About five quintillion of stories. Stories that have been written. Stories that haven’t. Stories that have been read, stories that have been told, stories that have only been imagined.
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“…Come out. I know you’re here,” Rika said abruptly, and the world focused, to form the interior of a train car, and in the middle of it was she, in her dress of the sharpest black, the metallic-looking suitcase in her hands, and a small swarm of hats following her.
A wing peeked out from behind a bench, attached to a school backpack, which backpack dangled off the shoulders of a girl. Finally Ayu emerged from there and stood before the door leading out of the car, sheepishly twisting her hands. Rika pulled a cigarette from behind her ear, stuck it into her mouth and glanced sternly at the tip. The cigarette lit up in a faint red ember, totally obscured by the all-pervasive glow of Rika’s hair.
“So?…” she said, looking back at Ayu.
“You’ve changed,” Ayu replied in a sad voice after a long pause.
Rika shrugged. “I have. Who are you, now?”
Ayu frowned. “Don’t you remember me?”
Rika shook her head, sending ashes from her cigarette flying. “I’m asking, who are you, _now._”
Ayu took a pause to think, and even drew a breath to answer, but Rika interrupted her. “Forget it. I am not really interested anymore,” she said, closing her eyes for a brief moment.
That brief moment was quite sufficient for Ayu to dissolve completely into tiny particles of shadow, which immediately scurried away into the corners.
Rika opened her eyes and moved on, continuing on her way into the next car, not paying any attention to the faint figures that vaguely looked like people on the benches. Behind her, hats took turns to sweep up the ashes from her cigarette.
Tamamo was waiting in the next car. Even her long flowing kimono could not conceal all of her nine tails, not that she was trying.
Rika stopped and stared darkly at the face of the fox, a mirror image of her own. Even if everything else was different, and Tamamo was now considerably shorter than Rika, who grew a lot since, the resemblance was unmistakable… Rika just looked a little bit younger.
“Who are you?” Tamamo asked curiously.
“Don’t you remember me?” Rika replied, with no change of expression, breathing out a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“No. Even if I did, I would still ask.”
Rika took a long breath before answering. “I’m true. I am not truth itself. I am not every nor any particular truth. _My value is true._ I’m a metaphor for something, one something which is undeniably true. I have been born to be a memory of you, but I have acquired my own identity since. One day, I, too, will dissolve forever in this ocean, like many before me, but today and here, I still speak for myself. This is what I am. Who are you?”
“I’m the door. I am not opening the door. I shall be ready to open or stay open. I’m opened… with a key, with a hand, with a kick, by rights and otherwise. But I won’t budge from here. That is all.”
Rika tossed away the butt of her cigarette, and it went straight through Tamamo. “Doors are just part of a wall. There are no walls in this universe for me.”
Before she even finished speaking, a gust of wind from out of nowhere blew Tamamo away like a cloud of mist, leaving only an empty space that looked like something should be there, but for a bizarre reason of some sort isn’t. Rika sighed and went forward into the next car.
The next car was empty, except, maybe, for a black cat, who was sitting next to the door Rika came in through, washing his face with a paw.
“Having fun running down the Memory Lane, Helix?” Rika asked him with unconcealed sarcasm.
“Do I look like I’m running?” the cat replied nonchalantly. “I’ve actually been waiting for you here for quite a while, and that involved very little running. Not that I mind terribly. The Library is a mite too big when your paws are so short.”
Rika raised an eyebrow. “Waiting? Do you have a wish to make, too?”
“No, just a question,” the cat said, jumping up to settle on Rika’s shoulder and look into her eyes. “Can you tell me what you saw in the mirror, back then?”
“I thought you, of all people, would know,” Rika smiled, continuing on her way forward into the next car, taking care not to drop the cat off.
“People? Am I ‘people’? Do I even look like ‘people’? What part of me is ‘people’?” Helix hissed back, clawing angrily at her shoulder.
Rika shrugged vigorously, almost throwing the cat off. “No, you look like a cat, but if entities as abstract as corporations are ascribed personhood, why shouldn’t you.”
Helix turned away and mumbled under his breath, “Bloody humans, you give names to _everything._”
Rika just sighed. “Am I ‘human’? I guess there’s no question that I _look_ human, but, what part of me is ‘human’?”
“The hands,” was the deadpan reply. “From my point of view the difference is considerably smaller than from yours, anyway. Just tell me, the thing grew back recently, and I’m curious.”
Rika shook her head. “Well, if you need that spelled out… Have you ever heard of split personalities?”
“More times than I would care to count,” the cat replied, and started licking his back to demonstrate disinterest in an obvious cliche, while still perched precariously on the shoulder.
“Would you be surprised to know that they’re far, far, _far_ rarer than everyone thinks?” Rika asked with a sneaky grin.
“Oh?” he looked back, whiskers bristling.
“It’s not like they don’t exist anywhere, but generation of truly separate personalities requires a brain actually damaged in a specific way, which is hard to come by.”
“You mean, you need to actually have a brain?” the cat asked with obvious sarcasm.
Rika ignored it. “In truth, people are more… well, more like a tree. There’s a seed, deep down, the core… which isn’t even the part that has a name, and branches grow up from it. Intelligent entities are socially generated. That means they are actually context dependent, and with so many contexts in daily life, every person, human or not, has more than one branch to them.”
Helix tapped his tail on Rika’s back in annoyance. “Yeah, yeah, I get the picture. But what do split personalities have to do with it?”
Rika rubbed him behind the ear as she continued. “The fact that they aren’t actually split, for one. They’re just branches. It’s just that sometimes, branches grow sideways, and begin to think they are alone. Even feeling like that for a short time might make it look like they are different people. They might grow hostile to each other, try to choke each other off, try to grow through… well, it doesn’t really matter. The tree is still the tree. There is only one.”
“You should get around to the mirror soon, you know.”
“It’s called the Mirror of Souls for a reason, you see. Once you wish to see your self, it shows you all the branches at once. For some people, it’s disastrous. For others, it’s eye-opening. Reasonably safe for most humans, really.”
“I remember it cracking. Again. So which was it for you? The last couple of times it happened, it was very different.”
“You mean Eve and Lilith, right?”
“There aren’t any other incidents on record, and I should know about records.”
“Compared to me, they once were truly gigantic, not to mention that I think they once were branches of one tree, too. Seeing themselves in their entirety made them feel uncomfortably close to infinity. When the mirror shattered, it was because the whole didn’t fit in it, that’s why they’re scattered all over as shards now. But when the mirror reflected me, I was little but a memory. A memory of a dream, looking for my place in the world. I was tiny, but the dream was of the universal truth.”
“Ah. So you got bits of universal truth in you after that.”
“More like, a contextual section of universal truth got bits of me in it. It’s complicated.”
“Remind me not to look at this thing.”
“I’ll try, if I ever catch you in one room with it. Seeing as I don’t even know where you put it, that probably isn’t going to happen,” Rika said. The next door opened before her, as if from a sharp kick, and if doors could be said to be scared, this one probably was. She went in, and there was the locomotive cabin, which, for some reason, contained no driver.
Helix jumped off her shoulder onto the driver’s seat. “What do you want to do here anyway?”
“Get things moving, obviously,” Rika answered, setting her suitcase down on the floor and pushing buttons. “Fortune favours the brave, hope comes to those who wait, that sort of thing. Well, I’m here, and this handover has been on hold long enough.”
“I think this one is broken. Trains weren’t on their best behavior recently.”
Rika threw a glance at the cat over her shoulder and winked. “Too bad for it, then,” she replied, and pushed a lever.
The train lurched, and the lights outside became thin, blurry lines, as the sounds of machinery made further conversation completely impossible.
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