Within Worlds
Vin is in the crèche again and a buzzing in his head is getting louder and more painful. Then it ceases. He feels a release of tension and a wave of peaceful absence, no sensation of any kind, no light, no smell, no sense of touching anything and he’s not sure whether or not his eyes are open.
A voice, which he experiences without hearing, says, “Welcome to this event context, designed for the temporary storage of unanchored awareness. The meta-causality you have attempted to establish is unauthorized and is associated with a protected awareness. To prevent permanent damage to your consciousness resulting from immersion in simulated oblivion, to avoid ethically compromised outcomes, and to promote greater self-awareness, you will experience this context with an appropriate number of affiliated awarenesses.”
Vin hears a brief sequence of high-pitched tones that seem to originate inside his head, and then the voice continues: “Please understand that your influence on other, nearby awarenesses is limited in scope to methods that simulate verbal communication. You will have a simulated experience of speaking and hearing, as will other awarenesses in your context. You may move freely, but your perceived location will not change. If your experience becomes trying, we suggest that you protect your own coherence by adopting the conviction that you are experiencing a dream.
“You will be returned to a context closely related to your origin point within a period determined by the construct that has attempted to establish meta-causality. To preserve mental health, your storage facility is equipped with a utility that displays a best estimate of perceived time remaining in this event context. You may view your remaining time by making a verbal request. Simply say, ‘View Time.’ You will now hear a series of tones, after which you may have limited congress with affiliated awarenesses.”
Another short, high-pitched tone sounds. It has a color as well: red. Then a slightly lower, yellow tone sounds, followed by a lower, blue tone, and finally a green tone, a very comfortable sound.
At first, Vin sees only darkness, but that slowly fades until the world in all directions, including above and below, is no longer black but dark gray. At the same time, a set of evenly spaced points within the darkness begins to grow lighter. The points thicken and slowly take on the shape of human bodies until all about him, positioned as if at the eight corners of a cube and the midpoints of each edge and the middle of each side, are twenty-four lines of bodies, with Vin at the center. Each line extends to a vanishing point, with a new body floating in darkness at roughly every ten feet. Each body is naked and looks exactly like Vin. Several nearby are watching him.
“Hey,” one of them says, from above him and to his right. He sees the man bending toward him, hears the man’s voice directed at him. “Don’t freak out. This place is completely safe. You’re safe here.”
“What is here?” Vin asks.
“I know what you’re thinking,” one of the other men says, then he and a third man laugh at the joke.
“This,” says the one who spoke first, “is like a holding cell.” The man isn’t being loud but Vin can hear his voice clearly. He can hear the breath that’s creating it. “Your crèche tried to throw you forward in time, to a future when the technology Nerdean invented is pretty common. They made this place as a defense against people jumping into other people’s minds.”
“So, this is the future?” Vin asks.
“Well, that depends on where you’re coming from,” says a version of him with a stubbly chin.
“He’s from the same place we are, nitwit. Look at him, he’s our age. Use some common sense. Jesus.” That version of him punches the air. He has longer hair than the others.
“Oh, really? Half the time I come out of the crèche I’ve landed in some crazy place I don’t know where the hell I am. So how does common sense apply?”
As Vin turns about, he sees each naked body—each version of his own body—with a level of detail that increases when he focuses. The darkness between them seems flexible, expanding or contracting in response to his attention, and the light is uniformly clear, the shadows always what he expects them to be. He realizes that a few of the men are crying—apparently inconsolably, because others are trying unsuccessfully to console them. There are versions of him shouting, barking angry orders, cursing. Almost all those around him—all the versions of him—seem to be having an intense emotional experience of some kind.
“Hey, hey. Concentrate on me. On me,” says the man above him and to his right, who looks exactly like Vin, even the cut and length of his hair. “It’ll make this all easier.”
Vin tries to, and the voices rumbling about him—the grumbling, the mad wailing, the waves of conversation—recede into a background murmur. It’s weird and distracting to see a naked version of himself standing about fourteen feet away. The man’s feet rest on nothing but are angled as if they’re supported by an invisible floor. He’s crouching, so when Vin looks up, the two of them are facing each other.
“Thank you,” Vin says.
“Don’t mention it.”
“Are you bending your legs?” Vin asks.
“What?”
“Are you actually bending down, or am I only seeing that?”
“I mean—I don’t know what you’re seeing,” says the other man. “Are you frightened?”
“Yes.”
“Me too. I always am. But this place is safe. The strangest thing about it is the lack of smell. And how my sense of touch feels muted. But don’t worry, I’ve been in your position before.”
“You mean that literally, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Was this a mistake?” Vin asks. “Going back into the crèche again?”
“Probably,” says the other Vin. “Or maybe. I don’t really know. I’m on the same journey or, whatever, that you are.”
“This is it, isn’t it? I mean, I’m finally, really going crazy.”
“You mean you think this is all just a figment of our imagination? That you’re just unable to tell the difference between this and a dream? No. The crèche threw us into the future, that’s all. And this particular future is defending itself. I’ve been in this place before, or maybe other places with similar defenses. I’ve been in other futures, too, that don’t have defenses. Things can get hairy. On a cosmic scale, you know, there’s basically zero difference between one generation of humans and the next.”
The intensity on the face of the man looking at him—which must mirror his own intensity—surprises Vin. It feels as if he’s being prodded by it, as if it’s demanding something of him. He takes a breath and imagines that this other Vin probably doesn’t know how his look affects people.
“So, if you’ve done this before, then you must be a future me, right?” He glances around at the endless versions of himself, then back at the one he’s talking with. “Because this is my first time here. So, if you told me what happened to you, I could try and do some things differently, make different choices and things could get better.”
“Not really. I could tell you a bunch of stuff, but there’s so much happening, so many different interactions and possibilities. Things are just different for each of us. I mean, I could—look, the truth is, I tried that. I came to grief.”
“So trying might bring me to grief too. Well, what else do you have?”
“No, I’m not going there. Really. And you don’t want me to. Trust me.”
“Can you at least tell me why all these variations”—Vin motions at the lines of himself—“why are so many crying?”
“Or why are some furious? Or why can you and I have a civil conversation? Chance, I guess. Just random, dumb luck.”
A very small number of the other Vins look relaxed or bored, even while standing naked on the non-floor in non-space. One or two are cackling mad. Some are shouting at each other. A few are whimpering.
“I actually find this place painfully, painfully boring,” says the other Vin, the one he’d been talking with. “So damn boring. I hate when the crèche drops me here.”
“Really?” Vin asks. “Really? Boring is about the last word I’d use to describe it.”
“You haven’t traveled much, have you?”
“This is my fourth, um, do we call it a shot?”
“Oh.” The other Vin becomes somber, sad. “Did you abandon Trina, then?”
And Vin can’t help himself. He leaps upward, though his position doesn’t change at all. “Do you know what happened to my daughter?” he demands. “Do you know where she is? How can I get to her?” He is wrenched by anger. He can feel himself overheat and sees his spit flying at the other Vin, lit with glinting clarity as it arcs through the non-space.
“Hey, hey. Calm. Calm. Your daughter is back there, wherever you started from,” the other Vin says, his voice softening.
“Kim took her from me,” Vin snaps. “I can’t reach her. Kim took her.”
“Ah, shit,” says the other Vin. “Look, I’m so sorry.” And with a deeply pained expression he turns away.
“Kim completely fucked you over,” a Vin near him yells out, one who’s leaner, who looks almost starving.
“Fucked me over too!”
“Me too!” A Vin with a mustache.
“That bitch!” yells another Vin.
“That fucking bitch, Kim!” yells someone else.
“Ah, fucking bitch!” A loud chorus of voices swells around Vin.
“Kill that bitch!”
All around him, legions of different versions of himself are erupting with obscene vitriol, but he’s shouting as well, forgetting himself, joining them.
He yells for a long time. He froths. When he feels his energy wane he remembers Trina and the injustice, remembers she’s deprived of his love and protection and nurturing and he’s furious again and curses and howls.
Time passes. A moment arrives in which he realizes that he hasn’t shouted recently. Dizzy and nauseous from the strain of his galloping anger, he says, “View time,” and immediately sees a digital display counting down from two hours, fifty-eight minutes and seventeen seconds. He waits for what seems a long time, his anger boiling back up, and then says, “View time” again. Two hours, fifty-two minutes, one second.
You look up at the sky, the stars endless and isolate, distances so vast that your only defense—the only way to exist in your single body that feels less amid all that span of darkness and light than the fading warmth from one curling breath—is to imagine, imagine you are there, everywhere, as everything, and by imagining, by dreaming, allow yourself to continue. And then, as nebulas bloom and grow smaller with an outward rush of perspective—of time and scale—your specific experience becomes integral to the whole, a mystery whose integrity is set in motion by a living world and the passions it inspires.
When Vin woke from the crèche a fourth time, his world was both too small and too large for him. Above the underground office lay the basement of the house and above that the surface of the earth and then the sky, and the only way to live was by being a part of it all, so that imagining became a survival skill and dreaming the foremost skill of every individual who is alone.
And as for companionship, Kim and Bill had lives of their own; all companions did. They were swept up in their own dreams, the consequences of their own decisions, directions of their making that must be different from his because there is just too much raw possibility in the universe for any two lives to follow the same course. Possibility was the stuff of the universe; difference the material of time.
When he exited the casket and left Nerdean’s office, he left his limp behind in another world as if it was a sloughed-off skin. He walked around the huge house that he had just that very day inherited from a likeminded creature, a man with his same name who had also conveniently left a body behind for him to inhabit. Sophie lay on her bed near the dining room’s picture window, alertly watching small birds in trees just across the street, her long, cream-colored fur catching cloud-filtered sunlight, her mouth quivering in ecstatic, predatory anticipation. “Ah, ah, ah,” she said, in her cat voice.
It was nine-thirty in the morning and her dish was empty. When she heard him opening a can of food, she jumped down two levels from her perch and ran across the dining room to join him in the kitchen.
He didn’t check his phone. He didn’t want to know how people he loved had fared within this particular sliver of eternity. He was only a stranger here, and would travel further afield.
For the first time, he attempted to stay in the crèche for more than twenty-four hours. After arranging for Corey Nahabedian to feed Sophie for a week, he set the system to start what the files described as a “multi-shot,” the same mode Mona was using. In a multi-shot, the subject had a short shot, returned to a crèche, and then was briefly revived. If the subject exited the crèche, the cycle aborted. Otherwise, the subject went back into partial-torpor, and took another shot. He didn’t quite understand how a multi-shot could work, given the shell game that the crèche was playing with bodies and minds, but he had decided to try it.
Dark, muddy ground spins as if the whole world were a thrown disk, then hits him in the face. Soft and heavy sludge pushes into his mouth, his cut lips and cheeks. His teeth hurt. Face down in muck near the splinters of something, he shudders and angles his chin up, leaving his forehead embedded while opening a gap to breathe from the side of his mouth. The world shakes and booms. He waits.
He must pull his face from the earth. Pain lancing neck and shoulders, the furrow of a sharp edge crosses his jaw—a helmet’s chinstrap—these things press him as he raises his head. A man, craggy and broken, is gibbering in his mind. The man tugs the muscles of the body Vin inhabits, makes them spasm.
Vin moves jaw and tongue as regions recover from numbness. Sound of gunfire. A high, deafening whistle comes and goes. The air shakes with distant thumps. The broken ground he is on is a mix of bodies and dirt. The crèche has sent him to another bad place.
He is breathing, this body whole but hollow, as if abandoned. He finds its owner, the madman who is now begging him—begging anyone—to act, to move. The madman is searching in the firmament of his own mind for a hole to crawl into. He will give over the reins of his body if Vin guarantees a crushing defeat of all enemies. Or if he doesn’t. Vin pulls and pushes their shared body up to its knees.
The body aches with cold and injuries. Vin stumbles to standing. The air hums. A great fat sun with fiery cheeks strolls over distant hills. The corpses may rise up to dance in rhythms of sky. Is that his old friend opening a bloody breast to let in the raw wind? He is a good friend. A fine, generous man. Sadly, his name is shattered. Vin should splash a bucket of water on his filthy head and clean his crusted face and close his split mouth. If he can find the pieces of his jaw.
Fields turned by battle lose their place in the world. These might be fields anywhere. This is no place. Oh, my brothers, Vin thinks as he staggers, why such a mess? Why carve such bits and pieces off your bodies to strew all around, so careless with meaty arms and gut, or this toe that should be tapping stones or this face with paled lips puckering to whistle songs of grief?
He bends to touch the face, squats and presses its bony forehead, draws three fingers across a mud spattered eye, tries to close it but it won’t. Instead, he scrapes grit into the eyeball and the helmet falls backward, pulling off the crown. Vin and the madman reflect on the lack of discipline. Any man would be disappointed to make a show like this at the end. The madman takes the reigns of their body and lifts the helmet, filled as it is with skull and brains. He digs within to ensure no one is hiding.
No one is, but the tiny, bristly hairs and the bloody gunk and bits of skull are frightening. The madman has little schooling, but Vin knows that each of the billions of cells of blood and brain includes a unique string of DNA, the double-helical chain that was this man’s signature on his contract with eternity.
“I know it now,” the madman yells, triumphant. “I saw it in my own mind. You are saying that these numberless, twisting worms have already eaten him. Poor love.”
“No,” Vin replies. “Those twisting worms are proteins that are a part of him. They are his blueprint, his design.”
“Oh, I am a fool for words,” says the madman, who feels grubby and abashed before Vin’s angelic knowledge.
Time to walk. Most bullets fly out of one direction and into another. Is it better to go where bullets come from, or where they’re going to? Questions. Going where they come from may put you behind them, which has benefits, surely. Going where they’re headed may offer company, if you could walk beside them. So, which direction is the better choice? The madman makes a worried sound and grabs his tongue with his filthy left hand.
Vin makes a choice. He has died before within the crèche, and survived it.
“Oh, you have, have you?” demands the madman, his broken head popping up like a gopher in Vin’s thoughts. Vin doesn’t answer. Making the body move is hard going. He doesn’t have a lot of energy left for being thoughtful.
Staggering and falling and rising ensues. Vin is in Africa, in the body of a mercenary fighting EPLF rebels in a conflict he knows nothing about. He’s never been to Africa before. (“Born here,” corrects the madman.)
He’s dizzy and in great pain. The body he’s in is insane, and the world is spinning and stopping. The hours begin to drag by.
His shot with the madman ended during a firefight—bullets twanging through humid air and into thick plants that sprayed green shrapnel. When he awoke inside the crèche, he was too stunned to summon the presence of mind to exit. He slid into a second shot . . .
. . . in which he experiences a lot of sex, with many different people. The shot begins as a tessellation of bright sensory moments, a musk of bodies and perfumes that gently unstitches him. There are soft chests and others firm and geometric, wide caramel aureoles and pink-rimmed, vanishingly small buttons, gooseflesh along slick lengths of skin leading to innies, and others to outies. He lies on his back and things happen. He rises to his knees and acts. The first time he begins to organize a full sense of himself his prostate becomes a ringing wave and he gets lost again.
Vin has only had a few partners, and has never had sex with men. There are many men and a few women here. But when his host runs a palm over a bearded face and pulls it to him, Vin’s understanding of himself is irrelevant. Elian, his host, is alert and more than happy, is expert in responding to and intensifying a coupling. Elian’s delight is already faceted and Vin only adds another lens. During pauses, recollections of Kim form and fade, smells recall her, the weight and feel of bodies and limbs evoke ghostly memories.
Elian is lying on his back, exhausted, his limbs over other healthy limbs. He stretches and stands, makes a joke that Vin doesn’t process. He’s on a large yacht in a lovely, island-bound cove, a young body that feels most comfortable wrapped around other bodies and that’s now clothed in a mild breeze. He may be a prostitute, though Elian bridles at the term. After Vin’s day in combat, the surrender of this shot and possibly the drugs in Elian’s system make surfaces tilt and slide unexpectedly, lips stretch and then relax, bruise-like circles around eye sockets swell and recede, voices waver as if jostled by bubbles that are wishing themselves toward breathable air. Elian seems to be keeping Vin at a distance, as if Vin were a crawling sensation that could lead him to a bad trip.
For hours Vin doesn’t try to influence Elian, just tries to remember that he’s a separate person. It’s difficult to decode Elian’s perspective. There is drowsing, then more nuzzling, drinking and snorting, straining and smoking, a return of other naked bodies.
A flock of vivid green parrots are loose on the yacht and in slack moments when Vin sees their curious faces or startles at their piercing cries he wonders whether they might be phantoms. A gray wire-haired dog sits on a green cushion beneath two of the green parrots. If he is hallucinating, Vin might be seeing the ghost of his dog Xiao Hui, Gao Cheng’s doomed companion.
Elian has a terror of mixing the wrong drugs and dying at an anonymous anchorage. Between the bouts of confusing sex with roaming packs of hedonists, Vin tries to make various pills, powders and pipes on offer seem unappealing, and tries to keep Elian hydrated. At one point, as Elian drifts in and out of sleep, Vin experiments with suggesting that he change his life, maybe steal away with a companion and settle down. Elian seems to be ignoring him, until—just as Vin is wondering whether direct communication is possible—Elian says aloud, but softly, “Okay, but without fucking what are we for?” Which might be a response.
Though Elian’s love of sex is genuine, he wants other things as well, he’s just unsure what. He wants desperately to be away from the yacht, but he has trouble thinking of other ways to live. Vin tries to envision alternatives but the drugs are still making it difficult to maintain his own coherence. In the end, Vin can’t overcome the nihilism of Elian’s commitment to partying, even though it limits and may kill him. Again, Vin is in a person he couldn’t imagine without the crèche, a person who doesn’t think about the questions that obsess Vin. For example, Elian never asks himself what’s “real” and what isn’t.