Masters of Worlds

Theodore:

Imagine the tallest tower your sense of realism will allow, and then imagine taller. Think of the glitter of cut diamond, the reflections in a shattered mirror with shards so fine as to be near invisible. The rush of cold air into winter lungs. A fall from a great height. The tingle of a needle held close to the skin.
	I built my first creation in a forest, so this spire, this monument to sharpness would have a contrast. The chaos and random fluidity of nature with this one colossal statement of man-made precision, my creation. I built it as an affront. I can defeat nature, it declared. It passed with 71% of a ten-day vote.
	I matured, and I no longer create with such arrogance, but that tower still stands. Many calls to vote, over six hundred in thirty years, have tried to topple it, but still it stands. So much faith in my legacy worries me.
I once designed a six billion-mole cube of lead to stand in an empty stretch of arctic tundra. Two-day vote, 98% support. I let it stand there for a few hours before designing the area back to empty space. 98% support.
Soon after, I altered myself.

Maina:

Murder is difficult.

But not impossible.

The constitution appears solid. No action can include the wilful cessation of a consciousness without that consciousness’s consent. Of course, nothing is said about action that leads to that consent. The vote stands in the way, but it is oh so very easy to manipulate. What, then, will drive a person to suicide?

Mussain:

Something in the trees sees me and I jump, ravenously seeking the iron taste of flesh and the shrieking cry as death—death in the purest, animalistic form—overtakes it. Claws and teeth and talons and beaks.
	None of it was alien to me any more.
	I have killed thousands, and not a soul among them. I have my obsession and my sister has hers. The chase, the hunt, the kill. Similar, but not completely.
	I kill only out of boredom.
	And when it returns.
	There will have to be something new.

Maina:

Why? Why not?

The constitution dictates confinement over the destruction of life, but not its creation, or its alteration. I thought, why not alter my own life and create a new one? Not a pregnancy, no, nothing like that. More like…a division. Macro-mitosis.
	And my realisation was quick to follow. Once you’ve created a life, the next step is to destroy it.
There is no understanding a thing until you have seen it in entirety. Life. To see life as a thing has been my goal. It isn’t tangible. It isn’t intangible, not in the way we know it. It cannot be observed as it is the source of observation. What we observe of other life is only the surface. The skin, the eyes, the flowing words and flowing thoughts.
Life can create other life, but it cannot create itself. There is no such impossibility with death. Life is created as a gift. Ending it can be selfish.
But this I have beaten. I have created myself…an element of myself. I have seen it live. One thing left to do. With both accomplished I might claim full understanding of life. My life. The only one I can truly understand. The only one I can be inside of.

Theodore:

The vote nearly denied me. 48% didn’t want to lose the recognisable visage of their favourite designer. My appearance may belong to me, but they were the ones using it. They didn’t like it stolen from them. I changed my body and I changed my name. No voter would recognise me. I would also change my designs. My style. I would no longer be judged by my reputation, but by my skill.
I holidayed on Abeir-Toril. Ten days on The Spine of the World, in constant fear for my life. It felt exhilarating. And it gave me my motivation.
On a frigid plateau of rock, dressed like a primitive but warmed from within, I saw an eagle and stopped walking. For a long while I watched it glide. We’d all existed as a bird, of course, but how many of us had felt a bird’s existence?
I would make my next creation an experience.

Mussain:

Two days. Immobile. Tongue tastes the air. Feels the air. Taste. Vibrations. Heat. The dim clouds of colour in my eyes.
	Such peace.
	Like waking sleep. The experience of life just drifts by. Glacial. Serene.
	Beautifully.
	A rat sits digesting inside me. I feel it. It distends me. Fulfils me. In a while there will be another one. Out. Exploring the night. My jaws will take it.
	And I will bite.
	And then I will wait again.

Theodore:

I put myself in a quiet orbit. Vacuum cooled my naked skin. Atmosphere glowed beneath me. I thought.
	With so much out there to play with, I had come to feel I had little to offer humanity. I had built cities when few had the ability or the imagination, but now all who cared to do it could. Nobody cared for cities any more, except for the role-players. I reshaped planets. I planned the dismantling of Saturn. Then Cornucopia replaced the need and, in the blink of an eye, Saturn returned, without my involvement. We had all become masters of worlds.
I saw the end of the drive to fulfil needs. Life became a playground of wants, satisfying them and finding new ones. My work became creation; creation of wants.
An Enterprise passed below me, silently floating.
Not all abandoned their needs, though. Some transformed them into wants. They adopted limitations to live out fantasies. They ate and slept and worked because they wanted to feel like they needed to. They fought fabricated adversities, weathered unnecessary hardships, explored known territory, pulling sledges or flying starships. The USS. Enterprise was everywhere. Many copies. Many Kirks.
A beggar will dream of becoming a king. And when he does, he may return cap in hand to the streets for his evening entertainment. Necessity makes a challenge an ordeal. Living in plenty turns it into sport.
I raged against it. Too many did nothing but ape how we used to exist. I endlessly urged humanity towards new experiences. People created, just like me, but so many of them simply recreated the past, like men building a stage and then living upon it, and I myself carried the shame of doing the same on too many occasions; I climbed mountains when I could easily flatten them.
	That bird had blessed me. With confidence I could declare I had imagined something that I had not touched upon before; the experience of becoming something new, putting on not just a different body, but a different mind too. We could exist as another consciousness, experiencing life truly from an alien perspective. Abundant ability lay at our fingertips, but we had yet to turn this power on our very core; that little world inside us that defines how we think and feel and digest the information our bodies present to us. I had spent my life changing what we observe. Now I would change the observer.

Mussain:

How pitiful they look, huddled in their tight groups, clutching at one-another’s arms, fingers gripping wet clothing. I smiled. They were cold, every one of them wet to the skin. They shiver, and I watch, kept warm by the thick coat of my uniform.
	I wave my arm. The soldiers lined up at my sides raise their rifles. A woman screams and the crowd presses against the wall. A child falls. Feet move. It is trampled in the crush. A foot presses down on its neck. It struggles and goes still.
	I wave my arm again. The soldiers pull their triggers. My ears fill with the crack of gunpowder and the screams of the dying. They fall in waves, their number halving, halving again, and again, the soldiers calmly reloading between shots. Smoke curls over piled bodies. Soldiers break rank and move forward, ending the agonised cries of the wounded. Bayonets thrust. Flesh splits. Soon, only stillness and silence.
	They hadn’t rushed the soldiers. Like cattle they stood. Like cattle they knew nothing of the power they could wield against the farmer. I catch the scent of blood and emptied bowels. Death and victory. A human kind of hunting.
	I unsheathe my bright ceremonial sword and hold it high. Men! To the capital!

Maina:

I rode a fusion bomb to Mars. There my brother played with automatons under a burning sky. The atmosphere hung heavy with noxious gasses and radioactive fallout, the wastes of the playful destruction of bored gods. I had to remove my lungs.
	Continuous bombardment had glassed the northern hemisphere. I slipped out of my transportation and let it impact Acidalia Planitia at ten thousand kilometres per second. I learned later that three consciousnesses had been caught in the blast. Reduced to their marbles, they needed to call votes to give themselves new bodies. This annoyed them. But the next day they returned to throwing themselves into pools of molten lead. I was a passing blip in their lives.
	I fell towards the equator and, in the spirit of the planet, let myself burst into flames and smash a crater into the ground. I crawled out in a carbon spider, then flew as an angel towards the jungles and warring cities of the south.
	Where are you? I want to see you, I whispered into his thoughts, and like a puppy he replied. A red jewel hung in my mind’s eye, guiding me towards him. I landed beside the unabashed anachronism of a burnt renaissance cottage. I found him inside, bleeding to death on a smouldering bed.
	You have a human body, I said.
	He smiled. The devilish smile of an imp. Animals bored me. Human violence is far more interesting.
	I sat on the end of the bed. His insignia shone through the grime of his uniform. Soldier?
	General.
	You led an army.
	Yes. Toward glorious revolution.
	I could see his ribs. From the sweat on his forehead I could tell he was feeling the pain and enjoying it. What happened?
	 My men turned on me.
	Your living mannequins did this to you?
His smile widened. There was madness in his eyes. Oh yes. I made them very well, don’t you think?
Yes. You did. I stood up, brushing off soot. I want to spend time with you. Come.
Let me die first.
It took an hour of unbearable pain before his body failed and he slipped away. For a while his consciousness sat imprisoned in the tiny armoured marble in the centre of his brain, savouring the helplessness of the confinement. Then, with an eye-watering blur, his body disappeared, replaced by a bipedal beast. Human shape, but animal features. Fangs and fur and claws. His favourite form.
Did you enjoy yourself?
Oh yes, he purred. Immensely.

Mussain:

To Antarctica where we make love on the ice. I sink my claws into her back and tear her wings to tatters. She bites my lip until it bleeds and prolongs my pleasure with such care that I have to throw her off and ravage her until her heart stops. I hold her tendons between my teeth. With one lust slaked I feed another. I begin to eat.
	She gives me no time to finish. The angel had become an empty shell. A mouse with steel teeth appears. It carries the sparkle of her consciousness. She runs up my back. Her teeth sink into my flesh and start the flow of blood. I swat at her. I miss. I hit. I crush her ribcage beneath my fingers.
	Then a bat. She flies about my head. Wings harass me. I wave at her, heavy limbs unsuitable. I knock her onto the ice and bring my foot down. There she lays, teasing me. A body, there to taste, but she times the vote well. I step forward and the bat disappears, only blood on the ice. In its place a domestic cat.
	I stop.
	Oh.
I sit on the red ice. She mews and pads towards me. A hint of her smile hangs on the animal face. She climbs into my lap and then, when I lay back, she climbs onto my stomach.
	She whispers, What have you not yet done? Then with the precision of a surgeon she claws a line down my belly and pulls the skin apart. She climbs inside, tearing my organs. I bulge. Pregnant.
	In the thirty second vote on her design to seal my skin over her there are two who vote against it on moral principles and two thousand who automatically vote favourably on the grounds that one should not be governed by the moral principles of others. Such is the way of most votes that don’t break the constitution.
	I ask her how long she intends to be inside me this time. She doesn’t say.

I will accompany you. I will show you why you are unhappy. I will show you the futility of this life you immerse yourself in.

Theodore:

I relaxed on living tissue beside Lake Wichita and watched the fireworks rocket up from the far shore and explode into geometric complexities. Children played, learning to create, showing off their skills to their peers. A baby screamed at my side. When I looked over it stopped and stood up, walked over to me and licked my ear.
	“Change me”, it said. I shook my head.
	I toyed with a few votes, carried on waves of boredom that threatened to overwhelm me. Two seconds wait gave me a rainbow in my palm. Ten seconds for a projectile weapon. Nineteen and a half seconds for fist-sized atom splitter. One tenth of a second to lengthen my fingers.
	A marble-cracking design, however, would keep me waiting for months, years even, with a resounding “no” majority at the end. Even I could get no support on something like that. Nobody wanted anyone to have the power to break the little safety backup we each carried inside. That would risk mortality.
	Still, in my dark moments I wondered what would happen if one of those votes passed. What then happens to a consciousness that uses that granted ability to break the constitution? Nobody had yet invented a suitable punishment because nobody had yet committed the crime. How can you punish a crime if nobody is capable of committing it?
	In my darker moments I saw this as a challenge.
	I bit down hard on that runaway part of my psyche and narrowed my thoughts to a needle, pointing it directly at my goal. I tracked my way back through the history of votes, decades in an instant, looking, searching. I had learnt one important lesson many years ago; never embark on a journey without first finding out if anyone else had covered some of the ground for you.

The shame of it. Proud revelation of the fruit of years of work, in the days of solar capacitors and big dreams breaking cages. Surrounded, a circle of faces, watching with refreshing anticipation. The delight of something new. Something exciting. My childish pride, buzzing inside, flying, and the crashing defeat of those smiles falling away and heads turning. Seen it. Done it. Last week, a team in Germany. Old news, broadcast globally, Solar System-wide, and I had missed it, locked in a basement with a computer and an idea. I would create. Something never seen. But then, some minds move faster than mine…

There! A string of votes, leading back. Hundreds and thousands of votes from the same consciousness, all similar. I sent a request into the void, a gentle whisper of curiosity, tinted with a flirtatious hint of hedonism. The reply came fast, a deep purr. “Oh really?”
	A red jewel. Mars.

Maina:

Put your weapon away. Those soldiers will only rise like Lazarus. Petty games, create and kill, create and kill. Is this how you wish to spend your life? Why do it? Nothing will have changed after doing it. Your life will be in no way improved. Why run and struggle when it only leads to you standing still? Just stand still, and throw away your sport.

Given freedom, my thoughts invariably go backwards, not forwards. They find the memories of the past and sit, rigid, amongst them.
I was a slave for sixteen years, before Cornucopia. Then had been a time of the polar opposite of the times before and since, of necessity above abundance. Need, sheer unaccountable need strip-mined luxuries of free civility. We had eaten the world to a hard core. People became hard to match. Those years were of cold, hard steel.
I dug tunnels for the NAPCTLS hawks, pulling on the bit in luminous green darkness, machinery underneath skin, reins behind the eyes. The continents washed and waned, passing in fluid motion above me as I moved set patterns along set lines, a machine creating more machines. When they moved in, I moved out, and fresh rock occupied my mind, my claws, my will.
The light did not treat my eyes well. This thing called I pulled from the pit had my name, and they told me what it was. They dulled my claws and removed my eyes, and for a time I was useless. But this was how they said it was to be named and autonomous. I had risen through an invisible line I never knew existed, passing from the servile to the served.
Those days were a deep, navy blue of the senses, rifted amongst imagination and creation. When I was awake, I moved. They placed me and killed me for rest, and always, always, they remain indistinct and nameless. I was what existed inside locked boxes. I was what found freedom on a leash.
In closing, Cornucopia. Life found rebuilt, shaped around a recreated ideal. We have made this magic. We are masters of worlds. We give you a new world.

And then the new world becomes old. Years and invention weather and wash away the excitement of fresh air and uncontrolled action. Slipping into a planet’s core or creating and destroying and creating and destroying starts to bore. After a time I went underground again. There I lay in the dark and cold, letting myself be nothing, with no need to fill time with activity. Nothing can grow stale if you don’t experience them new.
	But this only lasts so long. The emptiness itself becomes stale.
So to create myself. Myself in my image. Create and then destroy.
Experience the beginning and then the end, and then feel.
	Feel the entirety of experience
and know the new
			and the old
				and not be tired by it.

Now I have my victim, and history has given me my weapon. I whisper to him, my voice rising through his body, inescapable, internal.
You have done this too often. Do another thing.
He lets the mouse slip out of his grasp.
I still enjoy it.
Do something else.
He sat back on the bare ground. I felt his vote go out. The ground erupted into green chaos. A jungle, screaming with life. I heated my body, steaming his insides. He fell, struggling.
Oh yes, he purred.
Isn’t this so much better? No need to create and chase. Why hunt? Let the entertainment come to you. Use the vote.
I want to hunt.
You have hunted endlessly. Eat.
But the chase.
The end is the same. Eat.
A vote went out. Bleeding meat coalesced into his paws.
Eat.
He sat there, warming my curled body, surrounded by the swelling energy of life and enjoyed, perhaps, the staleness of inert satisfaction.
Why bother with all that activity? There is nothing you ever need to do, nothing else exciting to entertain you. The chase? Why chase what only runs on your orders?

Mussain:

The blood taste isn’t as strong as it usually is. I tear off thick, ragged chunks, being as violent as I can be, but my satisfaction doesn’t peak. Meat, but just meat.
	That stranger is coming. A flicker in the sky that slowly descends. I can fix a beacon on him and see him clearly any time I like, but I have no need. My eyes see far. He is crisp in my vision.
	He asked to play with me. Does he know what that is like?
The little common-body alights on an engine, flames at his feet. I watch from the shadow of a boulder, my claws cutting the brown rock, meat discarded. The jungle sways around me. She knows what I am thinking.
	“Where are you?”
	I crawl out with my teeth bared, drunk on the atmosphere, seeing red, tasting red, my vision narrowing down to a sharp slice over his figure. Thick, heavy beats fill my ears. Hips swaying, shoulders rolling, ground closing between violent predation and innocent, unseeing prey. It would be wonderfully easy, so sweetly primal, to push him down and take my teeth to his neck.
	But her voice whispers up into my mind. He’ll only stand back up and vote his body whole. Attacking him will accomplish nothing, so why?
	He turns and sees me. I fall back onto my haunches. He watches me and I watch him. I am the image of animalistic fury, but he shows no fear. No real consciousness does.
	He crouches, matching my eye-level. “Mussain?”
	I growl, my body still.
	He tilts his head, the wind catching his hair, his eyes reflecting the reddy-orange of the sky. “You start a lot of votes to change your body. I find that very interesting.”
	It’s common enough.
	“Well yes, I believe that. But nobody appears to have as much experience with it as you do.”
	I’m sure there are some.
	“No, I’ve checked. I cannot find any. You have the most. I wish to ask your advice.”
	You tempted me with play.
	“Ah. You would like to play?”
	Boredom will find you again as soon as you finish. He will ask you his questions, and nothing will have been accomplished. You won’t feel improved. Why waste the effort?
	I enjoy it.
	You think you do, but it is an illusion, one that has broken. Can you be happy with an illusion?
	I’m happy enough.
	No, you are not.
	I feel happy.
	But you are not. Don’t play, and see what it saves you.
	What advice do you need?
	“A while ago you spent time as a snake.”
	Most do.
	“But most don’t change their brain when they do. Most fear what might happen. Accidents have happened in the past.”
	I have heard of those, yes. Something in the mind breaks.
	“You don’t fear the same happening to you?
	You haven’t ever feared, have you? You’ve tried everything you could without caring. Too fast. You exhausted everything too fast. There’s nothing left for you to try. Just lie down…
	I don’t fear it, no.
	“Then you might be able to help me. Will you?”
	With what?
	“With understanding the mind, the…pair of eyes inside that looks out, without accidents.”
	It’s already been done.
	No it hasn’t.
	You’ve done it. You do it every time you change.
	I focus on a part of my mind and slip into it. I don’t alter it.
	Isn’t that enough? That’s accomplished, done. It’s old. Why do it?
	Why?
	“Because nobody has done it. Wouldn’t you want to be able to change how you perceive the world, to relive every experience differently?”
	No.
	Yes.
	“Will you help me?”
	No.
	We should talk more.

Theodore:

He sat me down in his jungle and told me about his votes, all the while his heavy-set animal jaws muffling his words.
	“Why don’t you change?”
	He cradled his belly and shook his head.
	I am fine like this.
	I watched him for a few moments, and he watched me.
	“How do you do it? How do you alter your mind without having an accident?”
	I let myself become absorbed in parts of myself.
	“How do you do that?”
	A movement passed through his body, a gesture I didn’t recognise.
	I don’t know.
	“Do you use the votes to—”
	I am quite old. Not as old as Cornucopia, but old enough to remember its early days. I was alive before skills caught up with the ability. Maina, she—
	“Maina?”
	My sister.
	“Ah.”
	She taught me what it was to be. She showed me how to vote, but I already had this ability before. I could daydream. I don’t believe I am entirely whole.
	“What do you mean?”
	I feel fragmented. There is not a full consciousness in here.
He tapped his skull.
Only parts of one. Each fragment is a persona. The soldier, the snake, the beast…the lover, the fighter, the twisted demon.
	He stopped, but I could see the words continue behind his eyes. I did not feel the presence of the genius I was expecting. Psychosis over creation.
	“I thought you used the vote to alter your mind.”
	Only my body. My mind I can alter myself. I do not fear altering my mind, but I need no vote to do so. And, I feel, I may not need my own ability any more.
	“Why?”

Maina:

Why indeed. Because you have lost the desire, and quite rightly so. It wasn’t there to begin with. It was simply boredom that pushed you to it. You felt a need to fill that endless time.
	I was happy.
	There used to be another way to end boredom. It was an option for all before Cornucopia.
	What was it?
	It still is an option now. But you have to want it?
	What is it?
	Oh Mussain.
	What is it?
	Play with her.
	Her?

Theodore:

What is your name?
	“Theodore.”

Mussain:

Him. His name is Theodore.
	Names mean nothing. Gender means nothing. Is male any more right than female?
	What is the option?
	Play with Theodore. See what her body tastes like.
	No. It will not get me anywhere. Tell me my option!

Theodore:

I did not return to Earth. I enjoyed that place best, yes, but in disappointment its brightness and life would overwhelm me. I had to find a cool, quiet place. Space, but where?
	Far, far out orbited the machinery of Cornucopia. Wide, crystalline arcs of strange matter carved a sphere out of reality, inside which the drifts of future matter slid into existence, blazing for brief moments before collapsing into nothing. Out radiated the energy. Out projected the field within which the magic of Cornucopia could be performed. I pressed my palm against the surface, feeling the intangible nothingness as a cold, slippery wall. I knew the sun as a bright star at my back. Space was dark and starless. The blue vortexes before me washed out my vision, and all sense of scale was lost to me. I floated and fell all at once, the blue and the black above me, below me, around me, none of them more real than the others. My perception shifted back and forth between them, and in the confusion I found stability. I hung arm’s reach from the surface, and did nothing.
	Now I felt I could reclaim my thoughts. Mussain’s lust overpowered it. I had sat and watched as he lifted my finger and delicately bit it off at the knuckle.
	And what followed remains only as a violent frenzy in my foggy memory. I recovered from my marble, as much as it shamed me. I felt like a common thrill seeker, no better than all the other children on Mars. Those yes and no votes have had anonymity in them since the beginning, and I have always felt that. But this time, and this time alone, I felt the people behind them. The handful of no votes cut me like sharp insults. The yes votes felt worse. They felt knowing, conspiratorial. We know what you like to do, oh yes. Here is what you need. Enjoy your perversion.
	I knew of no justification for my thoughts. I recognised no perversion in what we did, but yet I felt one. Emotions over sense, and I knew my goal had more importance than pride and the satisfaction of creation alone. Mussain saw himself as fractured, and I, despite everything the successes of my life might lead me to believe, had no real control over the ticking machine inside my head, inside that marble that kept the me of me safe. Master of worlds, but slave to one’s self. I had to fix this.
	I shoved off of the surface and cartwheeled away from Cornucopia. And hanging next to this monument to someone else’s success at the expense of my failure would not help. Those years in that basement. So slow. Too slow. Beaten.
	If I had to risk an accident, if I had to risk madness and death, I would.

Maina:

I think he enjoyed it. To an extent. The real satisfaction wasn’t there any more. I had hoped for this. I had intended this. He was bored. And in his boredom he will turn to me, away from what this threat can offer. To change that which experiences rather than that which is experienced. An interesting idea, Theodore, but it isn’t mine. Close, but not.

The beginning of experience, and its end. I need Mussain more than you. He’s mine.
	
	I lay myself down in the wreckage of Theodore and looked up at him, wet like a newborn baby of the old manner. He looked at me with what could be real affection, but it wasn’t. I was interesting to him now, that’s all. He could do nothing but follow instinct, and his instinct told him to pursue me.
	And what does the pursued do? Why, they flee.
		This makes them all the more tempting to chase…

Thank you Theodore. Thank you for showing me the perfect lure.

Mussain:

She teases me. One thing said, then a second contradicting. Which to follow?
	The animal needs are far easier. I drop my thoughts and the choice becomes obvious, made for me. He sits before me wearing a classic body. Thin and spindly, unfurred, unclawed. Advanced? But the primal shape provides far more entertainment.
	What had Maina said? Lost from my mind for the moment.
	I slink forward, claws extended. He raises his head. Theodore…
	“No. You won’t play with me.”
	Then run. But I will catch you.
	“I’ve had this body a long time. I like it.”
	Then make a new one. You came to me with the offer.
	He disappears, gone from my vision. A black dot against the sky, propelled up by forces used but not understood. He voted. He engineered an escape. I need no vote. I am equipped. In moments I feel the breathless escape of upper air, then the burning suction of vacuum. I am so tempted, so tempted, to roll in airless agony until the body dies and, my marble, my consciousness entombed in dead matter, falls serenely back to the planet, burning away, until I impact, barely more than a dot on the desert, or jungle, or European street, silent and still in the tightest prison ever made until I request a new body on the vote, and then there’s always the chance they’ll deny me, and the vote after that, and the vote after that, leaving me trapped and helpless, in the perfect cage. It is the ultimate risk.
	But then Maina’s voice resurfaces. I feel her inside, a tight ball pressing out. Go on. Catch her. Play with her. Eat her. Then see what satisfaction you feel as she reassembles before you and walks away.
	I hesitate, but only a moment. I’ll show her what joys there are in the game, in the hunt!
	I see him, a glint amongst stars, crossing the unfathomable distances, falling from planet to planet. I whisper. Subtle. Soft, but heard by billions. Neurons flare, yes or no, and reality coalesces. I close my eyes. My skin solidifies, rigid, fiery cold, not warmed by the furnace at my rear. Maina drops onto a floor.
	A machine? Brother, you have an imagination.
	Don’t mock me.
	I feel her feet at every step, the touch at the furniture, at the controls.
	How many times have you had this form.
	A few.
	Hmm. I would have thought you would be bored of it by now.
	I crush her against the rear as I accelerate. There is no rush of wind, but my front compresses towards the back. Seams strain. Metal deforms towards its limitations. I go further. Screens and dials dutifully display, lights flash, molten metal and ceramic fibres strip away from the inferno of burning elemental gasses, hydrogen, oxygen, flame passing through the spectrum, becoming a brilliant blue ROAR. His speck grows. A split runs down my side. Air erupts like escaping breath. I lose track of Maina. An engine tears away and spins off into someone else’s future. I feel the delicious abandon of disintegration. I splinter. The physics of combustion get involved, and in a moment of brightness I am my marble, and Maina is hers, sailing forward on momentum. I am coming Theodore.
	We can catch her faster. Don’t you want the instant gratification?
	I will chase!
	The end is the same.
	You will see!
	This isn’t the realm of man or animal. Out here, with only the forces and the empty wilderness of nothing, is where primal instinct is born, amongst the quiet chaos. I vote, just for some mass, some eyes. I telescope. He is a white shape. I can see legs and arms. He is just floating, and I am floating faster. Lying in wait under a rock is a poor reflection on this. Hours will pass, and closer and closer I’ll get, in slow, mouth-watering inevitability.
	Then, after an eternity, he veers, invisible force propelling him away to the side. I manifest new engines how primitive and follow. To the sun? Oh Theodore. I will delight in following you there.
	He accelerates with unnatural energy, and I follow, dropping hydrogen atoms behind me and ripping them into subatomic particles. Maina follows, a blip in the distance behind me, matching my speed with ease and grace.
	Ah, the sun. You spent years playing here. Is there any part of it you don’t know?
	Theodore. Give up. I will catch you.
	His voice comes strange and illusive, unnatural for him. Leave me alone.
	Why do you want to chase her?
	Because he runs.

Maina:

There was the heart of Mussain. It is only his goal if he cannot obtain it. But then, he can have anything he asks for. Cornucopia provides it. So he must manufacture illusions if inaccessibility. The chase.

And now one that wasn’t an illusion.

Must be wary. I couldn’t let him get too…interested. I had wanted to expose the illusion to him, destroy it irrevocably. Now this was under threat.

But, in that threat, an opportunity. This will be good. I need not simply drive him to grow weary of his games. I can use his games against him. He can chase his own demise. Oh, and he will want it. He will want it so badly…because he cannot have it without the chase.

Catch her, satisfy your desires with her, and then I will tell you of the ultimate prize, Mussain. The one that you cannot have.

Mussain:

We dive into the sun. He cocoons himself. I don’t care. I burn down to my marble. Burning gasses slow me, but I am like a bullet, coring this star like nothing. I feel consciousnesses swimming in the inferno, laughing like angels. Maina is somewhere close, propelling herself, whispering to me, taunting me, tempting me with some treasure. Catch Theodore. Catch Theodore. Catch.
	Down towards the centre. Layers of ever-compressing matter zip by. Gas. Liquid. Solid. We burrow. Even Theodore’s cocoon can’t survive the pressure. We exist as marbles, as unbreakable beads, as velocity, as force. I can feel the pressure easing.
	I lose Theodore.
	I regain him.
	I lose him again.
	Back out into the cold expanses. I start to feel he is in the game.
	Starting to feel the prey’s exhilaration, are you Theodore?
	That voice. So uncommon. Masked. No.
	That back room of my mind that I’ve never understood speaks to me. A vote. One that directly relates to me. Not one to be dealt with by that little autopilot that assumes my wishes.
	
	Theodore.
		A sustained burst of photons from the following source…

I understand nothing but the location. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, and my no. Countless automatic votes, and only my small voice to resist. I feel heat, and my momentum slow, sapped away by the bombardment.
	But then, the vote serves me too.
	I can get anything I want at any time.
	
	Mussain.
		The resolution of nine times ten to the power of six thousand unstable hydrogen ions at the following location…

I find myself behind him in an instant. With arms I could reach out and touch him. But as marbles the distance is as wide as any. He puffs to either side. Tiny changes. Quick votes. So that becomes our chase. The race for the quickest vote to gain that edge, to get out of reach, to get within it.

	The resolution of nine-hundred moles of lead, exerting the following gravitational pull at the following location…
	The dissolution and erasure of all matter bounded by the following locations…
	The resolution of one particle of strange matter at the following location…
	The dissolution of all non-cornucopian energy within the following radius…

Our minds race. Intellectual hunter and prey. Not free from the mechanics of physicality, but above it. Wits over circumstance. Here he is a match. He knows the popular consensus. He plumbs into every easy vote. He…
	The edge…
	
	The resolution of…
	He tries to vote a force to stop himself. Yes yes yes…
	The dissolution and erasure…
	And I realise my failure. To stop a consciousness from acting to pull away from the edge is a marble-cracker. Out there, beyond the reach of Cornucopia, there is no safety.
	Maina. Help me.

Maina:

Cornucopia has its limitations. Beyond a certain distance it simply ceases to work. Votes go unheard. Nothing can be created. Stray out of the solar system and you are in true wilderness.
	Out there exist other consciousnesses. Luddites escaping Cornucopia, explorers accepting the risks, insane individuals delighting in them. Countless Enterprises and Death Stars and Galacticas have wandered off into that uncertain distance.
	It was not where I wanted Mussain to be. It would work, but not for my purposes.
	You can’t get her to go out there. The vote won’t let you. Come away.

Theodore:

The edge scared me. Out there I could have no ultimate control. I could turn, I could flee elsewhere, but the only place I could be sure he would never follow is out beyond that edge, and I considered that a worse option.
	I could have revealed myself, let the assembled masses gasp as my real self re-emerged into the void to vote. I could have thrown off the mask, lain aside Theodore, and taken up that old fame. The great creator returns!
	But that too seemed a worse option.

Mussain:

His marble hangs still. With a clink I touch him. Maina is somewhere close, but that is misleading. Close may be a million miles away. Distance matters very little out here. She is close to my mind.
	I give in. What do you want to do?
	I need not travel anywhere. Cornucopia makes a world for me. Nothingness shimmers, and I emerge a feral beast. There is wolf in me. But there is lion. And shark. Hot blood pounds in my ears. My vision is tinted yellow. Trees sway. The sky is ripped in violent storm.
	Give yourself a body.
	I expect his earlier body, but see something else appear.
	You are female.
	“This body has the female gender. I have none.”
	Theodore is a male name. It is an old name.
	“Does it matter?”
	The naked nymph kneels in the dirt. It does not suit the surroundings.
	The beast and the virgin. Why turn this into a fairy tale, Theodore?
	“I find it fitting. Do you see anything real here?”
	I do not lunge. I do not roar. The chase is over. This is the courtship. I slink on four legs, cutting an arc around…it. Does it fear? Does emotion overcome reason and bury the surety of safety within the marble? Do my eyes retrieve an ancestral fear of teeth and claws and fur?
	I approach, my gaze fixed. It doesn’t move. With my nose I lift its arm, snuffling, breath bathing innocence. My tongue leaves a smear on the wrist.
	I will bite!
	Those eyes see my intent. They widen. Nothing moves. The trees still. Black lips part. A finger slips between them, slim, fragile, cut from cloth, baked in white porcelain. Bones like glass. Flesh like liquid wax. The points of teeth touch, prick, pierce. The blade meets flesh, Theodore. Teeth find the jugular. Claws know the body. This may be a fairy tale, but it’s all the reality I need.
Eyes meet and lock as. With closing jaws, I introduce a nymph to pain.
	
Maina:

You can forget Theodore now. She has nothing new for you. You’ve taken everything you want from her. You’ve chased and caught. No need to chase her again. She is gone from existence.
He wore a female body.
	I was right.
	But before he wore a male body.
	You wore a spacecraft. A snake. A soldier. All manner of beast. Are you these things?
	No.
	In my eyes she is female.
	But his name is Theodore.
	Did you enjoy playing with her, Mussain?
	Yes.
	You’ve done it so many times though, haven’t you? You’ve satisfied all your desires with endless repetition.
	I am confused.
	There was no real chase. You got what you desired, but there was never any chance of you not, was there? She ran, but others have run. Everything in the joy you got from her was recycled. You’ve done it all before. How dull.
	Then what do you suggest I do!
	I’ve already offered it to you.
	You haven’t.
	Oh? I’m certain I have. Do you want it?
	Yes!
	Hmm. I’ll think about it. 

Theodore:

Very few deaths have occurred since Cornucopia came into existence, and most of those happened because of what I planned next.
	I had before me a representative ghost. I enjoyed this method of design the most. It coalesced out of nothing as not quite matter. If I put my arm through it it’d wash like liquid before drifting back into place. The shape described my mind, but not literally. No neurons or grey matter here. The blues and the greens and the reds mapped out the pulsing patterns of energy in my mind, unravelled, and laid out into areas of activity. I could play with the patterns, arrange them into different shapes, but I’d have no way of knowing the full effects. With so much mastery around me, we were still amateurs in this inner space.
	I reclined on a leather chair and watched it for a while. It appeared entirely alien to the surroundings; a luxury-liner’s observation bar. I had done this on purpose. I wanted to feel disconcerted. The silence oppressed me. The empty chairs and stools haunted me. The knowledge that the bridge was empty and the engines off filled me with an instinctual nervousness, even though I knew I controlled everything around me. The leather felt soft, and the drink sweet. Unobtrusive music played. Heaters kept the air warm and flowers filled it with dusty fragrance. My surroundings felt ambivalent, and it put me on edge. This mix of comfort and threat helped me focus and work.
	I knew that if you twisted this part, perception fades to nothing, as if you found yourself confined inside your marble. But I didn’t know how to expand it. I knew that others found removing memories a simpler task, although one just as risky, if not more so. I knew that changing personality caused the most difficulty, and most of the accidents. So where would I go? Removing memories over and over to make every experience fresh and new seemed like the easiest option.
	But the least effective. And perhaps someone else has already done it. Perhaps someone is perfecting it at the very moment I sit and contemplate it in this bar. Perhaps someone did it long ago and you just missed it in the votes.
	I spent three frantic hours searching, my skin cold and the balance in the room upset. I calmed myself down when I found nothing. I relaxed, but only slightly. I could not risk such a pale achievement. I turned my attention to personality.
	You wouldn’t understand what follows. Come back later.

Maina:

I first told Mussain about the miner back…back at the beginning.

It happened before Cornucopia, but after my days as a slave. I saw nothing for such a long time. He was assigned to look after me, as he knew my workings, had known them for the all that time I had worked. He was a guiding touch, a teacher to a machine.

For my sleep, he would kill me.

I grew to love pineapples. He couldn’t understand why, but he provided them for me. I must have looked strange, but I didn’t know. I still had no eyes. But, he said, he was working on it. In time. Give it time. I have to wait until they replace the machines first.
	So I waited, and I played with the pineapples. I crushed so many trying to feel them. He dutifully replaced every one. I never knew him to do anything other than serve me.
	Let me feel you.
	“No. It’s not safe. Perhaps after you have eyes.”

Mussain:

Waiting. Completely still. Taste. Vibrations. Heat. The dim clouds of colour in my eyes. I ignore the rest of my mind, the nagging word Maina.
	This is not as peaceful as it should be.
	A rat. It scurries in front of me and stops, whiskers twitching, ears up. It looks up at the sky. Darts forward. Head down, tail twitching, snuffling the earth. I feel its machinegun heartbeat.
	I uncoil. The rat lifts its head and scans. I know it knows I’m here somewhere. But perhaps it thinks it hasn’t been seen. Perhaps it thinks I am somewhere far away enough not to matter.
	More likely, it is wondering which direction to run. It might pick the wrong one and head straight for me.
	Its smell changes.
	It moves a little one direction. Then, back in another. I slowly slide out from under the rock, tongue flicking, almost close enough to lunge.
	When you kill it, you’ll do it again, and again and again and again and again, never changing, nothing new.
	I rest my head on the ground.
	No!
	The rat springs to life, disturbing pebbles and grass as it escapes out of view.

Theodore:

I flew a tour of my favourite places. It felt like saying goodbye to them all, and in a way this seemed true. I could cease to exist, and my marble wouldn’t save me. It would be inert, and it would be thrown away.
	I had the design I needed. It had to use a lot of guesswork, and I had no idea what most of it would do. I would soon enter unknown territory. I had only one thing left to do.
	I descended into a market square over an ocean that had not existed a few days ago. Figures bustled around me. Half of them had consciousnesses. I smiled at them. They ignored me, playing their roles.
	I closed my eyes and opened a door. My identity saw light for the first time in years. All the disappointments and achievements emerged. My fame reinstated itself. A ripple washed across the void where votes teem. And, for a breathless moment, they fell into silence.
	A cacophony of votes followed. A spike that could overwhelm so many minds. Jets and rockets and unstable atoms, all thrown rapidly into existence as millions of consciousnesses raced to converge on this one spot. The market doubled in size, then tripled. Grandstands grew. Hovering platforms appeared, clashing for proximity. A few smart individuals set up a barrier bubble. Frantic minutes gave way to an expectant hush.
	I leaned back almost doubled over and shouted. A trademark anachronism. “I have returned!”
	They roared. It felt wonderful. I spoke again before the sound died away.
	“But I will leave again soon!”
	The roar transmuted into confused wails. The wave of votes increased. Word had spread. Others not present now raced to attend. Bodies of countless diversity pressed inwards. Violence occurred. Someone voted to set off a giant explosion, but a torrent of NO votes threw the completion of the vote months into the future. The assembled numbers doubled. I raised an arm and instant silence descended. I loved this. If everything went wrong I would miss it.
	“I left the sight of you all because your support was choking. I could not know the true measure of my success, as you treated my failures with rapturous admiration. I fled you all. I love you, but you drove me away. Now I have returned, with something new to take your breath away! I have spent my life creating things to experience, things to observe.”
	I paused. No consciousness communicated. The votes reduced to a trickle as latecomers flew in.
	“But now I intend to change that which observes. Why have we not altered our minds as we alter the world? Because others have had accidents? We’ve never had that stop us before. I had the idea long ago. It took until just recently for me to accept the risk. We accomplish nothing being safe.”
	And now I could cut away those parts of myself that hold me back. All those throwbacks; the fears, the taboos, the trivialities of ancestral desires. All the things that surround us with games. Everything that Mussain represents. Everything that I have in common with him. This enlightened mind shall be rid of it!
	The crowd surged forward. Some voted to remove the barrier bubble. Others fought to keep me unmolested. Don’t do it they cried. We need you!
	“If I can do this, then I’ll open up something new for you all. Look at us. We’ve all become locked into repeating past fictions. Even when we do create something new, we live it in an outdated context.”
	I held my arms up.
	“Let’s change that.”

Theodore.
	The alteration of the consciousness named Theodore, with the following changes, with full awareness of the risks present to the participant…

It passed with 58%.

It…was enough.

Maina:

Finally I had my eyes. I could see, in crystalline blue. On every surface pineapples clustered. Their pulp stained upholstery. Ornaments and books lay toppled onto the floor, fruit decomposing in their rightful place. I had my first realisation that this is how pineapples died.
	Where do they come from?
	He explained, after a fashion, plants and trees and soil, light, photosynthesis, seeds. He opened a window for me to see the trees outside, but I looked instead towards the smoke in the distance.
	I don’t understand.
	“That’s alright. You will eventually.”
	There were broken panes and whole panes in the window. The floor was scored with deep gouges from my feet. It was dark in the corners. I didn’t know what electric light was, and couldn’t. I had broken all the bulbs without realising.
	Where do you come from?
	He was quiet for a while, watching me. In retrospect, I guessed he was wondering how to answer my inevitable next question; where did Maina come from? But I had no interest in understanding myself. My obsessions shifted. The miner explained about parents and family, procreation, gestation, caesareans, invitro fertilisation, genetic engineering, baby farms. He grew quite animated. Then he settled on birth, and all the details; fluids, pain, hospital beds, infested instruments, high mortality rates. It all only served to confuse me further.
	It seemed to me that pineapples were simpler. They began, they existed, and then Maina ended them. Three distinct states.
	Where do…televisions come from?
	He explained factories to me. He kept clear of the concept of robot production lines. Then shops. Once they had security guards, then police, then soldiers, now nothing. The joy of purchase, easy monthly payments. Showing it to his children. Boasting to other miners about its size.
	What do they do?
	Nothing, he said. They used to, but not now. They used to do a lot of things.
	And then Maina ends them. Three distinct states. I knew this as a certainty as I pushed it over and watched it shatter on the floor with a soft crackle.
	If I could learn how everything starts, how everything exists, and then how everything is ended by Maina, I could know everything. I wouldn’t be confused.
	He couldn’t understand why my clumsiness had become systematic destructiveness. I broke the crockery in his kitchen. I crushed his microwave and fish tank. I put holes in the walls. I cracked the armrests off his seats. The more I did it, the more I was certain in the beginning and the end of everything.
	Finally, I wanted to understand people. I already knew what the miner did; he cut tunnels, like I did. He cared for Maina. I learnt that he was as delicate as the pineapples. It was easy for Maina to end him.
	More people came and killed me to sleep. There were long explanations. People experienced, like I did. They lived. A new concept. They lived, so they shouldn’t be ended by Maina. But they’re a thing like everything else. No, they’re like Maina.
	So people had something else inside them. Something called sentience. Nobody was able to explain to me how it began, or how it ended. They knew all about the bit in the middle, no problem. But not the other two states. And how could I understand everything without that? I didn’t want to live in ignorance again.
	Such a long time passed. The world changed. So many things passed in and out of my consciousness. I wanted to know how Maina ended sentience, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see the sentience of others, other consciousnesses, other sources of observation, and if I ended mine I could no-longer exist to understand it. I had to find a different way of doing it.
	When, after so long, I had learnt everything else, I settled upon it. Maina creates from herself. Maina ends back into herself. Maina begins and ends maina. Maina knows her own consciousness. Maina, finally, knows all. So, Mussain came into being. Time for him to end.

Mussain:

I would like you to tell me what I should do now. Please tell me.
	Are you ready?
	Yes.
	Follow me to the edge. I’ll show you what vote to cast.

The votes:

Mussain.
	The removal of Mussain’s marble and the transference of his consciousness into the following unsecured organic form…
Passed with 64%.

Maina.
	The resolution of a USS Enterprise at the following location with an initial velocity vector orientated towards the edge of Cornucopia’s influence…
Passed with 98.9%

Mussain:

She lays me on a soft mattress. An angel and a beast. Her fingertips touch my lips. Trace down to my neck. Soft breath on my ear.
	You have been good, Mussain. So good. So good.
	I extend my claws. We are beyond the edge. With my body’s destruction comes nothing. With hers comes the imprisonment of her marble, with no saving vote. I sink them into her sides. She gasps. Her fingers stroke my forehead.
	One last play, Mussain. When it ends, this will all go. All this, all those thoughts. They’ll join mine. I’ll understand you, Mussain.
	What will I become?
	You’ll end. Become nothing. Something new, beyond your final state of being, where boredom will never catch you again.
	Instinct recoils. I know what death is, in an abstract way, the same way a person who has never lacked food knows about hunger. I cut my claws into her.
	I could stop you. I could rip you apart. Turn around. Get my marble back.
	Yes. Yes you could. But you know where that ends. Back in the mire. Back in the world where nothing excites. Where nothing is new.
	I retract my claws. She extends hers.
	The pain…is so very real.
	
Maina/Mussain:

Stay calm. Just close your eyes. It will be over soon.
	This is dying?
	For you. Your experiences are ending. They’ll be mine. Pay attention Mussain. Close attention. I need to be able to remember your experiences at that very last moment. After that…
	Yes?
	You knew yourself to be fragmented. That was very true. You never were a person, Mussain, any more than I was. Only a fragment. You began with me, and you are ending with me.
	Don’t you want to speak, Mussain?
	I don’t know.
	You won’t have another chance. You’re going. I can feel it. Crumbling away.
	It feels strange.
	You…
	It feels…good. New.
	The last new thing you will ever experience.
	Did you enjoy yourself?	
	I did.
	A long life. Ending now.
	I…
	Shh. No more.
	The divide between us has blurred now.
	You are nearly in me.
	Sleep.
	Sleep well.

All:

Did it work?
	I think so. I feel different.
	How different?
	Give me time and I’ll know. Different. Like I’ve not been here before.
	Is that good?
	I don’t know. Give me time.
	Now you know it all then.
	Yes. But…not really.
	Oh?
	I wouldn’t call it a complete success.
	I’m no closer to understanding either.
	I have the feeling that something is missing. I’ve lost part of my drive. I can’t place it.
	I’m overwhelmed by…lusts.
	Polar opposites.
	We know the beginning and the end and the changes between. What else is there to know?
	I’m not sure.
	We control the universe and everything in it. We know ourselves. We know everything outside ourselves. How could we possibly not understand it?
	I don’t know.
	We don’t understand our lack of understanding. Can we really complete this?
	Do you want my answer?
	No. No, I don’t think so. What to do…
	Mussain’s approach perhaps had something in it.
	Oh?
	Why worry about this? We have the tools for pleasure. We have the ability to…remove this unobtainable desire. Shall we return to the middle-ground?
	Do we really want to do that?
	It’s an option.
	And there’s always the risk.
	We’d only go where Mussain has gone. I’m not sure that’s something to be feared.
	So to be satisfied in our ignorance, then death.
	Mussain’s way.
	Can we bring him back?
	Well, we can try…
	And should we?

	Give it time.

END