Chương 436: Book Eight, Chapter 103: Shapeless One Interlude

Shapeless One Interlude Among the shapeless ones, there is a select group of revered individuals said to have a long memory. They alone, it is claimed, can remember the twists and turns of our mysterious past. Some are even said to remember back before we left our physical bodies and became higher-dimensional beings. The word for these people is charlatans.

They exploit our desire to remember our past for clout and personal gain, though most mortals would have trouble understanding what beings such as us would have to gain from the deception. We are beyond the need for money, for food, for shelter. There is only one currency left to our civilization, and that is the narrative. We are obsessed with the story of our species. The shapeless one who controls the zeitgeist gains tremendous power. It isn't that they fool us into believing things that aren't true.

They simply give us a shiny new backstory, and we are thankful to them. The fact is that even before we came here, we always had a deep love for role-playing. We always imagined ourselves as part of a bigger story. We believed we held an important place among the many worlds. We believed it right up until the day we fled to Carousel. My guess is that we aren't the only ones. The way I see it, being immortal is only impressive if you've been that way for a long time.

That's something the Manifest Consortium and all the other colonies of magical humans don't understand. The shapeless ones have been around longer than we can describe. Longer than a physicist could find the notation to record. When you're that old, sometimes you hear stories about yourself, and you have no idea if they're true. After a while, all memories become exactly that: stories. You sit in the audience of your own history, and you wonder what came before, and whether any of it ever mattered.

I've been so many people in my time. I've been world leaders and scientists. I've fought in wars on more versions of Earth than I could count. I've had so many names I couldn't begin to relay them all. Today, my name is Riley Lawrence. It won't be forever. - The real Riley Lawrence and I walked as we talked. We had nowhere to go, but we had all the time in the world to get there. The valley was wide and cast in a golden hue of light.

We walked along the river that ran through it, Riley a few steps ahead of me, his shoulders set in a way I recognized from the inside. I had taken his shape so well, I knew the ache in his lower back from sleeping on the boat. I knew the small habit of flexing his fingers like he was typing on an invisible keyboard in his mind when he was thinking. I knew there was always a movie playing in the back of his mind, and I knew the guilt he felt for never really engaging with his own life before Carousel.

It is strange, taking someone's identity. As soon as the shaping machine finishes the last fold of their brain, you have all of it. Their memories. Their personality. Every hope and dream served to you on a platter. Whatever baggage they carry feels light because deep down, you know it doesn't belong to you. Riley Lawrence had baggage. He carried it as quietly as Carousel allowed him to. I didn't know how he was going to react when I'd first caught his attention after he beat the storyline.

There are only so many realistic responses to meeting your own copy, and I had seen them all. Anger. Fear. Sometimes a kind of brittle, performative humor. I hoped he would handle it as he had the first time we met. When the moment came, Riley did not let me down. It wasn't anger. It wasn't fear. It was curiosity. Wonder, even, badly hidden. Our little game of lost memories and secrets had clearly gone both ways.

"I don't remember one of you taking my shape," he said.

"I don't think Carousel wanted you to," I answered. Mortals waste so much of their lives on small talk. I got none of it from him. He took a plastic tape container from his hoodie pockey, the number 4 drawn on the spine in his own handwriting, and held it out between us like a question. I knew all about that tape.

"Care to explain?" he asked when he saw the recognition on my face.

"The last time we met," I said, "you told me you wanted to remember everything. Is that still true?" As eager as he was to chase down the last loose end of the storyline, he was rightly cautious of me. His eyes drifted to my hand, his hand, technically, where it blended seamlessly into the plastic body of the fourth videotape, the film unspooling and trailing in the wind like a long black ribbon.

"What kind of trick are you trying to play?" he asked.

"None." He was doing remarkably well for a man in conversation with his own doppelganger. Maybe he was just too tired to psych himself out. Or maybe the Filmmaker in him recognized a scene when he saw one and knew better than to break character.

"This has my handwriting on it," he said, holding the tape container up.

"Is that because I wrote it?"

"What do you think?" I asked. I wasn't being rude. If he didn't put it together himself, I wouldn't be allowed to tell him. He thought about it.

"I think the title of the trope Prop Department Requisition refers to an actual place. And that when we need props, we have to make them ourselves. We have to earn them." I smiled then and offered him the chance to remember. Now, I was almost certain Carousel would let me. Why else would it have allowed me to come here? He nodded. I reached out, unfolding my good hand, and gave him back what I could of the memories he had lost. - I had never been to the props department before.

Riley went there many times, though he didn't remember them. I remembered, through him, the moment he first realized what he got himself into. He was forced to film The Sunken Cradle Part One from the outside, not the real storyline, just a movie that walked off the silver screen and went three-dimensional. He could never go On-Screen, which meant he had to film everything from a distance. He could rarely hear the dialogue. It frustrated him to no end. But he learned about the storyline, regardless.

He was good at picking up details and reworking them into actionable intelligence. That's what made being him so fun. My interaction with him didn't begin until much later, after he filled three videotapes and started a fourth. Carousel made the rule plain: he was not allowed to go down into the cradle. We were in Carousel a long time, my people, and it was my distinct impression that Carousel liked the cradle more than it liked us. An interdimensional hub. A doorway to so many worlds, all at once.

We were a means to a setting. Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Riley, of course, did not care for Carousel's rules. What Carousel laid down as a restriction, Riley read as a challenge. And maybe he was right to, because he found his way in. I'm still not sure if he regrets it. He filmed us at our most devious. For a species in love with role-play, Carousel should have been a paradise.

But it always had such limited ideas about which roles we were allowed to play. It wanted us as antagonists, as monsters of the week. I understood the appeal. Carousel wants stories of mortals struggling against terrible odds, and we are good at being those odds. The shapeless ones have only been protagonists in that kind of story once. It's not something I would care to relive. - If you were to believe the charlatans, with their long memory, we were not always like this.

They tell grand myths of our rise from simple mortals to the divine. Some of us eat up those stories. Even amongst more modest shapeless ones, it is almost universally agreed that we had bodies once, though I keep a small dose of skepticism. There's no real way to know. One common theory is that we came from a version of Earth that shattered across the dimensions, and that our ability to ascend was a necessary product of evolution. Another, the one I prefer, posits that we were once great scientists.

That we taught ourselves to travel the dimensions, and the multiverse itself, and that somewhere in the vast cosmos, there is a forgotten realm where our bodies still wait. Frozen in time. Patient as glaciers. Waiting for our souls, whatever a soul is, to come home. I like the idea that I have a body somewhere, waiting for me. I don't believe it. But at this point, anything could be true. - Riley filmed everything that happened inside the cradle. Everything.

He filmed us as we took the shapes of his friends in that first film. He filmed us from a distance, and because we ignored him, he believed we could not interact with him. He was wrong about that. He knew better than to come down. He knew information like that wouldn't be free. But he could not have imagined the cost. While he was filming our shaping machine, I received a directive from the script: The rogue shapeless one captures Riley and compacts him into a dimensional void in order to take his shape.

We don't have names, my people. Maybe my body does, somewhere back in universe X, but if I ever had a name that belonged to me, I don't remember it. We have always preferred the names of our shapes anyway, if a name was even needed. We recognize each other instantly, by proximity alone, an ability that Carousel has never bothered to write into its movies. We have a great many powers that Carousel does not let us use in its storylines. Capturing Riley was easy. I was Off-Screen, and being Off-Screen has its perks.

I can be myself when no one is looking. I had no clue about Carousel's purpose for Riley. Perhaps I would be tasked with running the storyline as Riley Lawrence, the Film Buff. Perhaps that was how he was meant to learn his lesson. I would never find out, because Riley never had to learn it. As I was being shaped into him, something went wrong. My hand, and the videotape pinched inside of it, the one he pulled from his camera, didn't form correctly. I came out the other side incomplete.

Hand and tape fused into a single bad knot of plastic and flesh. The shaping machine doesn't make mistakes. Not that I can remember. And the script said nothing about this particular shaping going awry. Then I saw him. Out on the floor. Standing where he should not have been. He escaped the timeless prison I stuck him in. How? I looked at the tape in my malformed hand and at the identical tape in his, and I understood.

That clever little bastard unspooled the film, gripped the loose end in one fist, and threw the cassette like a grappling hook. The tape paid out behind it in a long black streamer until it crossed through the radius of the compactor. With a physical medium connecting him to the outer dimension, the dimensional void was compromised, and he was expelled from within it. Too bad he ruined all his footage in the process. He wasn't the first creature to figure that trick out.

Usually, it's the things with tentacles or long searching roots. It's not every day that a human gets out using nothing but quick thinking and a length of videotape. Up until that moment, Carousel had no problem with me feeding him back his own memories. He earned the knowledge of the props department. He pieced it together. That was fair. Carousel only stripped players of their memories in the department because it would be an unfair advantage, not because the place was taboo.

But for whatever reason, Carousel didn't want him to know what happened next. I wanted to show him the plan he made, the one he needed the little plastic cassette container for. I wanted him to know how well he had learned from his time in the cradle. He had such a daring plan. He deserves to know, I thought. The script bound me anyway. He deserves to know. He earned it. Let me show him. Carousel would not budge. Maybe it didn't want him haunted by the psychic pain that plagued him in the cradle.

Maybe it just didn't want him to get smug. Or maybe Carousel planned on recycling his plan just like it did so many other things. I tried my best, anyway. To give him context. To show him our long conversation between shape and shapeless one, in the dark near the shaping machine. I'm still not sure how much of it he picked up. He had a plan to win it all, and he would never get to know it. We talked for hours.

He interrogated me, hoping to learn every little detail about my kind, even when he knew he would forget it. At one point, he turned toward a dark hallway that I knew to be empty. He cocked his head, the way an animal does when it hears the snap of a twig.

"Cassie?" he asked. I looked where he was looking. There was nothing there. Even with all my senses, I couldn't perceive it. He waited. He got no answer. But he kept staring into the dark long after a man without a reason would have turned away. Humans can become attuned to the cosmos through some kind of psychic ability. That is a power shapeless ones can only covet. Even wearing a human shape, we are too vast to feel the smallest vibrations in the immense array of existence.

It seems counterintuitive that such simple creatures could be more sensitive than we are, but then, a butterfly is probably more sensitive to a small stir of wind than a man is. I watched him stare into that darkness for some time before he gave up searching. I could tell that something about the aura of the cradle was weighing on him. If you don't want me to tell him his plan, then why did you want me to find him after the storyline? The script gave me no answer. Not for a long time.

I stopped showing him his past. He took a slow breath. The memories finished settling.

"Is that it?" he asked. He didn't look at me. He spoke to the valley.

"Cassie said I had an idea for beating the storyline. That there was something I forgot. She was there. Somehow she knew I was on to something."

"I can't speak about that," I said. A pause.

"But I did have a plan?"

"I can't speak about that." He didn't press. He knew the shape of a wall when he hit one. He breathed out through his nose, long and even, and watched the river. I could tell he was in pain.

"If you're not going to tell me," he said quietly, "then what is all of this about?" I told him the truth.

"I don't know," I said.

"I'm just following the script." He looked at me then, really looked at me, his own face wearing his own expression, the small annoyance of a man who has come a long way for an answer that turns out to be a dead end. He breathed deeply, recovering from the weight of having his own memories pushed back through him. And only then, standing at the edge of the great valley, did the script finally give me my next line.

"Do you want to know why we came to Carousel?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, still grinding his teeth against the ache of old memories returned.

"We came here running," I said. Why would Carousel want me to tell him that? What good would it do? We knew so little about what had hunted us.

"From what?" he asked. I didn't have to come up with an answer. Carousel had one prepared for me, but as soon as I read it, I paused. Was it even true?

"We were running from something we couldn't see or understand," I said.

"A destroyer of worlds. Something beyond even us. It took all of us but a hundred or so. All who perceived it perished." Was that true? A hundred? That couldn't be. We were powerful beings. Our numbers were in the millions. It had to be a lie. Surely I would remember. It hadn't been that long. Did I remember there being more of us? I searched the recesses of my mind. …No. I didn't. I had no recollection of millions of my kind in Carousel. What had happened to us?

"What's wrong?" Riley asked.

"Nothing," I said. We came to Carousel running. Had the enemy really taken so many? Why couldn't I remember? More words appeared on the script.

"We came here on the brink of extinction," I said.

"Carousel saved us." That was true, wasn't it? We were almost all gone. The memory hit me in the gut. I couldn't take it. Please, I begged. Let me forget. Had I asked for that before? Carousel answered my prayer. I forgot the truth. It all became a story again.

"What could drive shapeless ones to extinction?" he asked. It was a good question. Carousel did not let me answer it. Instead, it told me to leave, and I obliged.

"Wait," Riley said.

"Are you really just here to tease me?" Maybe I was. My memories became stories again, and I found some small measure of peace in letting them go. But a thread remained. One last gasp that remembered the truth. The shapeless ones have a timeless existence. Every memory I still hold, original or borrowed, happens all at once. Right now, I am a ship captain fighting through a hurricane. Right now, I am the ruler of the Roman Empire. I am freezing to death in the Arctic on a doomed journey to rediscover the cradle.

I am soaring through space, fleeing every version of Earth I have ever known. I am a sorcerer. I am a saint. I am a mother. I am a father. I am a child with my whole life ahead of me. I am the survivor of a purge played out across many worlds. I am Riley Lawrence, a Film Buff, on the verge of discovering the horrifying reality of my situation for the hundredth time. I am curious and excited. As that last little spark of memory faded, I worried about Riley.

If Carousel had gone through all of this to bring him to us, did that mean it planned to send him further into the darkness? What horrid plot was it unfurling? I wish you luck, my human friend. Curiosity is a spear no shield can block. But where you are going, they are very curious too.