Part 2 to this story posted previously (here)
I went to bed early that night, professing a headache I didn’t have, and ducked under the thick black cloth that divided the room in two. On the other side were the four beds, and no sources of light - all the windows in the room were in the lighted, productive half. Not even bothering to change clothes, I clambered up into mine and laid down, facing the ceiling not more than two feet from my nose. I could hear the leakage from Rob’s headphones even from here, and Adam was humming a bit to himself, off-tune - he did that while he worked, though we never got a good idea of what he was working on. None of it bothered me - I wasn’t going to sleep. In my head I rummaged, and once again brought out The Forest, that vexing world, and held it in focus. Just watch, no joining, I mentally suggested to my second pattern. We could talk directly outside of a world; The Room was a comfortable convention designed for longer discussions that we had both become fond of.
I sensed acknowledgement, so I upended the box.
She was right where I left her, just a few steps before a bend where the path curved downhill and I would lose sight of her. Rather than follow, I turned back to my sitting boulder and stomped through the undergrowth past it, down into the creekbed. Even though these woods were not real, they were identical to a place I had explored well, and that would be enough to patch my way through.
I reached the footbridge and stood in the middle, knowing she would either turn back or reach it. She rounded the bend less than a minute later, looking very cross, then very surprised to see me, then cross again.
“What is this, some trick to prove you right?” She asked, the intervening hours being for her no time at all.
“Nah.” I gestured backwards. “I know a shorter path is all. Look, maybe we got off on the wrong foot. Forget the whole ‘you’re in my head’ thing. You tried to help me, let me return the favor.”
“You can’t help me.” She responded.
I stepped back and off the footbridge to let her pass.
“That’s it?” She looked at me strangely. “What’s changed?”
“Had some time to think about it.” I responded. “I was wrong to say something like that.”
“Some time?” She looked backwards. “I just left you back there... two minutes ago.”
“That’s some time.” I responded with a nod.
She stepped cautiously up to the bridge and onto it, as if expecting me to attack her. I didn’t, of course - Standing at the closest I ever got to straight, I was about an inch shorter than her and not at all in shape, where she clearly took care of herself. To allay her fears further I took another step backwards, off of the main path entirely and onto the beginnings of the smaller path I’d used.
She walked right past me, and I watched her continue on her way, determined that this was an unmitigated failure. Maybe she was a more complicated simulacrum, a more complicated character, but she might not be human. Maybe we had overreacted, I wondered, but my second pattern broke through in my mind to disagree. Just wait, it hinted.
Sure enough, about ten paces past me, she stopped, and turned. “You really took a shortcut?” She asked suspiciously.
I stepped out and gestured down that narrow path. “It’s right here. You just have to jump the creek to use it. Been coming out to these woods enough to know my way around. For instance, that trail will loop all the way around to come out behind Facilities on the northeast side of campus.”
She looked behind herself over her shoulder, probably estimating the accuracy of my claim. The world probably had not been defined that far, but if I went that way it would be.
I realized I didn’t know what would happen if she went that way alone - would she merely cease to exist when she got to a gap, or would the world patch for her? “But I think the low spot halfway there is still a mud pit.” I lied. “I wouldn’t advise it.” I didn’t know if the low spot was muddy in The Forest - I would have to go see for myself, see what was patched there when I did.
She seemed to be weighing options for several seconds before speaking again. “I’ll take your word for it.”
“And sorry about the name thing, too.” I jumped in. “I’m Matt.”
“Laura.” She replied automatically. “Why are you less nuts now than you were two minutes ago?”
“Like I said, I had some time to think about it.” I replied evenly.
“You must think fast, Matt.”
“Not fast enough.”
“Is that supposed to be an apology?” She didn’t really know what I meant - how could she?
“I already apologized. I was just stating the facts. I don’t think fast enough, I didn’t realize what I was doing until it was done.” A small lie - what I hadn’t realized was the nature of the character I was using my words to probe, to gauge. I meant to let her think that I was lying about being in my head, to get her guard down, so that I could try to locate any gaps or simplicities in her persona.
She nodded, seeming somewhat mollified. “I guess I caught you at a bad time.”
“In some ways. In others, it was a good time. No offense, Laura, but I don’t think you’d have given me a second look in any other meeting.”
“No, no, I - ” She started, before having something occur to her. “... You may be right.” She conceded after a pause. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m who I am by choice, and I’ve got to live with that. It’s not your fault.”
“Don’t let it get to your head, Matt, but...” She looked away, pretending to scrutinize a patch of flowers in the undergrowth. “That’s a more mature attitude than I’ve come to expect from college students. Living with consequences.”
I nodded. “Heard that before, actually. Though it’s not always been meant as a compliment.” I pointed back across the bridge. “I’m going back this way, I’ll take the shortcut again if you don’t want the company.” I gestured once down each path to emphasize my intentions, hoping that Laura would be able to see that it was no harm to her.
“No, it’s all right. You don’t need to get your feet wet again.”
I looked down, and noticed that she was right - one of my shoes was wet, and the sock inside had begun itching badly, as if I’d stepped through the creek. I didn’t recall having done so, but I realized upon considering it that I must have, because the creek was too wide to cross without -
I put a palm to my forehead and stepped back from Laura. “Not possible, how did you do that?”
“Do what?” She frowned. “I didn’t - ”
But time was already slowing, I was grinding the ride to a halt to let myself off before I lost my lunch. I’d just been patched in one of my own worlds - patched not by my second pattern, that happened occasionally, but patched by an innate character of the world., a completely independent actor. She had altered my perception, filled in gaps that I hadn’t bothered filling - entirely accidentally.
I threw the box labeled The Forest as far as I could get it from my attention, and pulled back to the base world, shivering a little in bed. I’d been patched inside a box in my mind. This terrified me - there was no reason that a poorly thought-out patch on my thought patterns by ‘Laura’ couldn’t affect me outside the world itself. Even talking to that world’s occupant was dangerous. When my second pattern and I patched each other, it was from the same memory base - we couldn't overwrite anything. Laura, on the other hand, could edit my memories on a whim and a thought.
I could hear Imagine’s elfin laugh in the back of my consciousness. Imagine wasn’t an independent entity in itself, it wasn’t sentient, it was a force of human nature and of my own repressed desires. My second pattern and I had named it for simplicity - in a well-maintained conversation between two, no names are needed, but when discussing a third party one needs to bring in at least one name. Rather than give a part of myself a name that implied hostility, we had agreed to simply call it Imagine, because that was all it could do. The feminine voice I often imagined it had was my own construction, not Imagine’s, part of my own thought pattern, a bad habit. My own or not, it didn’t make being laughed at in my mind any less frustrating.
Sleep did not come easy that night, or for many nights thereafter. The Forest, sealed up in its little featureless box, stayed where I had tossed it. But it did not stay there forever.
When I finally did re-open that box, it was on a Saturday, sunny and unseasonably cool. I had retreated into the real woods, to the real spot which the world in the box had so perfectly imitated. I knew exactly where I had been standing when I left the Forest World, and planted my feet there before upending that box, knowing now full well how dangerous its contents might be. It was a private place, but I also wanted to minimize the damage of any bleed-through, patching or otherwise - in the same place in the baseline world, I couldn’t, say, walk into a lake, unless I was doing it in the one I was conscious of as well. I rarely had bleed-through problems, but I wasn’t taking any chances this time. I knew what I was doing was dangerous.
The forest world upended out of its box and settled around me, exactly like the world that I would see if I opened my physical eyes in the baseline. Laura was still there - time for her hadn’t progressed. “ - do anything.” She was saying. “Matt, are you al - oh!”
I frowned. “What?” I refreshed my recollection of the last few sentences of our conversation, with the help of my second pattern. I hadn’t expected her to be surprised - what had I done?
“You looked frightened of me, you asked me ‘how I did’ something. You stepped back. But now you look calm. Instantly. Wait, are you - ”
“I’m not schizophrenic.” I finished for her. “Though I can see why you might think I was. Come on, walk with me, I want to try to explain something.” I started back along the path.
“Is it that ‘you’re in my head and we’re all doomed’ shtick again?” She had her defenses up. “I won’t hear it, Matt. Paranoid delusions.” Nevertheless, she kept pace, at a safe distance. I had to turn to look at her, and to speak, so I did, walking backwards slowly. I knew the path well enough to only have to look once every minute or so.
“What do you think I did to go from being afraid of you to being this collected? You scared the hell out of me, Laura, you patched me.” I stomped my wet foot. “And even a minor patch like this... you shouldn’t be able to do that. That’s not how this works.”
“Patched you? You hadn’t noticed your wet foot before I told you? I didn’t make your foot wet.”
I looked up to the leaf-obscured sky, casting about for how to explain. “No, you didn’t. You patched it. There was no information, wet or dry, one way or the other. It’s like Schrodinger’s cat. You shouldn’t be able to be the observer, but you did, and your subconscious mind patched in that my foot must be wet because the creek looked too wide to jump clean across.”
“I can’t change reality, Matt. Your foot has always been wet.” She was annoyed with me, but playing along, so I persisted. I knew this was dangerous territory, but I had to try.
“Wrong. Think back to when you saw me standing on the bridge. Was my foot wet?”
“Yes, I remember it clearly.” Laura insisted.
I nodded. A patch worked on memory too, hence my own memory filling itself in. The mental alterations were what I was afraid of, naturally, not the simple pseudo-physical effect of a damp shoe. However, I had long ago learned to see through the holes in a world patch, after a few bad run-ins with accidental patching by my second pattern. “This is the tricky part. Do you remember remembering that my foot was wet before you pointed it out?”
Laura frowned, and looked off to one side. “That’s a ridiculous question, of course I - hmm.” She interrupted herself. “... no. I don’t.”
I seized on this. “If you look hard enough, a patch never propagates properly in your memory. You can find the holes if you know how to look.” I turned around and pointed down the path, to a narrow turn around a hillock. “Tell me, what’s the path like after the turn?”
“Nothing spectacular.” She replied. “Like this stretch of path, more or less.”
“Muddy?” I remembered that the day that Imagine had created the forest world was only two days after a rather heavy spring rainfall. I aimed to show her what it meant to be patched like that - she seemed smart enough to recognize the tampering.
“Umm...” Laura looked confusedly at her shoes, which were very free of mud. “A little, but not all the way across. Mostly on the left side, where the path is lower, I stayed to the right so I didn’t get these shoes muddy. I...” She looked up in horror and recognition, stopped moving, then took a step back. “I didn’t know any of that a moment ago, did I? How did you do that?”
“Same way you did. I put the world in a position where I focused my attention on a gap, and my subconscious filled it in.” I stepped around the bend, and saw that the path was exactly as she had described, complete with a single set of prints in the higher, drier dirt on the right side of the path.
“But I just went through there - ”
I nodded. “Transition states are glossed over. You probably didn’t think much about your short walk here until I asked you. That’s why my foot wasn’t dry or wet until your mind patched it.”
“Well don’t do it again.” She said weakly, holding her hand up. “I wondered why I liked these shoes enough to avoid the mud, and in came all these memories about how they cost me eighty bucks and even that was on sale and - ”
“Laura, stop. You’re going deeper into the hole, you’ll find it has no bottom. The world is very thin.” I warned, but I could see her eyes moving from side to side as one thought led to another question, into another gap, and patched into another thought. She had hit a loop, and wasn’t paying attention to me anymore.
With a sigh, I walked back over to her and put a hand on her shoulder, jolting her out of the loop enough to slap my hand aside. “Get away from me. I don’t know what you did...”
“Nothing. I’ve got no more control than you do.” I claimed, backing off. I didn’t tell her that I could have my second pattern drop into her head, which would probably erase what there was of Laura and replace her with a glorified costume, because I didn’t intend to do it. It would be murder, of a sort.
But she wasn’t listening, she’d gone back into the memory loop. I’d been afraid of this - she was checking her memories, and finding that everything she tried to recall she found, but that nothing arbitrary was popping into her head, and that even those things she did find came with the telltale fresh unspooling feeling of a patch. She was looking for herself and not finding it.
“Laura!” I clapped my hands and she jumped a little, looking up. “Focus for a second, okay?”
“Wh-”
“No. Don’t speak. Listen.” I tapped my wet foot. “You scared me because you did that to me. I exist outside of this world, but you can patch my memories and it sticks. That means you could accidentally drive me insane. Chances are you will if you leave the forests, go back to campus, build up a pile of patched students who I would know but don’t exist in the baseline. So don’t, not right now, until I figure something out.”
“Wait.” Laura glowered. “Am I a hostage or something?”
“No.” I held up my hands. “I am asking a favor. I can’t hurt you, but I can stop the clock. That’s what I did a minute ago, when I went from panic to calm. I stopped the clock in this world after you patched me and couldn’t convince myself to come back in for a good two weeks.”
“I only met you five minutes ago, you - ah, I think I know what you’re implying, but I am not sure I believe it.” Laura frowned. “You’re just some guy, you aren’t God.”
“I’m not. I am here on this world’s terms like you, I just know the terms better, and how to get out once in awhile.” I clarified, stepping back from Laura now that she wasn’t in danger of tunneling through an infinity of patches.
“I’ll play along for now.” Laura said suspiciously. “But you don’t have me convinced you’re not insane.”
“Come on, this way.” I stepped around the turn, skirted the mud, and stood on the other side of it waiting for Laura to catch up. She did, so I located the side path I knew was nearby and directed her down it. “You know about me. Tell me about yourself.” I requested.
“About me?” She asked. “Sure. I’m a junior at State, got dragged out here for a party by a guy who turned out to be a creep. But he’s my ride back, so I’m sort of stuck. Probably going to have to find a cab.”
She was just behind me, and I didn’t need to look to listen, but I made sure to turn and nod so she knew I was paying attention. She didn’t sound like she was done talking, so I didn’t interrupt.
“I left for a minute to find a bathroom, and when I got back I found him feeling up some busty girl who’d gotten too drunk and passed out nearby. I slapped him when he tried to talk his way out of it, and stormed out of the party.” She caught up to me and put her hand on my shoulder, so I stopped and turned. “Hey. You’re driving a harsh pace, Matt, can we take it easy?”
“Sure.” I took a half-step to the side, which was her cue to let her hand drop before it became awkward. Maybe she would have put her hand down without the reminder, but I didn’t want to leave such things to chance. “I’d let you set the pace, but I know these trails pretty well.”
“Where are we going?” She peered past me down the narrow path.
“Nowhere, I was going to see how big of a loop we could draw.” I was also desperate to keep her away from inhabited areas of the campus, so I had picked one of lesser-known routes to even minimize the chances of traffic, patched or otherwise. And as long as I was a few steps ahead, my subconscious would handle terrain patching, and I wouldn’t wind up with memories of any fictional places lurking about in my head.
“Those memories, they weren’t the same. Those I had.” Laura insisted. “They weren’t ‘patched’, I was thinking about that when I walked around the bend and you were sitting there on that rock.”
“Good.” I nodded. That meant she wasn’t a patch herself, but I knew that - she was intrinsic to the intended progression of this world, so she had some things to her that were not patches. More than that, I was beginning to sense, this world was just her wrapper, or better put, a wrapper for this conversation between her and myself. “Let’s keep moving.”
“Supposing you’re right.” She led in after we’d been moving a minute. “If I have real memories what does that mean? Where do I fit into the ‘you’re in my head and we’re doomed’ theory?”
“Theory?” I asked. “You act like this is science. What goes on in my head has never been science, Laura. I only know the facts, and try to make rules from the patterns in the facts. This has never happened to me before - I’m flying blind. All I know is that you’re new, a thinking person. I shouldn’t be able to have thinking entities in my brain, except for myself.” I didn’t try to reinforce the hope in her voice, I didn’t spin a story to tell her that she was probably some sort of invader into my mind, or that I was sure we could get her out into the baseline. Anything along those lines would be a lie - the only way out of a world was the way I’d been entering and leaving. My mind could only extract itself if time in the simulated existence was stopped.
“Well then supposing you’re right, we’re both screwed, aren’t we?” She prompted, as it became obvious I wasn’t going to keep talking.
“I think so.” I agreed. “You still don’t believe me, though, right?”
“Not really. It’s...” Laura trailed off. “Hey, Matt. Where are the birds?”
“They’re scared of you.” I replied automatically. “You’re bigger than they are.”
“No, no. Stop.” She hissed.
I stopped. And I listened. I didn’t hear anything. “Nothing.”
“Exactly.” Laura replied. “Can’t hear any birds, even off in the distance. No cars. No people. Nothing’s moving except us.”
At that moment, a light breeze picked up in the treetops, and the leaves all hissed. I didn’t feel a breeze - of course, we were shielded by the woods themselves, so that didn’t surprise me. “The breeze is moving.” I pointed out. Which of us had patched the background noise I didn’t know, but the result was, as she pointed out, almost silent. I wondered why that was.
“It’s unnatural. There are always birds.”
“Hang on.” I didn’t have any memories of the kinds of birds in those woods - they were background noise at best, a nuisance to be overcome at worst, and I’d never paid them any attention. She was unsettled, and I didn’t like the sound of worry in her voice - the last thing I needed was to be in a world where an unstable, panicked person could patch against me. I also felt bad for her - in a way, she was a prisoner, one I didn’t want to keep locked in but who I could not release, who probably still had hope that I could.
Story continues in part 4 (here).
