"The Forest World" (Part 2 of 5)

Part 1 to this story posted previously (here)

I blinked. The piece of lined note paper in front of me was empty but for a date, a title, and the beginnings of a single mathematical proof, whose last readable character trailed off into an unbroken pen line, which meandered toward the center of the page and then spiraled into a solid circular mass of ink. The pen, still in my hand, was still idly tracing circles inside this mass, though there was no white left to write on. The ink was laid on so thick that it reflected the light not as a shiny black, but as a dark, oily purple.

It took my brain a moment to catch up, but when it did I nearly fell out of my chair to throw the pen across the room. “No no no.” I hissed. “That felt real. No fair.”

If my imagination had a voice, it would have been a calm, clear, confident feminine one, and I often imagined that it did. “All’s fair.” I imagined it saying. “Your move.”

I crumpled up the ruined assignment and tossed it into the trash, and then, taking out more paper, I hunted for a new pen, not wanting to dig in the dormitory room’s corner for the first. I mentally boxed up the fake forest, with its fake occupant, and closed the lid, casting it into the recesses of my mind as a means of disposal. I had never destroyed the contents of a world, no matter how much scorn I directed at it - I had to store the things my mind created, the things my imagination birthed, even though most of them offended me and ashamed me. The imagination of a college-age male is a frightening thing, after all - and I had to live with that more than most. This world, though, was different than the usual hormone-fueled fantasy - it wasn’t like those, more like the ones I had churned out intentionally, carefully lording over the process to keep my often-antagonistic imagination from taking over and twisting depravity into their substance. That, I decided, is why it had gotten through. I had not recoiled from it immediately, because it was not on its face reprehensible. My mind had been so busy with the puzzle it presented that it didn’t bother looking for seams, hints that what I was experiencing was a fabrication.

Unbidden, I felt the mental box label itself - “The Forest”. True, but also false. It was a fake forest, if a realistic one. I scowled, and returned to my proof. Worlds always named themselves, in usually so simplistic a way. The Room. The War. The City. Each got its own unique tag, except that I force-rewrote the tags of anything resembling smut to be nothing but the letters “XXX” and slapped extra locks on those. They still had labels, but I didn’t want them or care to know them.

The tromp of feet balancing too heavy a load heralded the return of one of my roommates, a cheerful, pudgy student most people called Rob, but not without prefacing his name with mild to moderate profanity. Sometimes it was meant in anger, other times in annoyance or amazement, but that didn’t seem to bother him much. “Day...” He swung his pack off his shoulder, narrowly avoided dashing out my brains with it, and tossed it toward the couch, all in one spinning motion. “...Accomplished. Things must die.”

I rolled my eyes and scooted my chair in to let him get past me easier. I was so used to his theatrical way of doing things that it was second nature to understand that he wasn’t being literal - he had little to do that evening, and would game until he got tired of it, or more likely until he got hungry.

Hunger. My stomach reminded me that looking at the school union’s selection of lunch food had put the idea of eating out of my mind better than actually eating something would have done. I craned my neck up to look at the clock on the shelf over my desk - it was ten minutes to five. We usually waited for everyone to get back to the room before venturing out to brave the student union for dinner, but that would not be for about three quarters of an hour - I remembered that Patrick had a project meeting on Mondays, and some corner of my head was reminding me that it was Monday. And that on Mondays, I was an axe murderer?

No I wasn’t. I didn’t own an axe. Against dormitory code to even have a knife longer than four inches.

“Hey Rob.” I called. Rob’s desk was hidden from me by two back-to-back armoires of the room’s four, so I leaned my chair back as far as it would go. “Rob.”

His earphones were on, the big black ones, and I could hear them leaking something that went “thump” about twice a second, occasionally sticking an extra thump in between one pair for good measure. Luckily, we had a policy for handling this situation. I opened a desk drawer, revealing a dish of pennies, selected the shiniest one I could see, and took aim.

The penny missed badly, following my pen into the black hole corner. I grabbed another, and took better aim. This time, it ricocheted off of the plastic case of Rob’s earphones, which we had learned was one of the few sounds that could penetrate their bass response at maximum volume.

Rob pulled the earphones down to his neck before the penny even stopped rolling. “Yeah, Matt?”

“I’m gonna hit dinner a bit early. Got things to do. So don’t wait for me to get back.” I closed the drawer containing the pennies with my knee.

Rob tossed out a sloppy thumbs-up gesture, and replaced his headset. I knew that he would do as I asked - his memory was pretty good, and he didn’t like waiting for anything too long, much less dinner. One better, his briefly-interrupted music and video game made him too apathetic to ask questions like ‘what’ and ‘why’, questions I hadn’t formulated answers to yet.

I took nothing with me to dinner but my meal card. I didn’t think I’d need anything. It was spring, so not yet too warm to wear any reasonable amount of clothes but not so cold as to require a thick coat. Perhaps it would have been more comfortable to bring my windbreaker, but I hadn’t, and didn’t want to go back for it. The air was bracing, and I used it to ground me as I dove to retrieve the box that I knew was never far from the fore.

It took me only a few seconds to find it. Most of the boxed worlds were featureless, with only their names to distinguish them, but this, among the oldest, I had let bleed out to color its shell. The box seemed to be made of small stone blocks, and on its label “The Room”. The simplest, most stable world, neutral ground.

My feet knew the way even without my stomach giving them pointers, so I opened The Room. The box upended, and inverted, and I was at the center of a stone-block room, lit only by two light sources - the blood-red light leaking from the seams of a fist-sized orb of lava suspended to my left, and the flickering blue flames of the mantle I knew was behind me. The flames seemed brighter today, I thought. The stone wing-backed chair was probably facing the fire, also out of view. Two bookshelves covered one wall, the remaining walls not dominated by the mantle itself were nothing but bare stone blocks.

A thought and the chair swiveled, and I became seated in it. Sort of. I could look down and see only the chair’s seat - I was not visible here, it was part of the rules of this rudimentary world, inasmuch as places that don’t exist can have rules.

There was no greeting from the suspended orb, a neutral silence. “Thoughts?” I prompted.

Imagine has come up with something new. Devoid of erotic intent. This is uncharacteristic. There was no sound, just raw voice, emanating from the orb of cracked lava. It was understood that the orb was not the speaker but merely a point of origin, much like my single word had come from the wing-backed chair even though there was no body sitting in it.

“But I’m sure if you wanted, we could...” Started a whispered feminine voice at where my ear might be, but I isolated the origin of the fake-world words and mentally flicked it backwards, toward the mantle. There was a hellish shriek, a splash of orange illumination over the blue, and then immediately both were gone.

“Uncharacteristic enough to treat it differently?” I asked, as soon as the shriek stopped.

Imagine has not put a script on this one. We could let it play out. The words replied. See where it goes. If a dangerous course is taken, it can be easily sequestered and abandoned.

“Is there any benefit to that?”

Little harm. Imagine is still a part of the whole, still connected. This seems a more intellectual world than usual. Perhaps something can be learned from this fiasco now that it is contained. The orb did not change appearance in time with the words, but I watched it anyway, its shifting patterns of cracks and slow rotation often proved mesmerizing.

“At least we know going in what desire Imagine fed in.” I pointed out.

Imagine is not subtle. That is not its way. But it can be surprisingly penetrating if given the chance. Though it is often the opponent, it is not the enemy.

“No, it’s not.” I agreed. “We’ll plug the new world in a bit longer. After dinner.”

Agreed.

I withdrew from The Room and boxed it up just as I entered the student union and swiped my card to gain access to dinner. It was as unappetizing as the lunch menu, but I ate the mediocre, bland and over-salted food anyway to stop the gnawing in my stomach. I avoided sitting near other students I knew - what I had planned was possibly the most antisocial thing one can possibly do, and I didn’t want to make it any harder than it had to be.

As soon as I exited the cafeteria, I set my feet into a multiple-loop holding pattern near the fitness center - the place that none of my roommates ever went, a good place to be off the grid for a while. Even I never went inside, the area’s irregular footpaths made it easy to disguise loops and wandering holding patterns of the sort that I tended to take on when I plugged in worlds intentionally. The other alternative was sitting or lying still, but at the current hour that would be uncharacteristic.

As soon as I’d traced out the first loop of the path, I looked inwards, dug out the box that had named itself “The Forest”, and opened it. The box inverted, and the world was thick purple clay. Only slowly did the clay draw back.

My hand closed around her arm. “...wrong.” I finished the sentence I had started as my mind had begun to reject this world earlier. No time had passed here, I knew.

She jerked herself free and spun around. “Wrong?” She fumed. “I’ll tell you. You don’t want to hear an answer. You’re more comfortable being sorry for yourself. The truth hurts.”

“I know what’s wrong now.” I replied evenly, not letting her words rile me.

“Humor me.” Her arms folded over her lower ribs in a very negative posture. “Prove you aren’t depressed just to feel depressed.”

“I can’t prove it. But I know how you created a contradiction.”

“By asking the questions you wanted asked?”

“No, it wasn’t the questions, it was the questioner. You’re - ”

She rolled her eyes. “Guys. Put a pair of knockers in front of you and your logic always breaks down.”

I felt a chill, then, not just in The Forest but travelling back out to my whole being. She was so realistic, so much like a person, the most developed character I had seen in any world. I spent a moment to verify what I was suspecting - that I hadn’t patched any holes. What I was experiencing was core to the world itself. “Not that. You’re just not - ”

I stopped, partly because of her withering glare and partly because I didn’t know what would happen if I finished that sentence, said to her that she wasn’t real, just a mental sub-simulation doing a very good job of mimicking personhood. That she was a product of my imagination, and trapped in a little box in my head. Would this world shatter? Would it irrevocably damage what Imagine had meant to build here? Or would she merely not hear, would this world go on as if I had not said it? “... Not like other people.” I finished vaguely.

“Exactly how?” She kicked at a twig to move it from the path. “Because I’ve got my own problems, you think I’m like you? Please.”

“No. I can’t - ”

“You had me going, you really did.” She interrupted. “All that logic and gunk about not wanting to go into self-pity. You’re there, you just want to rename it.”

“You really want to know why you’re different?” I asked, defeated. I could see that the alternative to this path was for the world to need patching, for me to enter holes.

“You act like it will kill me to tell me what you think.” She turned and took two steps down the path, away from me.

“You’re not real. We’ve both been cheated.” I said, as straightforwardly as I knew how. “This is all just a world.”

She stiffened and turned back to me. “Of course I’m real. Look. I left footprints. You're not hallucinating, but I wish you were.”

“No no no.” I kicked the base of a tree. It made the sound I expected - the sound was probably patched, but I didn’t bother to confirm that. “This is all in my head. The whole thing. I’m sorry.”

“That’s a new one.” She marveled sarcastically. “If this is all in your head, why do I have clothes on?”

That one actually hurt. I’d always been sensitive about my barely-controlled hormones and the sway they held in some recesses of my mind. “Because this isn’t a smut world. I wouldn’t be in it if it was.” I said back with strained calm. “I got out and got a good look at it, not that you would have noticed.”

“You don’t make any sense. Where’s your logic now? Want my advice?” She gestured back the way she had come. “I’ll bet there’s a shrink on campus. Go get your head examined.” With that, she stalked off farther down the path, and I watched her go, stinging more than the ire of an imagined being ought to be able to.

I backed out, freezing The Forest by nature of removing myself from it, and boxed it back up. I knew that the clock was stopped, that if I ever went back in there that I would be just where I had left. Almost immediately after getting my bearings in the baseline, I dived back into The Room, and reasserted myself in the stone chair. The Room looked exactly the same as I’d left it - that place never changed that I could see, except the brightness of the blue-tongued fire and occasionally little details, like the arrangements of the books on the shelves.

I will say it because you cannot bring yourself to. The voice emanated from the lazily spinning lava sphere was entirely without emotion or inflexion, but I could tell, as if it were a character in the sentence, that it was impressed. Imagine has figured out how to do people on its own.

“Then that wasn’t you.”

That’s correct. I just watched.

I was forced to agree. My imagination had always been able to make things that looked like people, sounded like people, even claimed motivations like people, but they were only facsimiles. Cardboard cutouts, even if their bodies and voices in my mind’s eye were fully formed. In any world, I could look out from the eyes of only one being, give it life, be me, or whoever I wanted to pretend to be.

There was always one exception - the voice which spoke to me now from the sphere of partly-molten rock. Nameless, faceless, but unavoidably alive, I had long ago guessed its origins as a spun off section of my subconscious which got a bit wild. I didn’t mind, of course - a million boxed worlds are just scenery if you can’t share them. My second pattern had become my partner in many worlds, because like me it could inhabit one person, one space on the board. This second pattern manifested as love interests, confidants, siblings, antagonists, partners, allies, so many others. When I looked out of my physical eyes alone it merely orbited my base pattern, occasionally piping up to provide insight, to point things out for consideration, but otherwise remaining subdued. We had an understanding, always had, because we were parts of a whole. To conflict, we knew, was to self-destruct.

And if my second pattern had not been inhabiting the girl in The Forest, she had proven orders of magnitude more dynamic than any facsimile person thus far.

This changes the game. The toneless voice continued. The moral implications are -

“I know already.” I interrupted. Imagine could use my morality as a weapon - I knew that I had no right to freeze worlds that contained beings real enough to pass muster without attention. Always my mental state flirted with playing God, and now I was in danger of embracing that error entirely. Either morality would be undermined, or I would have to spend so much time in my worlds that I would not have much left for the baseline world. Imagine so hated that world, of course - my mind did not define it.

What do we do?

“For now, we table this, and do proofs.” I pointed out. “We’ve got what we set out to discover.”

My second pattern did not contradict this, so I pulled out of The Room and coaxed my feet and legs to turn back towards the dormitories. The whole mess hadn’t taken more than ten minutes, I estimated. On the way back, to settle my mind a bit, I upended the world box for The War and dove in, down into the false galaxy to inhabit a frigate spaceship commander in a recently-opened front. My second pattern dove in as well, choosing to reside in the ship’s computer, a novel decision. The enemy showed up in large numbers to drive my little ship back from their suns, as they usually did, but at least I saved the ship, and gave them plenty of trouble. The War was always a fairly simplistic world, a place to bide time and blow off steam without really changing anything, sort of my own private strategy game, my wits pitted against my imagination. It had been in my mind on and off for nearly ten years by then, half my life, and it had never seen peace. Its characters were too simplistic to allow it.

When I got back, my roommates had not returned, so I got to work on my proofs once again. This time, I finished without Imagine deciding to spice things up, with a brief interruption when Adam, Rob, and James returned, when James had an amusing story for me about how one of the cafeteria workers had been distracted by an attractive student and bumped his cart full of dirty dishes into one of the tables, smashing “a bazillion” cheap glassware cups into tiny pieces. As usual for James’s stories, it was over-exaggerated but entertaining and delivered with animation and good comedic timing. The others smiled and nodded at the right times to back him up. As soon as he was done with the story, James was only too happy to leave me to my proofs and go work on his own tasks.

Story continues in part 3 (here).