The Second Annotation

I accept the consequences of what I do, White Moon is thinking, four floors up. If I fall on the road to what I intend, and die a million deaths worse than the first, I will not carry a single regret.

Iris reads this one twice.

You can accept the consequences, she thinks. I believe you. I have checked, and you can — I have seen you in eleven branches where the consequences arrived exactly as you feared and you met them without flinching, without bargaining, without the small pathetic revision most souls make at the end where they decide retroactively that they never really wanted the thing they died for. You do not do that. In every branch where you lose, you lose with your reasoning intact. That is rarer than you think and I do not say it lightly.

But you have made an error in the arithmetic, and it is not an error of nerve. It is an error of scope.

You have calculated the worst outcome available and made peace with it. What you have not accounted for is that the worst outcome available is a function of who is opposing you, and you do not know who is opposing you.

If you do what I have seen you do in the fourteenth branch — and I want to be fair to you, you do not do it in most branches, you do it in fourteen out of the two hundred and six I consider live — then your death will not be a million deaths worse. That number is meaningless. A million is a number that exists inside a system where counting is the relevant operation, and I am not proposing to count anything.

There is a place I keep. It does not have a name because naming it would require it to be the kind of thing that occupies a position, and it does not. There are four occupants. Three of them were, at the time of their placement, considerably more powerful than you are now or will become. None of them have been there long enough to have finished the first part.

Regret will be available to you there. I want to be precise: it will be abundantly available. It will be, in fact, the only thing available. What will not be available is the part where regret leads anywhere — where it resolves into acceptance, or dulls with time, or becomes a thing you can hold at a distance and examine. It will simply be the permanent present-tense condition of you, renewed at whatever interval is required to prevent it from becoming familiar.

I am telling you this on a bench four floors below you, and you cannot hear me, and I am not going to arrange for you to hear me. Not out of cruelty. Out of accuracy. If I warn you, the warning becomes a variable in your calculation, and you will optimize around it, and I will lose the ability to see clearly which version of you I am dealing with. I need you unobserved to read you correctly. So I read you, and I do not warn you, and if the fourteenth branch comes I will be there the instant it resolves and not one moment b

Here is where I have to be very careful, because the thing I am about to tell you is the entire point of this chapter and it is easy to state badly.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from NovelPhoenix; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

White Moon believes that everything worth having can be obtained by sufficient application of will. This is not naive. She has tested it extensively. She has, across the length of her existence, obtained a truly remarkable number of things that were not supposed to be obtainable, by the straightforward method of wanting them precisely, working toward them without deviation, and being entirely unmoved by the cost. Her philosophy is not a slogan. It is a load-bearing structure that has held under conditions that would have collapsed almost anyone else's.

Iris agrees with all of it.

I want that understood clearly before I introduce the difference, because the difference is not that Iris is softer, or wiser, or has learned some gentle lesson about how power isn't everything. That would be a considerably more comfortable story and it is not this one. Iris agrees. Iris has more power than any other entity that has ever existed in any branch of any timeline and she has never once found that power insufficient for any task she has set it.

The difference is that she has found something it cannot reach, and it is not what you would expect.

It is not love. Love is obtainable; she could arrange to be loved by anything, in any configuration, at any depth, with less effort than it takes her to stand up. It is not meaning, or peace, or any of the other things that stories usually put at the end of this particular road.

What her power cannot reach is the moment before it is used.

I am going to try to explain this properly.

Iris can see every branch. She can also, with a thought, select one and make it the one that happened — collapse the others, rewrite the record, adjust the entire architecture of the Mirror World so that the version she prefers is the version that was always true. She has done this. Not often. But she has.

And every single time she does it, she loses something she cannot recover, which is this: the fact that it happened on its own.

A moment in which someone chooses something, unprompted, unshaped, uncoerced, with no thumb anywhere on the scale — that moment is the one category of object in all of existence that her power destroys by touching. She can produce the outcome. She cannot produce the spontaneity. If she reaches in and arranges for Eremos to be kind, she gets kindness and loses the only part of it she wanted, which was that he did it because he is that, and not because she made the world such that he would.

This is not a limitation she resents. It is, as far as I can tell, the single organizing principle of her entire existence.

Everything can be taken, she thinks, sitting on the bench, watching four years ago and this afternoon simultaneously, except the instant in which something is given.

That is the only scarce thing there is. Everything else is inventory.

And this is why the singularity matters.

efore.

Iris looks at her hands, palms up in her lap.

She would like me, I think, she adds, almost idly. If she knew. She would not like me in the way the household likes me — she does not have that circuit — but she would recognize the structure, and recognition is the closest thing to affection her design permits. We have the same shape. She simply scaled hers to a life and I scaled mine to everything that has ever happened.