The Singularity

There is exactly one point in the entire Mirror World that Iris cannot see through.

I want to be careful with the phrasing, because cannot see is not quite right and chooses not to is considerably less right. What is true is this: when she looks at Eremos, the corona is not there. The forty-one thousand alternate versions that surround every other soul she has ever looked at simply do not resolve around him. She sees one. One version, one path, one man, opaque and singular and entirely present, the way you would see him.

She has spent a very long time trying to determine whether this is a property of him or a property of her.

Her current assessment — and she holds it provisionally, which is remarkable given that she holds almost nothing provisionally — is that it is neither. It is a property of the fact that he found her first, on a colorless hill, when he was a silent rooted thing with no voice and no face and no capacity to recognize what was crouching down in front of him. He did not know. That is the whole of it. Every other entity that has ever encountered her has known, at some level below language, that it was in the presence of something that could unmake it, and has adjusted accordingly — has been afraid, or reverent, or careful, and in adjusting has become one of the forty-one thousand, a thing shaped partly by her presence rather than entirely by itself.

He did not adjust. He had nothing to adjust with. He looked at her with total unguarded ordinariness, and in doing so he became the only object in existence that she had not, by the simple fact of observing it, altered.

She told him she was a flower. That was the lie, and I have told you before that she has never regretted it, and now perhaps you understand why it was not a small lie at all. It was the most consequential act of her existence. It was her deciding, in real time, that she would rather have one thing in the universe that was genuinely not about her than have him know what she was.

He named me, she thinks. He did not know what he was naming. That is the entire value of the name.

And this is where she and I diverge, four floors apart, thinking with the same machinery toward opposite ends.

White Moon wants to become the one thing that cannot be taken from her. I want to protect the one thing I cannot make.

Her method is acquisition. Mine is abstention. She is building a fortress and I am standing very still.

We would both burn down anything in the way. The difference is only in what we are standing in front of.

I want to show you something now, and I want to warn you first, because I have realized while writing this chapter that I have spent a great deal of it telling you what Iris is capable of and almost none of it showing you, and I think you have begun to take my word for it in a way that will make what follows land more softly than it should.

So: watch.

White Moon, four floors up, is still at the rail. In eleven seconds she is going to lift her right hand and look at the back of it — she does this periodically, checking whether the recovered channel is still holding, the way you might press a healing bruise. It is the only gesture she makes that could be called a habit.

Iris, on the bench, does not move.

Somewhere that is not the greenhouse and not the terrace and not anywhere that could be reached by walking, she reaches out and takes hold of the moment.

I do not have better language for it. There is no better language for it; the vocabulary does not exist because the act does not exist in any framework that generated vocabulary. She does not use her hands. She does not use anything. She simply locates the eleven-second interval between now and the gesture, and holds it, in the sense that a person holds a page they have not yet turned.

And then she opens it.

The corona blooms.

Forty-one thousand six hundred and two versions of the next eleven seconds unfold simultaneously around the one that is actually happening, and I want to try to convey what that looks like, and I want to be honest with you that I am going to do it badly.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from NovelPhoenix. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

In most of them, nothing differs. White Moon stands at the rail and lifts her hand and looks at it and the branches are identical in every particular down to the angle of her thumb. This is the overwhelming majority — thirty-eight thousand and some, all functionally the same moment, the universe being redundant the way universes mostly are.

In two thousand of them there is small variation. She lifts the left hand instead. She does not lift a hand at all. A bird crosses behind her and she tracks it and the tracking delays the gesture by half a second. Nothing follows from any of it. These are the branches that exist only because branching is what reality does, not because anything is at stake.

In eleven of them, something is at stake.

In eleven of them, White Moon lifts her hand and feels nothing.

The channel has failed. The four years of recovered sensation retract in a single instant, without warning, the way a held note ends, and she is back where she was before the rain in the eastern courtyard, and there is no reason for it and no way to predict it and nothing she did wrong.

Iris looks at all eleven at once.

This would break her, she observes. Not immediately. She would run the protocol that night as normal — she would, I have checked, she does in all eleven — and she would run it the next night and the night after, and somewhere around the fourth month she would begin to make small errors in the sequence, and the errors would not be carelessness, they would be the first visible symptom of a structure that has taken a load it was not built for.

In seven of the eleven she recovers. It takes her considerably longer the second time and she is meaningfully worse afterward, more brittle, less interesting, but she recovers.

In four of them she does not.

In one of the four she does something in this house that I would have to answer.

Iris considers this for what is, from the inside, a very long time, and from the outside, no time at all, because she has not permitted any time to pass.

And then she does the thing that no other entity in the history of the Mirror World has ever been able to do, and she does it with less visible effort than it takes Flora to water a plant.

She closes the eleven.

Not destroys — that is the wrong verb and I want to avoid it because it implies violence and there is none here. She simply declines them. She reaches into the architecture that holds every possible version of the next eleven seconds and she removes eleven of them from the set of things that could occur, and the removal leaves no scar, no gap, no evidence. The architecture closes over the absence the way water closes over a dropped stone. Nothing anywhere in existence records that those eleven futures were ever available. No account book has a missing line, because the line was not deleted; it was retroactively never written.

Then she lets go of the moment, and eleven seconds pass, and four floors above her White Moon lifts her right hand and looks at the back of it and feels, faintly but unmistakably, the cool afternoon air moving across her skin.

She lowers the hand. Her expression does not change. She is entirely unaware that anything has occurred, and she will remain unaware of it for the rest of her existence, which will be a long one.

You are welcome, Iris thinks, with no warmth in it whatsoever. I did not do that for you.

I did it because in the one branch, the thing you do in this house happens in a corridor he uses, and I do not want the corridor to have that in it.

I want to be precise about my reasoning, because I think it would be easy to mistake what I just did for kindness and I dislike being misunderstood even by people who cannot hear me. I did not preserve your sensation. I preserved the absence of an event. Your sensation is the mechanism, not the objective. If the mathematics had run the other way — if removing the channel closed more bad branches than leaving it — I would have removed it, tonight, without any more hesitation than I just spent, and you would have woken tomorrow into eleven years of erased work and no explanation, and I would have gone upstairs afterward and let Flora braid my hair.

I am not the merciful one in this house. I want that on the record. He is the merciful one. I am the one who arranges for mercy to be affordable.

I want to add one thing, as the narrator, before I move on — and I am aware that I am not supposed to intrude here, that this chapter belongs to the two of them and my job is simply to hold the light steady.

But I have been telling you about this household for a long time now. I have told you about Vaelira's domains and Eremos's rings and the Garden of a Thousand Souls and an empress who built a castle out of glass to stop her own thinking. I have described a great many powerful things.

None of it is the same category as what just happened.

Everything else in this account operates on the world. Vaelira bends what is. Eremos restores what has been damaged. Even the erasure — even the woman the mirror forgot, who unmade her own existence so completely that no surface anywhere holds her — even that was an act performed within the architecture, using rules that the architecture provides, at a cost the architecture extracted.

Iris edits the architecture. She does not pay a cost, because there is no one to charge her.

And she does it while sitting barefoot on a bench, in a greenhouse, thinking about a woman she has never spoken to, and then she goes upstairs and helps with dinner.