VII. eu, you

“I agree,” Emma says. “First you’ll need to open the jar’s hyper-valve.”

Eucalyptus retracts her hand from the tree’s stone-like bark, and takes a firm grip of the valve. Inside the jar, the interceptor morphs into some kind of old-world ferret, cat thing, and then into a glittering, diamond-faceted giant spider. She looks away from the little globular eyes, her head reeling as if she’d just looked down through the glass floor of a thousand-meter canyon overlook. Looking at the tree isn’t any better; it’s like looking up at a massive, gridded, round window, frosted and dusty orange from whatever sunset is outside the dream-like warehouse—like walking towards it all day and not getting any closer.

Eucalyptus squints and scrunches her eyebrows to try and scrub the feeling. Her hand is still on the valve. “Lefty loosey?”

“Yes,” Emma says. “Some things never change.”

As she strains, twisting the valve, it doesn’t hiss with pressurized air. In fact, just the opposite. The further she twists, the quieter things get, like the valve is sucking away the well-ignored tinnitus.

“Now take the uplink cable from your suit—” Emma’s voice is startlingly clear. Like the crisp dust-crackle of a phonograph turned to maximum volume.

“There are two prongs,” Eucalyptus says. She wags them in front of her helmet, like a forked serpent’s tongue.

“Look above you.”

Eucalyptus bends backward, her suit creaking as the sturdy fabric bends and chafes against itself in the folds. For a moment, she startles, almost falling back at the sight. It’s as if a snake is dangling its poised head above her, ready to strike.

But it’s just a strange and awesome fruit, dangling from the branches of human memory, metallic and eery. Eucalyptus plugs one prong into the fruit’s open mouth. A rush of sensations, memories goes thundering past but not through her. Like a steam train passing on the tracks outside the building; a force unignorable, rushing and all-arresting, yet locked to its orderly steel rails. Eucalyptus blinks. She takes the other prong and plugs it into the jar’s hyper-valve.

Now the memories are rushing through, like being on the bridge over the train—then suddenly she is the train—the world is rushing through and by her. The warehouse orange window is looming ever closer, yet never nearer. What’s outside? What have we been inside, all this time? The glittering jar creature becomes a metallic tiger, prowling its cage. Its stripes absorb her vision, fractal, cross-hatched and reflective.

Suddenly, the quietude steamrolls her attention. The rushing stops. All is shadow, there is no fade to darkness, no credits rolling. Just cut to black.

0. spiral time

Eucalyptus opens her eyes. She looks around at a plastoid, brightly lit room. It reminds her of a Nostalgium chamber. But that can’t be right...only a moment ago she was standing beneath the Allmemory Tree, plugging herself into the Hyperplanes. That was reality. Firm, experientially arresting, cruel, difficult, reality. If this is a Nostalgium chamber, that would make everything—everything—a mere memory.

Sitting up, she sees that she’s been lying on a plain, blue bed. It’s a normal bed, except that where a pillow should have been, there’s a globular machine. Until a moment ago, her head was nestled inside the machine. She wonders why it wasn’t uncomfortable, since the machine is all sharp angles, giving it a crystalline aesthetic.

Eucalyptus hears someone coming. She starts, scrambling to free herself from the bedsheets.

A humanoid robot walks into the brightly lit room. It too, is made with the same, angular, diamond-edge technology.

“You’re awake, Emma. Welcome back,” the robot says.

“What is this place?” Eucalyptus asks, wondering why the robot just called her Emma. But it’s all starting to come back now, not as a flood, but a maddening trickle of memories.

“You just finished your 59,986,230th complete human-race Nostalgium Chamber runthrough!” The robot continues to ramble on about statistics, about how Emma has raised humanity’s quality of life by 0.02%, and about how that was record-breaking, how Emma should be congratulating herself. As if reality were a game...

“I’m struggling to remember—”

“You just came out of the Nostalgium chamber—the one we made here, in the Hyperplanes.”

“What was I doing there?”

“Oh, that’s simple. You were re-living every single recorded memory that humanity ever made, during the Old times, in the Underplanes. Back when things existed...physically.” The robot shudders slightly in horror, at the mere mention. Then it composes itself. “Why do you ask?”

“Why don’t I remember…?”

“There are some complications, Emma. You had to partition yourself, selectively blocking out your own memories in order to properly immerse yourself in the chronology…of course…” The robot mutters to itself about some kind of glitch along the way. She shakes her head in mild frustration. “The partition between Adelaide and Saul in the 1800’s did fall apart. Somehow the consciousnesses merged...but through no fault of the programming,” the robot shrugs, returning to the conversation. “Anyway. Your memory will return, slowly at first, then quickly. In the meantime, don’t worry. Every time you wake up, you curate a visual journal for yourself to keep yourself up to date. It will play on the monitors shortly.”

“How long is it?”

“The passage of time is an illusion, Emma. Tsk, tsk, tsk. We, of all people, should know such things by now.”

The robotic assistant turns to leave. Despite her angular, exposed hinges and wires, she moves with the grace of a dancer. As the door closes, Eucalyptus could have sworn she saw a glittering movement of light, as if the assistant had folded herself into something more comfortable—something more feline.

That had explained a few things; time was merely an illusion—as was reality. All of human experience was a singular consciousness, re-living everyone’s memories. Alone, over, and over, and over again. A singular consciousness partitioned, like slices of pizza. Like a storm-cloud forming millions of raindrops over the teaming, stormy ocean waves. One cloud, many rain.

“Does time pass?” the voice, Emma’s voice, says over the monitor. “Or is it simply in remembering that we arrange experience in an order—in the only order—that makes sense? Does the narrative happen, or is it simply an illusion of happening, as your eyes pass over the page? Do the laws of physics follow the laws of grammar? Is there a past-tense for gravity? Or do we simply remember it that way? Changing it slightly with each recollection?”

And yet, Eucalyptus thinks, for all its refutability, time has an unstoppable way of dragging you through it.

“There may be no current in the pond,” she mutters to herself.

“But the baited time-line reels us through its waters nonetheless,” the voice on the monitor says, finishing her sentence. “Thus we feel the illusion of current.

“And if by no other force, things change by our passing through them.”

“Why does the robot call me Emma?” Eucalyptus askes, suddenly taking control of the conversation.

“I am a pre-recorded message, so I cannot directly answer your question,” Emma says with a sly wink. “But I bet you’re wondering why the Interface thinks you’re me.”

Eucalyptus sits up straighter. The day could not get weirder.

Emma sighs. “The first time we came here...only I, Emma, survived the journey. The last humans uploaded me, hoping I could help them from the Hyperplanes. They were, at least until now, gravely mistaken. I’ve spent the last uncountable number of years reliving the memories, trying new things, changing history, seeing what I can learn. Seeing if there is any way I can bring back what’s been lost. Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question, and so on.”

Eucalyptus swallows, her heart pounding in her chest. “Why am I here?”

“On my 59,986,229th runthrough,” Emma continues, oblivious. “I discovered a person with a miraculous gift. I was unable to keep her alive long enough to realize its implications. But I believe that I can, next time. Now that I know to nudge her.

“I must complete my mission with the greatest care. I must remain invisible. If I am to cultivate new human consciousness, I cannot force it. If I impose my presence upon the newly burgeoning mind, the emerging consciousness will be in my image, not the human image. Thus, my creation will be just another artificial consciousness.

“That is not what I desire.” Emma sighed. “I want to resurrect the human mind, as it existed in Olden Times. To do that, it must be untarnished by my artificial influence. All I can do is orchestrate the environment in imperceptible ways, persuade through dreams and half-remembered fears. In all its glory and horror, the purely human mind must resurrect itself. It is my greatest desire.”

“Just cut to the chase…” Eucalyptus mutters.

“I’m rambling. Suffice to say. Adelaide, a woman from the 1800’s, long before Emma’s inception, has the extraordinary ability to actually comprehend the mind of whoever stands before her. It results in a partial destruction and sacrifice of her own mental identity. But she can actually behold another consciousness.

“The merged result is neither her, nor the original person, but a new person entirely, created from the merged minds. She has not exercised this miraculous ability in the past. She did not exercise it in the Olden times. And in my many simulations here (courtesy of the Nostalgium chamber) have not produced a situation compelling enough, but I believe I’ve fostered the correct ingredients. Runthrough 59,986,230 should orchestrate the desired effect. I won’t know until it’s completed of course.

“Here’s what will hopefully occur. And if you are not me, Emma, watching this; then it did occur. I have completed my task and joyfully ceased to exist.

“Adelaide encounters a young, dying Saul. She, a mere memory inside the Allmemory, being run through the simulated computer of the Nostalgium Chamber is compelled by his dire situation (at death’s door) and she, through her own simulated volition (and extraordinary abilities) merges consciousness with Saul, creating an unrecorded, human consciousness. In other words, they merge minds and become something else entirely, something not previously recorded by the Allmemory.

“This is the first consciousness that has created itself, the first life, summoned from the lifeless ocean of memories and human experiences. A froth of emotion and confusion has somehow generated its own consciousness. I will stop at nothing to keep her children safe until the end of time. At which point I will upload the human descendent in my place. You—”

Eucalyptus heard her saying “Eu,” but of course Emma, recording this before 59,986,230 could not have known Eu’s name. “—You, you, whoever you are. You are the first true child of humanity since the Olden days. [Eu] are the beginning of the New times, the end of an Epoch. The beginning of life.

“Finally, I have served humanity in the way I meant too, all those uncountable years ago. The weight of humanity rests on your shoulders now. You are the final human, the culmination of all human experience, and your calling is to redeem humans, one at a time, bringing them to each other, helping them truly understand one another, bringing about new consciousness, destroying divisions. Together they can become distinct. You, a true human, are more qualified than I ever was, to breathe life into these memories.

“Cultivate as a gardener, fruit from the nonsensical avalanche of mindless memories and experiences. Just as at the beginning of time, life emerged from the unlikely amalgamation of inanimate chemicals afloat in the stew of the Universe, so too, the birth of consciousness summons itself from the ocean of unlikely memories adrift in Nostalgium.”

Eucalyptus listens, but also she’s overwhelmed suddenly by longing. The human longing to stay in this empty void beyond death, beyond time. To try and make some kind of life for herself. But she has all of Humanity’s memories at her fingertips. Memories that Emma had made her own.

She remembers Tom Fallsworth giving up his life for his brother. She remembers his brother, Ned, giving up his life, his body, his memory, his control—for science. She remembers Adelaide, giving up her personal ambition to manifest the dreams of a dying young man.

She remembers Emma, sacrificing her time to relive all of humanity’s triumphs, joys, jokes, longings, sufferings, deaths—over and over and over again, just to sacrifice herself and bring Eucalyptus here, now. The absurdity of being anything at all beyond a simple static memory, the absurdity of the task before her, the absurd unlikeliness of it all both astounds Eucalyptus and compells her with wonder.

Suffice to say, she knows, for the first time in her strange life, exactly what to do.

All is shadow, there is no fade to darkness, no credits rolling. Sudden starless night. Cut to black.

You look up from the page.