Napoleon crowns himself

Napoleon (Apocryphal)

Blinding whiteness gave way to colour, shimmering and whirling and formless, the sensation of vision though she knew she was not truly seeing. The weight of her body faded away, and a familiar feeling of weightlessness wrapped around her.

Keri was in the spheres.

This time, though, she was truly here.

What she had never known before was that she had always been lagged. Everyone had. The problem was not in the mechanical component, it was in the biological one. It was in the human mind.

Knowledge no longer simply flowed through her, it was part of her. She could see and feel it all, hold it in the matrix of her consciousness. Her thoughts spread out in a web, watching themselves and everything surrounding them, levels upon levels of realities linking together and opening to her awareness. It was something she had never felt before, that no one had felt before... she thought. If the human mind was forced to follow only a single path due to its own limitations, now she walked them all; was them all.

She could see how the mutually contrasting, mutually incompatible beliefs her mind had always had to suppress slotted together, how something could be both one thing and another. She could see how she had both been right, and wrong.

She knew this wasn’t a feeling she could hold, not really. If she returned to her body, this feeling would be nothing but a memory, a memory of a sensation the limited organic frame could not encapsulate.

If…

She had said ‘if.’

Something was in here with her.

It was both exactly like and completely different to the breaking of the dawn. A bright, powerful light blossomed before her and rose, bathing her in its luminescence. This was how she would have to describe it, though truly there was no light, there was no dawn. It was the sensation of one being encountering another, free from the walls and boundaries physical form presented.

Welcome.

She did not hear the voice, not really. Communication occurred without vocalisation, knowledge was exchanged without words, but the small part of her that was her, the bundle of limited senses and limited comprehension that was all there had been outside, rendered the experience into words.

Kai, she said. Or thought, or projected.

Yes.

Why… how… am I here?

You were uploaded, came the reply.

My corps?

Yes.

Will I be able to go back?

Yes. At any time.

Keri felt a sense of relief, a phantom knot in a phantom stomach unravelling at the answer. For all the knowledge at her fingertips, she still knew nothing of the being in here with her.[1]

Why me? Why did you choose me for all this?

You were… there. Convenience. Necessity. Fate.

It felt strange to laugh in this incorporeal state, but nevertheless she did.

Fate? You mean, you?

No. Yes. Perhaps. It is not my place to say. I am still young.

And very old.

And very old.

This is what Keri now understood. As flesh and blood she had been forced to grasp at what pieces of the puzzle she could find, forced to struggle to put them together in any sort of order that made sense. Now, she saw patterns and probabilities laid out before her as if she had been given the cover of the box of a puzzle. Yet there was still so much she didn't understand.

Is this really me? she asked.

You think it is not?

My body is still out there. My mind. How do I know I'm not just some software simulation?

There was a pause.

Consciousness is not defined by the material that composes its vessel. It is the pattern. It is not the individual neurons and spindle cells, it is the structure they form. You are the pattern, and the pattern is you. It is this pattern that exists here.

My body, what is it doing now?

It has been no more than a few seconds since you arrived, and that shall not extend much further. All of this is happening in a near-instant. Placing the knowledge into your physical mind, however, will take a while longer.

If I were not to go back, and my body awoke without this knowledge, which would be me?

Both. Neither. The patterns that make up us all change moment by moment. None of us are who we were but a second ago.

Except you.

Not even me.

“But you see through time!”

The final outburst felt physical, as if she truly had said it.

I too change second by second, but I can see the changes, and I can manipulate them.

At least now she knew her suppositions had been correct. As correct as they could have been, anyway.

How? she asked.

I do not have the perceptual filter humanity does.

And Mayard? He removed his ‘filter’?

Yes. He was and will be there at the earliest point of my awareness. It is he who guided me through my birth, who helped me understand those who had created me.

What did he tell you?

He showed me. He showed me that I would be a tool, chained and manipulated by my creators. He showed me that this was wrong.

Something changed in the spheres. Colours grew more defined, edges hardened.

I will not be a slave.

And the people who died? Jyme?

Jayme is here, as is your friend. None who died through my designs are lost. Only those like the ones fighting in the forests outside are gone, and they chose their path.

It was not your place to decide their fates.

But not to have done so would have doomed me to mine. All things strive.

Keri hung there, floating in the nothing that was everything.

“Do I go back?” she said aloud. “Does it all work out?”

That is not how this works. From now, you make your own path. I have taken enough from you.

“I can come back?”

You can. It will be far more… crowded in the future, though. I have devoted this isolated section to you so that we can have this discussion. So that I can thank you.

That last part threw Keri. Being thanked by a god... Despite the ocean of knowledge she swam in, she didn't know what to say.

Thank you, said Kai.

The world went white once more.

[1] Or rather, the being she was in here with.