8: The First Five Years

That night Jon walked the streets of Argintarbo, looking and listening. He had been born on the Jaboro campus, and he had never left it without a specific destination. To walk was an enchanting novelty.

Argintarbo was sharply divided into four districts. The first district — the city’s nominal center, although it was actually at an edge — was the Palace. The Inner Palace covered an island in a small bay on the city’s northeast side. The Emperor’s Throne was there, and his residence. Several covered bridges connected the Inner Palace to the Outer Palace, a walled complex which sprawled around the edges of the bay, and was built out into it.

Outside the Palace was the Imperial City, where elegant stone buildings housed the Empire’s many bureaucracies. The Imperial City was of irregular shape, following the Continent’s coast on the north side, the Palace’s walls on the west, and fading out like an ink stain to the east. Its south edge, however, was a sharp line. A forested Park with precisely straight edges cut east to west through the city’s geometric center, dividing the Imperial City to the north from the Merchant District to the south.

Although it was commonly called “the Merchant District,” the southern half of the city had no official name, and no particular purpose. It was almost a second, distinct city, attached to the bottom of the capital like a bejeweled barnacle. It had no internal boundaries, but it had a gradient, starting rich in the north, where banks, boutiques, and ballrooms faced the Park, and slowly fading to slums in the south.

To the south of the Merchant District and spreading out somewhat to the east was the Industrial District. Rough outlines of the other three districts had been established in 381 — when the False Emperor had commanded that Argintarbo be built as a capital for his rebellious False Empire — but every brick of the Industrial District was post-Revolution. The majority of it had been built in Jon’s lifetime. It consisted mostly of large rectangular campuses with large rectangular buildings, topped with large cylindrical smokestacks. The Jaboro campus had been on the District’s southern edge when Jon was born. Since then it had grown so that Jaboro was now near its center.

Jon walked north through the Industrial District for half an hour, on cobblestone streets, on gravel roads, and between railroad tracks. Even in the dead of night, there was sparse but steady vehicle traffic, bearing loads of all kinds between the corporate campuses. Jon noticed an autowagon labeled “Jaboro” pulling into a gate labeled “Kompusen.” He vaguely recalled that Kompusen made powered tools, and he wondered if the autowagon carried titanium ingots.

He soon crossed the border between districts, where a jumble of low-rent apartments, low-priced shops, and lowbrow entertainments grew in amongst the angular corporate properties. There were many people on the streets here, and an atmosphere of noisy spontaneity. As he continued north, the streets slowly became straighter, cleaner, and emptier. He began to feel conspicuous.

The furthest north Jon had ever been was the Temple of Arraton, which was about half a mile south of the Park. He had never seen the Park, and he could not avoid it if he continued north, so he decided to go there. The Park was separated from the Merchant District by a broad street, paved in cream-colored brick, and bordered by tall iron posts topped with bright electric lights. Jon crossed the street and was about to enter the Park when a voice called out.

“Hey you!”

Jon looked to his left and saw two men coming down the street toward him. By their black uniforms and silver badges, he recognized them as city police. They carried short-barreled rifles slung over their shoulders.

“Me?” Jon said.

“Of course you. What are you doing?”

“Just walking.”

“Walking to where?”

“To the Park.”

“Why?”

“Because…”

The officers had come level with him. One circled around and stood on his right, blocking his path into the Park. The one who had spoken crossed his arms and glared at Jon, looking him up and down. 

Jon suddenly realized that he looked very shabby. His hair was disheveled, he was wearing soot-streaked trousers that he had picked up off the floor, and he had thrown a jacket over his sleep robe instead of changing into a tunic. He looked from his own dirty, mismatched clothes to the officers’ crisp uniforms with their shining badges, and he felt…

He knew that he ought to feel ashamed — the officers expected him to feel ashamed — and he knew that he would have, before. But instead he felt superior. The officers had to look as they did: their appearance was a sign of submission, to their chain of command, the Chief of Police, the Mayor, the Emperor. They looked dignified because they were being judged. But Jon did not need to fear judgment.

“Because I can do what I want,” Jon said.

“Cute,” the officer replied. “Actually you’re gonna do what I want, and I want you to turn around and go back to whatever hovel you crawled out of, because I don’t want scum lurking in the Park.”

Jon reflexively stepped back, a lifetime of habit overriding his conscious will. But his second step was slower than the first, and he did not take a third. He was not afraid of the officers. A feeling of power swelled in the void where fear was not.

“What’re you gonna do to me?” Jon said.

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t hurt me. I don’t have to do what you say.”

Jon took a step forward. The officers took a step back. They exchanged a glance, and their hands went to their rifles.

“You gonna shoot me?” Jon taunted. “Go ahead!” And he realized with a thrill that he meant it. He wanted them to shoot him, because it would prove that they had no power. If they shot him, they would only erase hours of their own lives; he would be unharmed.

He took another step forward. The officers aimed their guns. “Stay back!” one ordered.

Jon laughed. He laughed because the police were absurd, ignorant of their impotency. He laughed with joy at his own power: a slave all this life, he was suddenly the most powerful man in the world. He laughed in gleeful anticipation of the things he would soon do. He had never felt so much.

He leapt forward and seized the barrel of the nearest rifle, jerking it upward. It fired, missed. The barrel grew warm in his hand. The officer’s eyes went wide, white visible on all sides. Jon laughed.

The second rifle did not miss. Its bullet excised the front third of Jon’s neck. He collapsed, gurgling, blood gushing down into his lungs and up onto the street in equal quantities. His hands pawed stupidly at the place where his throat had been.

Jon’s first three deaths had been fast and nearly painless. This was agony. His only rational thought as he died was astonishment that such intense pain was possible.

10 Semoj 703, 1:06 a.m. (V)

His body shook. He bit down on his fist to keep from screaming. Somehow Katerine did not wake. When, some time later, he was able to breathe normally, he crept out of bed and left the apartment.

The fourth ambition of Jon’s life was to kill the two officers.

* * *

Jon repeated that night hundreds of times, thousands: he lost count quickly. For the first hundred or so, he set out randomly into the city and simply did whatever came to mind. Now that he was free to indulge his curiosities, he found that he was curious about many things. When he wondered what was inside a building, he broke into it. When he wondered about a person he saw, he questioned them. When he wondered if he could win a fight, he started it.

Falling back became as routine as going to bed had once been. Sometimes he would fall back after being killed in the course of some dangerous activity, but usually he would commit suicide (he found a variety of painless ways) when he became too injured, too weary, or too hunted to enjoy himself. Each time he died he returned to his bed at 1:06 a.m. on 10 Semoj, 703, his body refreshed and ready to start the night again.

He realized that money would open many avenues of exploration, so he worked out how to get into a vault on the Jaboro campus where dams were stored. A dam acquired, he used magic to break into the payroll office and steal as much money as he wanted. He developed a routine that procured a heavy sack of gil in less than twenty minutes.

Having money, he began visiting the brothels that dotted the merchant district’s poorer side. This caused him some guilt at first, but he reasoned that he was not really being unfaithful to Katerine, because he was not really doing anything: as long as he fell back, he was not really getting out of bed.

For a time, these spontaneous indulgences thrilled him, but they soon became merely diverting, and then, quite suddenly, he found that he was bored. He had broken into every building that looked interesting, fought every man who looked tough, hired every whore who looked alluring, toyed with every machine that looked powerful. He felt that there was nothing left to do. The night had been completed.

Jon had learned early on that the worst part of pain was fear. Pain proclaimed the destruction of the body, the destruction of the self, and it was this fear of deconstruction that gave pain its power. Jon disliked pain and avoided it, but he did not dread it like a normal man, because it signified nothing to him. Pain, however intense in the moment, would pass like a cloud, leaving no mark, extracting no cost, and so pain was irrelevant. Now he learned that pleasure was the same.

He began setting himself tasks to accomplish. He had enjoyed the challenge of stealing the money, and the challenge of killing the officers. Those tasks had presented themselves, but he could make up any challenge he wanted. He resolved to climb to the top of the Temple’s pagoda, and he did. Many of the factories in the industrial district had large tanks of liquified gas; he resolved to blow all of these up, and he did.

But these sorts of challenges proved barely more satisfying than impulsive wandering. Exploding gas tanks was fun at first, but by the tenth he was no longer doing it for fun: he was doing it merely to complete the task. He had become his own manager, acting because he had told himself to, following his own instructions without knowing why.

He tried to return to his old life. When he fell back into his bed, he stayed there until dawn, then he got up and went to work. But this proved intolerable. Now that he did not have to follow the corporate routines, they were hateful to him, excruciatingly boring, insultingly stupid. He tried to talk to his family, but he had nothing to say to them. What could he say to Katerine that would make any sense to her and also mean anything to him?

Jon could do anything, but he had nothing to do.

* * *

One morning when the dawn roused Katerine, Jon asked her, “What do you want?”

She sat up, pushing her long hair out of her face. “Huh? What do you mean?”

“If you could have anything, what would you want?”

“I don’t know.”

“Use your imagination!” Jon shouted. On the floor, Erik and Liira stirred. “Imagine you can have anything, right now. What do you want?”

“I want a house in the city, I guess.”

“What house?”

“One of those tall houses, near the Temple, on the Park.”

“I’ll get you one.”

“What are you talking about? What’s wrong with you?”

Jon said nothing. He got up, dressed, and went out. He could feel the children’s eyes on him as he left, but he did not look back at them.

With the dawn, the Jaboro campus was quickly coming to life, but Jon still had no difficulty stealing the money. He had memorized the positions of all potential witnesses. He was able to acquire a dam, slip into the payroll office, steal what he wanted, and slip out without anyone noticing him. He then hopped into the back of an autowagon as it left the campus to make a delivery in the merchant district. When it stopped, he hopped out and walked two blocks to a boutique that was just opening. He walked in, gave the clerk a silver gil and described exactly the clothes he wanted, all of which were in stock. He left the boutique dressed in a stylish robe, shoes, and hat, a sharkskin purse bulging in his silk sash. He had been out of bed for only ninety minutes.

He spent the next few hours knocking on the doors of houses near the Park, flashing fistfuls of platinum at whoever answered, and asking them to sell. He was soon in possession of a set of keys.

When he returned to the apartment, Katerine was not happy to see him. She was frightened. She tried to be angry, but fear overwhelmed her, and she stared at his fine clothes as if they were soaked in blood. He told her that he had gotten a house on the Park. He jangled the keys. But she did not want to see it. So he seized her wrist and pulled her, shouting for the children to follow.

But the young man who had taken Jon’s money and given him keys had been the owner’s rebellious son, not the owner. When they arrived at the house, Jon entered boldly, but the startled owner (who had been out when his son made the ostensible sale) attacked him with a sword.

Jon tried again and again, falling back each time he failed, and eventually he succeeded in securing a house on the Park, deed and all. But Katerine did not want to live in it. Jon moved in himself, hoping she would change her mind. But two days later he was arrested for stealing from Jaboro.

Jon devised different ways of getting money. Through many experiments, he developed a combination of theft, gambling, and investment that earned enough to buy the house without obvious illegality, and with a veneer of plausibility that Katerine did not completely reject. But this took a month, a month in which he could not be working for Jaboro.

He solved this problem through blackmail. He spent a score of iterations kidnapping and torturing Jaboro managers to learn incriminating secrets. He found one who was embezzling money from the company, fell back, then privately accused the man and demanded that he grant a month’s leave in exchange for silence. Jon then pretended to Katerine that he was working every day when in fact he was going into the city to enact his money-making scheme. Having money, he hired lawyers to create the fiction of a previously unknown “Uncle Friele” who had died and left Jon a large inheritance, large enough to pay off his and Katerine’s debts, buy the house, and leave enough money for five years’ expenses.

The blackmail and the money laundering added an additional three weeks to the scheme, and so it took Jon nearly two months to acquire the house in a way that he could actually keep it. He had to repeat the entire process several times to refine it, and then several more to perform his own role perfectly enough that no one suspected his duplicities. By the time he finally moved Katerine and the children into the house on the Park, he guessed that he had spent three years on the project.

Jon expected this success to be the start of a new life for himself, the sort of life that he had always wanted, back before he had died, a life of wealth, security, and leisure. He expected to be satisfied in the house. But on their first night there, his nothingness returned with new intensity.

At dinner, Liira said that she wished she could have met Uncle Friele. He must have been a good man, she said, to have been so generous to them. Katerine beamed, but Jon’s face darkened. He said he had a headache, and he left the table.

He lay in his bed — new, large, soft, in its own bedroom, on the second floor of a house on the Park — and thought bitterly: They don’t know me. Three years of his own intense effort had provided this home for them, but they could never thank him for it. He was not bitter because he wanted credit — he did want credit, but that was not what embittered him — it was because they did not know.

When Katerine came to bed, Jon felt revulsion. She’s sleeping with a stranger, he thought. She doesn’t know me any better than any of the whores I hired. In a way, the whores had known him better, because they had had no illusions.

Katerine tried to talk to him, but her ears were like a desert mirage, her lips like a salt sea. They mocked him with promises of refreshment that they could not provide.

Jon lay awake with his eyes closed long after Katerine had fallen asleep. Nothingness sucked at him. As hours dragged on, his emotion became so intense that it felt physical, as if the pressure in him might actually burst through his eyes if he did not press them shut. For a moment he felt that he would actually die, and he wished that he would, die in truth and go to the Hollow Moon, which was surely not worse than this. He stopped breathing and held completely still.

Something in him released, as if his blood had indeed boiled, and his heart had emptied out.

He slept.

* * *

Falling back had seemed a great liberation in the beginning, but now it felt like onerous work, and Jon was tired. He did not want to go back to 1:06 on 10 Semoj. He did not want to repeat that night, that week, that month ever again. He was finished. So he resolved to make the best of things. He would pretend that he was an ordinary man with an ordinary life and move on.

But there was no role for himself in the life he had constructed. His role in this life had been to build it. Now that construction was finished, there was nothing for him to do.

“What are you writing?” he asked Katerine.

“A grocery list. I’m going to the market later.”

“Right. We can’t eat at the cafeteria anymore!”

“Nope.”

“We have plenty of money for groceries. You can buy whatever you want.”

“Yes. We’re very lucky.”

“Very lucky… Um… This house is nice, huh? You like it?”

“Of course!”

“It’s just what you wanted.”

“It is.”

A few minutes later he went to see what Liira was doing. He found her playing with ragdolls in the house’s small enclosed yard.

“Hey, Liira,” he said.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What are you doing?”

“Playing.”

“We’ll have to get you new dolls. You don’t have to play with these old things anymore.”

“But I like these dolls!”

“Why? They’re just rags. Mommy wants to go to the market today. How about we all go, and we’ll get you some new dolls. Maybe some with porcelain heads. How about that?”

Liira shrugged her little shoulders. She looked down at the ragdolls, avoiding Jon’s eyes.

“What’s so special about these?” Jon asked.

“Mommy made them.”

“Oh.”

“This one is Terra. She’s an esper. This one is Locke. He’s a boy, like Erik.”

“What’s an esper?”

“It’s a… special kind of girl… from a special place. Mommy knows about them.”

“Does Mommy tell you stories about espers?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you tell me about them?”

“Mommy knows about them. You should ask her.”

Jon went with them to the market, but the trip was immediately awkward. Katerine, Liira, and Erik all held hands when they walked, and Katerine wore a makeshift harness that she would use to carry Erik when he was tired. There was no place for Jon. He offered to carry Erik, but the boy immediately began crying for Katerine. In embarrassed haste to hand him over, Jon dropped Erik, and the boy skinned an elbow. After that Jon simply walked behind the others, following them like a dog while they cast occasional glances back at him.

Jon knew much about the spaces and buildings they passed — he had been inside half of them — and there was much he could have told them, but he had no way to contextualize this knowledge. There was no reason why he should know anything about the city, so every time he thought of something to say, he could not think of any excuse to say it. Frustrated, he stared at his feet. Eyes down, he lost track of the others. When he found them again, he was not sure if they had noticed his absence, and he was embarrassed to ask.

He found a use for himself carrying bags for Katerine. She thanked him and gave him a few smiles, but they both knew that she did not actually need the help.

That evening Katerine made duck stew for supper. Liira praised it, and Katerine seemed satisfied, but Jon barely suppressed grimaces as he swallowed. Katerine was not a good cook, and Jon had dined at every fine restaurant in the city. Katerine noticed his dissatisfaction. Her face fell as he lamely insisted it was fine.

That night Jon tried to make love to Katerine, but he was distracted by the memory of a whore from one of the upscale brothels on Carver Street, a woman who much resembled Katerine. She noticed his distraction, and they both felt awkward and ashamed.

By the third day, Jon felt that he was nothing but a nuisance to his family, and that they would be happier without him. Katerine seemed to validate this perception by suggesting that he should start looking for a job. She pointed out that the money Uncle Friele had left would only last about two years, and they should really keep that money as savings rather than living off it. Jon opened his mouth to argue that the money would last five years, not two, but then he thought that she probably knew that and was exaggerating intentionally. He mumbled agreement, and wandered out into the city.

He did not look for a job. He could not think of any job that would not be oppressively boring. More than that, the idea of working in a shop or a factory for a few gil a day seemed ridiculous when he had recently made more than one hundred thousand gil with a single theft and a few weeks’ scheming.

He resolved to fall back. He would refine his methods and get more money, enough that it would last not five years, but five hundred. He would hide most of this money, and pretend to get a job, but actually he would do… what?

This question so absorbed his attention that he did not notice when he wandered onto a road intended for automobiles. He heard someone scream “Get out of the way!”

4 Klanoj 703, 2:47 a.m. (II)

He was in bed. But it was not his bed in the Jaboro apartment. It was his bed in the house on the Park.

Jon lay quietly and considered this. He found to his surprise that he was not surprised: it seemed obvious, now that it had happened. There had been nothing special about 1:06 on 10 Semoj. He had been sure of that for some time. But if that moment had not been special, then why had he fallen back to it, and not to some other moment? The only possibility was that 1:06 had been made special, that it had been selected. He thought back to 1:05 on that night — only seven weeks ago in the world’s time, but more than four years in his own — and he was not certain that he had been sleeping. He had assumed that he had been sleeping because falling back resembled waking from a dream. But he might have been awake. He must have been awake. He had been awake. He had been awake, and he had been thinking about…

Jon got up and crept quietly into the upstairs bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the electric light. A small mirror hung on the wall above the sink. He looked into it. Staring into his own eyes, he summoned all of the dark and empty thoughts he normally tried to suppress. He thought of how pathetic it was to be endowed with miraculous powers and still be unable to accomplish anything worthwhile. He thought of how purposeless he was, how lonely, how unwanted, and how death could not free him from his pathetic existence, because death was a lie. He willed himself to feel the void, to dwell in it.

The universe is empty. My blood boils in the cold.

And he felt a change, as if something had bent too far and snapped. He could not see it clearly, not quite, but he had an impression that, for the briefest moment, the face in the mirror had twisted, or smeared, or been inside out, somehow. But as soon as he saw it, it was gone, and he was himself again.

Jon went downstairs to the kitchen. He found a long knife and stabbed himself through the heart.

4 Klanoj 703, 3:06 a.m. (II)

Jon stood looking at his reflection in the mirror for several minutes. He felt oddly calm. What had just happened changed the entire nature of his existence, but it did not obligate him to take any action. Indeed, it freed him from any obligation to ever take any action.

Finally he said “Huh,” and went back to bed.

* * *

Jon spent the next few days experimenting with this new aspect of his power. It proved easy to understand.

He imagined time as a pagoda, and himself as a monk ascending it. But instead of having a wide base and a narrow apex, the pagoda spiraled straight up and down, forever in both directions. When he died, it was like jumping off of the pagoda’s ramp. He would fall down past the levels he had already climbed until something stopped him, like falling into a net attached to the pagoda’s side. His fall arrested, he would immediately return to the ramp and begin climbing again. These “nets” could be positioned anywhere, and he could determine the positions himself. As he ascended, he could leave one at whatever height he chose, and then when he fell back, he would land in it. The only limitation was that he would always fall back into the highest net; each new net blocked those below.

Emotion, he discovered, was not what caused a net to be placed. Emotion was only one means to… whatever the actual cause was… When he ordered his mind in such a way that it rejected the idea of an evolving future — when the present moment seemed to be the only moment, that now would last forever, and nothing else would ever happen — it triggered… something… and a net was placed. He did not understand how he did it, any more than he understood how he moved his fingers. With practice, he could simply do it, and he could do it whenever he wanted.

The most obvious consequence of this discovery was that he could indulge himself again. For years of his own time, he had restrained his impulses to accomplish the House on the Park Project, and he had believed that continued restraint would be necessary to keep what he had gained. But it was not. Getting the house was now below the net; he could do whatever he wanted and not risk losing it.

Again, feelings of possibility overwhelmed him. With this power, he could do anything, not only in the negative sense that he could avoid unwanted consequences, but also in the positive sense that he could preserve consequences he did want. He could have ten houses. He could have all the houses. He could sit on the Throne.

But first…

For a hundred iterations Jon ran wild, as he had at the beginning, but on larger scales. He visited brothels, and spent lavishly. He broke into buildings, not to explore them, but to thwart their security. He started fights, but with greater ambition and less spontaneity. His earlier acts of violence had been limited by a lack of resources; now he had money to buy weapons. He assembled arsenals and fought the police, staging battles in various parts of the city, setting traps, taking hostages, hiring mercenaries. He was eventually able to kill so many officers that they gave up fighting him and called in the Royal Army. (He could not defeat the Army, and the game lost its fun.)

His rampages became boring more quickly than he had expected. But he had expected. He did not despair when pleasure faded into tedium, because now he had real life to go back to.

He had developed a simple metaphysics: everything below the net was “real,” while everything above it was “potential.” Because events above the net could be replaced, they happened only in the sense that he experienced them. Events below the net could not be replaced, so they had happened objectively. This implied that whenever he placed a net, he made things real. When he placed a net, the possible past became the past.

Jon was, therefore, a god.

He could fall back as many times as necessary to achieve whatever he wanted to achieve, possess whatever he wanted to possess, become whatever he wanted to become, and when he had built the potential life that was exactly what he desired, he could make it real. And when the life he had designed became boring, he would simply make a new one, and then a new one, always moving upward to more interesting, more fulfilling, more glorious lives.

The Pliigists taught that virtuous souls were reincarnated into progressively better lives. That was what Jon would do, for himself. He would not be subject to fate or chance. He would not be judged by gods or men: he would be the god. He would shape the world like a potter at a wheel, and he would exult in his creation.