Tom dissolves his room down to the primordial chaos. He scatters the work of Hans, who\u2019d stomped the world down to sense.<\/p>\n
And more than just Hans\u2019, too.<\/p>\n
He rips back the work of all of them, really \u2014 all who have ever taken up the stew of ideals, ideas, sense-impressions, and concepts around them and attempted to hammer them down to the shape of sense.<\/p>\n
Under the force of his will and his all-black eyes he unrolls it all to emptiness.<\/p>\n
There is only a drumming nothingness, a door and a window, and Tom.<\/p>\n
He stands there before the chaos. He reaches upwards towards Heaven. He gestures, with his marvelous hope-congealing gauntlet, to draw down the fire of the gods \u2014 well, the red energy of hope and happy endings \u2014 from the<\/em> notional upwards<\/em> into the here.<\/em><\/p>\n It pours through him.<\/p>\n He stains the chaos red with it and he burns it into order with his eyes.<\/p>\n The chaos stirs.<\/p>\n It forms a happy ending. It is glorious and everything is totally resolved. It\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s perfect. The end.<\/p>\n Tom frowns in irritation.<\/p>\n Tom banishes that happy ending with a sweep of his chaos-roiling attachment. He glares out millimeters to miles \u2014 he cannot say, and nor can I \u2014 at the substance of the world around.<\/p>\n He begins to wrestle with the chaos.<\/p>\n He wrestles with it \u2014 as is traditional \u2014 for six full days and six full nights.<\/p>\n On the first day, he desperately attempts to teach the chaos about vice and about virtue.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is bad,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He holds up a popsicle. He lights the stick on fire. You shouldn\u2019t do this! There is no point!<\/p>\n Then he holds up a book of science.<\/p>\n \u201cThis, conversely,\u201d he says, \u201cis good.\u201d<\/p>\n The chaos understands him. It projects a happy ending at him. There are no cheerily burning popsicles in this <\/em>happy ending. There are no marshmallows soaked in glue. There aren\u2019t even any painted turtles! Such follies are scattered, turned to nothing, and made as air.<\/p>\n Science books, on the other hand, abound.<\/p>\n Tom leafs through them. He clears his throat. \u201cThese are gibberish,\u201d he says. He marks up the chaos\u2019 equations. Can you believe how badly the chaos understands quantum electrodynamics? It\u2019s like it\u2019s never even met<\/em> physics at all!<\/p>\n On the second day and night, he attempts to teach the chaos about sense.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is when questions have answers,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is when the structure of those answers can be studied, and then there are answers to the new questions that then arise. Ideally, there is never a final end to this investigative process: a proper universe ought not to be entirely contained.\u201d<\/p>\n There are many good reasons, explains the chaos, why<\/em> there are no glue-soaked marshmallows in this happy ending. For instance \u2014<\/p>\n The chaos considers.<\/p>\n SCIENCE! booms the painted-turtle-less chaotic world.<\/p>\n Tom lunches on manna. He drinks the nectar of the gods. He is exhausted and teetering but he can see his way to an ending.<\/p>\n The work that is left \u2014 from SCIENCE! to victory \u2014 is mind-numbingly extensive, but finite.<\/p>\n He is certain he can do it. He can straighten out the world.<\/p>\n It is not the chaos, in the end, that confounds him.<\/p>\n Rather, at the end of the sixth day, he realizes that he can no longer understand the difference between the chaos and himself.<\/p>\n He is hoarse. He has been explaining things. He is still explaining things. And the chaos is explaining things. And he can no longer tell, for any given discursion, which is which.<\/p>\n He finds himself vigorously arguing on behalf of wiring mothers and fathers together; putting hoods on a hibernating computer; and teaching every beetle to dance.<\/p>\n Not just the limber ones!<\/p>\n He catches himself believing that all of this is illusion, that he is not actually in a room reduced down to chaos but in a comprehensive simulation thereof \u2014 a perception<\/em>, a sense- and mind-impression<\/em> of chaos, a terrible Cartesian cage. What if the world around him is still sensible and the chaos is entirely contained within his mind?<\/p>\n He makes a hat. He crafts it, he puts it on him, it straightens him \u2014<\/p>\n Or is that someone else? On someone else?<\/p>\n He is losing track of everything. He has explained himself too thoroughly and the chaos is too responsive. His mind and brain, by sheer informational reflex, have offloaded pieces of themselves onto the chaos around him. He is not simply losing the distinction between himself and the world: it is dying, it is going away.<\/p>\n \u201cI need a barrier,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n He cannot find one; or rather, he keeps erecting it in the wrong places. He entirely surrounds the gigantic melting Tom with a metal fence of dreams and portents, but when he\u2019s finished and it\u2019s cut off \u2014 when its thoughts no longer flow seamlessly into the world\u2019s, and his, and vice versa \u2014 he realizes that it cannot possibly have been Tom.<\/p>\n He isn\u2019t gigantic and he hardly ever, he is certain, melts.<\/p>\n He grasps for himself. He cannot find himself.<\/p>\n He looks for purpose but there are only words.<\/p>\n He is gasping. He is pumping great gasps in and out of his world-lungs. He is staggering and he is lost in time.<\/p>\n \u201cYay!\u201d someone cheers him. \u201cIt\u2019s a happy ending!\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a happy ending! Red hope energy trickles in and out of his twitching, chaos-wroth mind.<\/p>\n He turns, and he sees the wall between life and death behind him. He can\u2019t remember if he\u2019s ever seen the ghost of Tom.<\/p>\n His skin is crawling. It crawls right off him.<\/p>\n He falls, he fails, he is dying \u2014<\/p>\n The chaos stutters and shuts down. The world, and his dorm room, are powered back on.<\/p>\n He cannot parse it. He is dead. Most of him is dead. He tries to move things with his purpose. He reaches out his thousand fingers. He tries to scuttle up and down nervously on the wall.<\/p>\n \u201cI told you,\u201d says Cheryl. She kicks him. \u201cI told <\/em>you not to light up those popsicles.\u201d<\/p>\n She\u2019s unplugged his poetic engine. She\u2019s slipped off his marvelous hope-congealing glove.<\/p>\n She\u2019s bent and broken the various devices that had surfaced raw chaos into the world.<\/p>\n He grasps at her. He says, \u201cDon\u2019t you get it? You\u2019ve killed it.<\/em> You\u2019ve killed our happy ending.\u201d<\/p>\n You shouldn\u2019t paint turtles. That\u2019s not kosher!<\/p>\n He remembers, very slowly, that he is Tom.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Tom dissolves his room down to the primordial chaos. He scatters the work of Hans, who\u2019d stomped the world down to sense. And more than just Hans\u2019, too. He rips back the work of all of them, really \u2014 all who have ever taken up the stew of ideals, ideas, sense-impressions, and concepts around them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"series":[50],"class_list":["post-5590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-vidars-boot-chapter-3","series-vidars-boot"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Icon_Jewel_NoBG.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5590"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6077,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590\/revisions\/6077"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5590"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/books.hitherby.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fseries&post=5590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}