Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

"You came to see me."

Edith Pavlov's pupils burned black suns by the overhead beam blazing conically about them. Her eyes were darkly ringed and bagged with exhaustion, and her hair was bunched in tangled lumps that Betelgeuse' hands itched to smoothen out.

He nodded. He could count her breaths by the delicate flares of her little nostrils, and an expression which could be described as tentatively grateful spread itself skin-deep across her face.

The room was small and square and palpably geometric. The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with black tape so that none of its recesses could be easily discerned, and somewhere along those shadowed corners there had certainly been fitted one or five high-def cameras and perhaps a dozen ultra-sensitive microphones, that the concept privacy had been finally and absolutely negated within that place.

The rest of that space was devoid of any furnishing save for the steel chairs they were given to sit and the steel table that came between them. The legs of the chairs and table had been bolted to the floor so that there was no adjusting their positions, and it was quite clear to Betelgeuse that somebody had specifically designed the room to enhance physical discomfort, to impose upon its occupants a sense of austerity and isolation.

"Was there any specific reason…?" Edith murmured, her voice leaping out of the stillness to bring home to Betelgeuse that the silence between them had gone on long enough to be awkward.

Curious, that. Edomites tended to prize quiet. But perhaps the both of them had traveled far enough away from the place of their birth, that their cultural predisposition no longer had any great hold over the people they had become.

"… I wanted to see what you were doing," Betelgeuse said, leaning forward to rest his forearms upon the table. "I would have come earlier if I knew you were remanded." He shifted in his seat, finding that his chair was set too far away from the table so that he had to lean forward further than was naturally comfortable.

"I see," she mumbled, withdrawing into herself.

"Had to get my coycom to set up this appointment, essentially."

He stared into her bloodshot eyes and observed, in those softly glinting pupils, the vague contours of a face reflected back.

Several seconds passed, and Edith managed a forward lean, mimicking him. She was so petite that she had to sit on the edge of her chair to get her elbows over the surface of the table.

"... You should get the scar checked out. It doesn't seem to be healing right," she said.

"I've heard. Don't worry about it."

The room's air conditioning seemed to have been set to an unreasonably low temperature. Betelgeuse glanced down at the skin of his forearms to see that his hairs were standing on end.

"What do they do to you here?" he asked.

"Not much. I lie in my room until they call for me. I sleep and eat. I defecate once in a while. Pretty much just repeat the cycle over and over."

"They take your Inc? I had to leave mine in a locker."

"... They did."

Betelgeuse ran his eyes over Edith's messy-haired scalp, over her neck, where he noticed a slight bulge suggestive of swelling cervical lymph nodes, down to her bony clavicle. She looked small and anorexic in her gray overalls, so fragile that she was in danger of melting into those thick canvas folds.

This was the Edith stripped of her Incunabulum, he realized.

"How do you feel without it?" Betelgeuse asked, his eyes returning to hers. "Without your Inc?"

It was the first time since the Analysis that he'd been so far away from his own Incunabulum. He felt empty, as if a large hole had opened up in the middle of his mind, and strangely stunted to boot. There was a dearth of motivation to do anything, even to move this conversation with Edith along. He tried reaching out with his intentionality but found that there was nothing to reach out with; his hands inched closer to Edith's, and as their proximity increased he found himself becoming aware of Edith's intentionality—a dull, muted and featureless thing like some misshapen fetus.

"I… what do you mean?"

"Did anything change? Do you feel different?"

"… I suppose I do."

"… How different do you feel, Edith?" Betelgeuse said, suppressing the urge to snap at the woman. She knew what he was getting at.

"I guess I feel worse, physically speaking. But my mind… I don't fear the violence, I don't look for it anymore. Perhaps the effect of the Inc is limited to what has been written in it," she returned flatly. "Which reminds me—I don't quite know how long I've been here though. Can you tell me?"

Betelgeuse cleared his throat. The cold was clogging his sinuses.

"Did they take you in immediately after we arrived?" he asked

"Yep," she sighed, and her eyes fell.

"So you've been here almost two weeks. Less than that. One point five weeks."

"... That long…" she muttered.

"I spoke to my coycom. He said they will release you once the investigation is done, sose best you don't worry too much about it. I can't imagine there's much more to investigate—Rolf is a deserter and an enemy of the state. It's an open and shut case."

"You act like you know," Edith said, her voice edged with bitterness, and she lowered her eyes from his. There was no trace of relief to be found in her haggard lineaments.

A flash of irritation wormed its way into Betelgeuse' mind. It felt like someone had taken a needle to his temple. He blinked, suppressing with some difficulty the unwelcome thought, and said: "It's a waste of resources to keep a good soldier like you locked up here. That much is clear."

"Is that all that you think?" Edith breathed, clenching her jaw, scarcely increasing the volume of her voice and yet seeming to Betelgeuse suddenly very angry. Their gazes locked, and for a moment the two became strangers to one another.

"What do you mean?"

"Am I just a good soldier? Am I?"

Her voice was low and deathly quiet and its intonation was all off.

"You are a better soldier than Rolf and the rest of them, in the eyes of the Democracy," he said, narrowing his eyes, but in the circumstances preventing any trace of anger from revealing itself upon his face.

"I came back with you, Betelgeuse, I remained loyal to whatever the hell this is, I don't know anymore. But fuck me, right? It doesn't fucking matter because—"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Betelgeuse tapped on the table—one, two, three times—with the tip of his finger. His fingernail made sharp, rapping sounds upon the metal surface, and the effect was jarring enough to arrest Edith's tirade mid-sentence.

Then he stuck out his thumb and wagged it and circled it around. Edith looked at him confusedly, her ears pricking sensitively, but he caught her gaze and then raised his eyebrows and glanced up and to the side, as though drawing her attention to someone who was eavesdropping.

'They are listening in,' she understood, and she leaned back slowly until only her hands were left resting upon the table. She clasped her hands, pressing her palms together and intertwining her fingers.

"The Democracy has its practices," Betelgeuse said, and as the words left his mouth he recognized them as something he'd heard someone say before.

Edith stared sullenly at him, and he thought she looked very small and vulnerable then. In her fragile anger she reminded him of the girl in the Prilogia. The girl who died.

The girl you murdered.

Gushing welters, turbulent flows.

How curious that, despite her demise, despite the death of her body, her visage retains a power all of itself. The dead have their power. Their labor is incessant and inescapable—

"I don't know when it's going to end. We were almost killed out there, fighting for who knows what, and… to come back to this…" Edith said, grimacing nauseously. Tension emanated from her form like a coil of wire wound much too tightly.

"Patience," Betelgeuse whispered, straightening his back. "My father once told me that good things come to those who are patient. You have to believe it'll all work out."

"... Sounds like 'God has a plan'," she said, chuckling sarcastically and bringing the ends of her mouth up in a smile that didn't look like a smile.

"You must be mistaking me for Voke. We must have patience and hope because the world is too large and too complicated to keep track of. We do things and we wait for the outcomes, and then we wait some more because the implications of things take a long time to play out."

"People wait so long they die along the way. Makes me wonder if it's even worth it."

"Dying isn't limited to people. Every living creature dies." Some people die more messily than others. "Have you maybe considered that you're just using our mortality as an excuse to give up on hope?"

He seized her hand, taking it in his palm with a startling abruptness that shocked her nigh out of her skin. Her eyes snapped to his and her lip quivered and her expression swelled with confusion.

"... Don't even know what you came here for… I'm sorry, you've already helped me through so much… but…—"

"Look at me. Do you trust me?" he asked suddenly, interrupting her gibberish speech.

"I… I do," she murmured, and she lowered her head and then raised it again, and Betelgeuse could see that her eyes were already wet. Her experiences during Liberation's Reach had changed her, hardened her, perhaps, but she was still Edith, she was still brittle and breakable. She didn't handle stress well.

"Then don't stop believing there's a way out. You'll get out soon, I'm telling you."

I may not know any better than she does, and yet should that matter at all? Belief itself can fortify one's chances of survival, that much is plausible. Edith needs belief to tide her through uncertainty.

They sat looking at each other for several minutes, ensconced in a silence that had ebbed enough tension to become—almost—comfortable. He let go of her hand slowly. The cold made him feel like urinating, but he held it in.

"I don't really care about getting out," Edith said softly, "because it's the same cage out there as inside here…"

She's right, of course. But we all live in cages of our own making, first and foremost. The cage of expectations. Of belief.

"… Maybe we'll return to Earth soon," she continued. "Maybe we can go back to Edom. There are a lot of things I still want to do with Mom…"

Betelgeuse observed her eyes begin to unfocus and knew her mind had transported her far away. Perhaps she had never really stopped believing—he merely reminded her, nudged her down the rabbit-hole of imagination.

"… I think we will," she said, talking more to herself now than to Betelgeuse, "we'll most definitely return to Earth."

Sometimes they were politically adverse concepts, belief and imagination. As in the case where one who believes, does so because it is not merely imagined; or one who imagines, does so against the oppressive hold of belief. But in this case, in Edith's case, they are merged, self-reinforcing: she imagines vividly enough that it shades into a belief of the imagined circumstance coming to pass; she believes in it so faithfully she gets tunnel vision, so that it is impossible to imagine it another way.

In this way, her mind does the work to unwind itself from its compulsive flirtation with nihilism. Curious.

Curiouser to think we may all be locked into our beliefs or waylaid by our imaginations, simply by virtue of such problems of fathoming.

And Betelgeuse watched Edith's spontaneous beatification and mulled over it and thought again, unavoidably, about how quickly his bladder was filling.

"Betelgeuse, you remember when they taught us the Edom-ursi?" she said, finally addressing him directly.

"Do I remember," Betelgeuse tensed his cheeks, affecting a smile. "It took up so much of our childhood I doubt we'll forget it even in the next life. It gave all of us asthma, for God's sake…"

"Ha! The next life!" Edith echoed, the hardness gone from her voice, laughing in tones that were soft and sweet and which lilted daintily into the frigid air. "... and you remember, you remember what they told us we should keep in our minds?"

"Silence. The power of silence is to calm our minds and our bodies."

"And when we're calm, we can be stoic. We can endure…"

"That is the gist of what the Elders seemed to believe."

"Why do you have to say it that way?"

"They don't have a monopoly on truth, Edith. The Elders taught us what they thought was right, and sometimes not even that."

"Even so…" Edith sighed, trailing off into silence.

There was nothing to say for a while. The silence dragged on.

Betelgeuse watched Edith's eyes dart in sporadic fits to-and-fro across the dendrite splay of shallow gouges, the scratches which marked the table's tumultuous history. After some moments of frenetic cogitation, she looked up, having, evidently, prepared some response or other.

"We shouldn't be too cynical about our upbringing. If we can't anchor ourselves to the things we've learnt and experienced—the list of rules, the exercises, the timings, the Elders' aphorisms—then we don't really have anything… we have nothing to keep these feelings away. No armor to insulate us from bad thoughts. You said we need hope… and I think that's right. I think there's nothing more right than that. But we need grounding. We can't deny our grounding."

"I can't argue with that," Betelgeuse returned, speaking slowly, enunciating in such a way that an observer would think he was considering every word carefully. "It takes a certain level of self-loathing to reject one's origin, a certain level of narcissism and delusion to believe one can escape from it. … I suppose it's why we're here now, talking. Edom was the connection I felt from the moment I saw you at the Library of the Edge, and it was the connection that bound us together throughout Boot Camp. Maybe it's why you followed me back to Saltilla, instead of going with Hrodwulf. Not a coincidence, perhaps, but… grounding, as you say.

"And yet, a person can aspire to be more selective with this grounding."

"I've always had the sense you rejected my—I mean… our Edomite heritage… I guess I was right. Won't you be so much more at peace, if—um… if only you find it in yourself to accept?" she said.

"You must understand there are parts of Edom-Zeta I hated and that I will always hate. I can reject it—I can formulate a rejection, I mean—even if I understand that in the end there are fundamental parts of my psyche that are immutably Edomite. You need not worry yourself as to whether it will affect my peace. Living creatures were never made—never evolved—to be peaceful."

Edith gave him a look that was deep with emotion and rife with internal conflict, a look that said she understood and did not understand all at once. There was intimacy and detachment, mutual understanding and mutual incomprehensibility. They were friends that kept secrets from each other, countrymen who held very different views of their country. And then she looked away and observed the four corners of that small room, looked everywhere but straight at him.

It was several tens of seconds again before she was able to ask: "Do you think we will make it back?"

Betelgeuse thought at that moment that this scrawny woman looked very weak. She had thin bones, thin lips and a brittle personality. There was great fear in her, and he knew that myriad anxieties plagued her every waking moment. His intuition was that it was very unlikely for such a person to survive, much less flourish.

Of course, humanity's entitlement to rule the stars was nothing if not built upon a trillion such personalities. They made stories of their fear and trembling, they erected religions as monolithic cairns to ward off the dark. They created the meat-stuff of mythology, and then they were swallowed up in it.

"I do."