--==Chapter 60: You'll Need a Voice--==

"Sori," I growled, my fists clenching. "What is this?" Nia was mid-stride, only feet in front of me.

"I told you. It's the exit. Then again, I also told you to relax; I guess you're just a bad listener." Sori said, his voice still light as if joking— as if none of this mattered.

"If you use fear to manipulate people, you can't expect their reaction to be relaxed." I snapped; I knew I was undermining my own illusion, but I hadn't seen any sign of it working anyway.

Tentatively, I reached out toward Nia, but the doorway seemed to have a barrier over it. It looked similar to the shield-buttons Sori gave me to help with Crowseph.

"Duh, that's why I used fear on Nia, not you. You're the one I'm reasoning with; she was just my way in. Oh, and look, I was her way out." Sori said, sounding pleasantly surprised.

"She looks trapped, not free," I said darkly. I wanted to do something; I wanted to make the eye deeply aware none of this was ok.

"Oh, of course. I had to pause her passage, or all of Forest Lake would get destroyed."

That pulled me up short. "Umm, what?"

"Sure. I'll do whatever you want. You want the girl to escape? We can do that. It'll trigger scrub protocols, and everything inside the Vortex will be wiped clean, but hey, maybe you think that's an acceptable price to free one innocent into whatever waits for her out there. I guess that won't be her family."

"I...I feel like I'm missing something— No, multiple somethings. This isn't real. That's not her real body. That's not a real door. Right?"

"I mean, real, not real, that's a blurrier line than you think. But set that aside. Do you really think moving a sleeping body the length of a football field is somehow a challenge? Grow up, Sam."

My jaw clenched. This is not ok. I desperately wanted to impress that on the eye, but I'd seen how it responded to Hands assault. I didn't have that kind of control here, and even if I did, Sori had barely been inconvenienced by the Dolphin's attack. What's more, Sori had just shown me he did have that kind of control, more than me anyway.

"This is what Hands wants, isn't it?" I said, my mind looking for a path forward, even if it was just gathering information. "But, I thought he needed the Shadow to escape."

"I'm better than a stupid Shadow. I'm a whole eye!" Sori said with a snort. "Anyway. If Hands used the Shadow to leave, the Vortex wouldn't collapse. In fact, it would let Forest Lake live on forever, probably. Pristine and unchanged, it would continue without errors popping up all over the place, messing things up for everybody."

"Errors, like our lingering memories?" I said, piecing some things together. "You want me to 'fix' the 'trash collectors' so things can be reset perfectly. You'd have us living the same twelve hours on repeat, unchanging and unremembered? The Shadow can somehow fix things?"

Sori bobbed upward momentarily as though throwing up his hands in exasperation. "Finally, he understands."

It was one blow after another. "How is that anything but a nightmare?" I whispered, staring at the frozen girl.

"It might be for some, well, no, it will be for some. For others, it'll be paradise, not many, but some. The point is, neither will know. It'll just be a day, good or bad. The last day, for better or worse."

"Worse, obviously for worse."

"I don't see how. In fact, I don't see how this is any different than the world you already lived in. Life is a brutal reality; just ask all your ancestors who were eaten alive or starved to death, who died in agony or desperation. None of the things you want to stop are avoidable in life. Pain is a feature, not a bug. Your anxieties? Your sensitivities? They're the traits that got you and your people this far, but they can't ever stop your life from being a struggle. It's what your minds evolved to do; no amount of predictability or civilization can change that. The only difference here, is the experiences aren't novel, and no one experiencing them will know that." Sori said, almost sounding desperate, almost sounding lucid.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"Our choices have mean-"

"No! They don't!" Sori snapped, and my already racing heart took it up a notch. "There is no such thing as meaning, and your choices have never meant anything. Everything just is. Or isn't. Anything else is delusion."

"Consequences exist," I growled through clenched teeth.

"Sure, consequences that are mostly beyond your control and ability to foresee or even recognize. That won't change either." Sori said, suddenly sounding tired. "You'll still make choices not knowing their results and not accurately predicting your own future. But if you prefer, you could just let things end here. I'd understand and wouldn't judge you for it. I'll even let you go through that doorway and join Nia if you like. Her odds of survival out there could only go up." I wondered if I was imagining the hope in his voice at the suggestion.

"How is that an acceptable outcome for you? Wouldn't it kill you too? How is either choice something you'd support? Utter destruction or perfect preservation? Sori, why? Why any of this? What are the vortexes? Where did you come from? Can you finally tell me?"

Sori was, remarkably, quiet for a few seconds as he seemed to think. "You know how... you know how people can love without understanding the chemical mechanisms involved? I think it's like that. I don't know. I don't know why I know what to do. I don't know how this came about. I just know the heart wants what the heart wants. And if I can't freeze this day in reality, I know it'll be so fun to watch it all be atomized." And the excitement I'd come to expect was back in his voice.

Sori had never been stable, or consistent, but this was a darker touch of that madness than I'd seen before. "These are lives— unique experiences not seen anywhere else in the universe. You'd erase them for fun?"

Sori snorted. "Don't pretend humanity doesn't understand that kind of fun. If you don't personally, it's your ignorance, not mine. Anyway. It doesn't have to be that way. I didn't really expect you to let Forest Lake get atomized to save one child. I told you I want to make a deal. It might be fun to watch all the atoms of this place be scattered, their energy absorbed. But it'd be better to preserve at least some of it. That doesn't work so long as you're here. So you need to go, and you need to take your Shadow with you."

I wanted to take a swing at the orb. "That's what I'm fucking trying to do! You're just getting in the way."

"Yeah, but, well, you've had the chance to leave before, and you never took it, even when you had people pressuring you for a way out. You seem to think you can save everyone, and Sam, what I'm trying to explain is, you can't. I know you want to; I know you've seen endless stories where, with enough strength of will, there's always a way out. That's the wrong lesson. Every moment of life is a struggle if you're living it. That's the real lesson. Struggle will never lead to paradise. It always leads to these outcomes: conservation, destruction, or more struggle. They all have a price." By the end, Sori's voice was almost gentle, and I wished I knew what was going on with him.

"The price of conservation is the lack of change," I started, trying to understand his reasoning, even if it was unhinged.

"No," Sori said, as though frustrated at a poor student. "That's the feature. The price is those stuck in misery with no path forward, the people at the bottom whose situation is simply accepted as unavoidable."

"Unacceptable. The price of destruction is obviously..." I started, before trailing off, realizing that I was about to confuse feature and price again. "If the end is the point of destruction, Then the price is what's left."

"In a way, it's another form of conservation. It's an abdication of responsibility for change or influence of the world."

"And also unacceptable."

"Then, what's left, as I knew it would be, is struggle. This is always the path forward. Ultimately, it's the only path forward, but its price is also the highest. This is the path that created predators. This is the path of unceasing effort that results in misery, that selects for anxiety, and that developed depravity."

I didn't disagree. People like to believe, or at least pretend, that their lives— their destinies—are their own. The more I learned about myself and humanity as a whole, the more I recognized the effects of generational trauma that probably extended farther back than humanity itself. "If you agree it's the only path forward, why are you trying to preserve the town in an unchanging time loop? Why not work with me to get everyone out?"

"Why do parents catch their children when they fall? Why do people resist driving into oncoming traffic? Why does a fly with a lifespan of a day avoid being swatted? Fear, of course. And a hefty bit of self-delusion, if I'm honest. And I am helping you. Hands may not trust me, but he'd take you and leave if I stopped hiding the Shadow from him."

"Wait, you're hiding the shadow from Hands?"

"Not just Hands," Sori said, sounding exasperated. "I may not have known where it was, but I was able to mask it from most. It only helps me if you use it. But it doesn't have to be voluntarily. I want you to be able to choose. I like you, Sam." Sori said, with a sigh and a small shrug-like bob. "But it doesn't change anything. I told you I wanted to make a deal. So here it is. One year and one day. You can't save everyone, but you won't give up trying. It's part of what made Hands abandon you. I won't give you forever to try. I can't. But I can give you a year and a day, and one other thing as well, but…."

Sori trailed off, and his eye turned slightly to look past me at Nia's unmoving form. Then he sighed. "But there's a price. Nia stays here. She stays as a promise, as a guarantee, and for a purpose. You'll need a voice after all."

--==