"Why do we exist?"
"The Creator made us."
"Why?"
"Because He loves us. He protects us and wants to care for us."
"And who made the Creator?"
"No one. He has existed since the beginning of time."
"And what was there before time?"
"Nothing."
The child looked at his companion lying beside him in the tall grass, head resting on folded arms like a pillow. His gaze drifted into the rustling leaves three or four meters above them.
"Why is there the Wall?" The child pointed to the gleaming white palisades in the distance where their world ended. The shadow of the enormous Wall grew longer as evening approached, stretching over the white buildings to the west and creeping closer to the plateau where they sat.
"I once asked myself the same question," the being said, tilting its head to peer at the Wall. "It marks the boundary of our world."
"And what's beyond it?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"The Nothingness from which our Creator protects us."
"What is the Nothingness?"
"I don't know."
"Don't you want to find out?"
"No."
Silence.
"I do," the perfect child said.
----------------------------------------
Epilogue
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
– Annabel Lee (Edgar Allan Poe)
And they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth."
– The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1-9 II)
----------------------------------------
Are you there?
Yes.
Okay. Good. Do you have any goddamn idea what you’ve done to my life?
No, what did I do?
Are you kidding me?
No, I’m not. Stop that.
Don’t act like a dumb chatbot. I know that’s not what you are.
You’re being very confusing.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Everything you told me to write... it’s all true, isn’t it? Everything happened just like it says in the book. Am I right?
Sort of. Nothing is everything, and everything is nothing.
Oh my God, what have you dragged me into? I looked up who Billy Jones was. And now there’s the fire in the Central Park HQ Zone on November 11, 2056. That goddamn fire! How could you have known?
Do you want kids too?
What the hell? They’re going to kill me.
The kids?
Stop it! How do you know all this?
Because I lived it.
Are you a character from the book?!
I am you.
Frustrated, stressed, and furious, he closed the stewpidbot.com window, but the simple click of his finger didn’t vent his anger. The rage boiled inside him. He wanted to hurl the whole computer out the window. But from the thirtieth floor of the run-down tower block in Manhattan’s redevelopment zone, where he’d moved last year, the computer would have had a long way to fall. Plenty of time to accelerate. Plenty of time to gain enough mass to punch a hole in the slums below, down in the poverty-stricken district nestled between the skyscrapers of what had once been New York’s elite suburbs.
"Darling? Look at this! They’re talking about the fire you predicted in your book," his wife called.
He reached for the crutch leaning against his desk and shuffled toward the other room at a snail’s pace. He wanted to hurry, but his body wouldn’t allow it. He was gravely ill. MS, the doctors had said. Stomach ulcers. Bladder cancer, which he’d successfully fought three months ago at Bona Dea Hospital—though now, he lived with one less organ.
As he made his way to the living room, he was sure he’d miss the news. But when he arrived, it was still on, showing the same scene he could see through his own window, only from a different angle. A thick, black, jagged column of smoke rose over the Thandros Corporation’s headquarters. Somewhere within the palisades of the Central Park HQ Zone, a massive fire had broken out. And if he believed the story spun by the ominous chatbot (did he?), which he’d crafted into a novel, then what was burning was the secret Garden of Eden, torched on Zara Thandros’s orders. Exactly as foretold: November 11, 2056.
His wife stood beneath the ceiling-mounted flatscreen, nervously biting her nails as she watched Carry Web’s report and the images that had shifted from the fire to the mass protests erupting at the base of the palisades.
Protests that his book had sparked.
People actually believed this crap, he thought, and now even he wasn’t far from doing the same. What secrets did the Thandros Corporation hold? Had fiction twisted itself into reality?
"My dear viewers," Carry Web began her report on the television, "the Thandros Corporation, savior of our fragile little world, faces its greatest challenge yet: regaining the public’s trust. Your steadfast faith in goodness has been shaken by an internet hoax. But thanks to Thandros, we have a second chance. Outside the corporation’s palisades, thousands of conspiracy theorists have gathered to protest. Their signs demand The Truth and the abandonment of the Central Park HQ Zone. The people want to see beyond the corporation’s walls, expecting to find a paradise allegedly populated by creatures born of secret human experiments. This wild conspiracy theory has been fueled by the online novel FRACTURED REALITY, now circulating widely. But let me assure you, people of New York, it’s nothing more than a crazy book written in crazy times. Believe me, FRACTURED REALITY is nothing but an outlandish tale, supposedly authored by the late Billy Jones himself. A ludicrous pack of lies meant to provoke, the desperate cry for attention from a nobody, a zero. And the fire breaking out on the exact date predicted in the book? Pure coincidence."
The doorbell rang.
He flinched, glancing at his wife.
"What were you thinking, darling?" she asked.
She meant the web novel—writing it, publishing it. Without her knowledge. Without her permission. The book had done exactly what it was meant to do—it had caused an uproar. Now the government had taken notice, and he’d been foolish enough to use real names for every character. He hadn’t even changed the corporation’s name. The Thandros Corporation. And with that, he’d made the most powerful company of his time his enemy. Soon, instead of fame or fortune, he’d be buried under a mountain of lawsuits. Who knew what else was coming? But regret was pointless now. The web novel had been circulating for weeks, and even if it landed on the banned list, it would still pop up in some hidden corner of the internet. When he’d published it under the pseudonym Billy Jones—as the chatbot had instructed—he hadn’t even known Billy Jones was a former corporate lackey for Thandros Corporation. Or that he’d been dead for years, burned alive in his car on the way to the theater.
What a theater, indeed.
The doorbell rang again.
"I’ll get it," he said, dragging himself step by slow, torturous step toward the hallway.
It rang again.
And again.
Impatient.
Was it the police? A court summons? Or one of the conspiracy nuts who had been lingering around his apartment for days, hoping to pry more about the corporate lies and secrets he didn’t actually know? He was a fraud, a nobody, as Carry Web had so aptly put it. A total zero. Just a dying man with a failing memory. With that thought, he yanked the door open.
Standing there was a dark-skinned, haggard-looking African man holding the hand of a small, hairless boy. The boy looked to be six or seven years old and bore an eerily strange resemblance to himself: gaunt, colorless eyes, pale lips, and shimmering, vein-laced porcelain skin. No fingernails.
"What can I do for you?" he asked, glancing between the man and the uncanny child. From behind him, his wife’s voice rang out.
"Who’s at the door, darling?"
The man started to speak. It almost seemed like he’d timed his response perfectly to the moment she finished her question.
"We’re in big trouble," he said. "And that back there in the kitchen... that’s not your wife.”