“Come on bud.”
Matt smiled and beckoned a hand to the black and white puppy. The dog scampered out from behind a thick chicle tree, having been chasing a bright, quick turquoise lizard, tongue flapping and tail wagging happily in response to its master’s call. It was able to run on its own now, the swelling in its foot subsided, and was growing bigger by the day. Matt had called it Scraps.
They wandered through a jungle‑spun city, a dense forest of temperate, flourishing green so lush and verdant Matt often found himself wanting to stop and just run up and rub it all over his face. The city, too, was an engineering marvel – quite impossible, he suspected, without a Divine hand’s guidance. The buildings were not built next to trees but around them, trunks and branches swept into walls and rooftops, soft whites and muted silver matching the wood’s natural twist and flow. There were no roads, only leaf‑strewn paths, and up above the city streets a thousand vine‑linked bridges and canopies. Birds sung in every colour, monkeys swung outside glass domes. It was exquisite. It was more beautiful than Matt could have ever dreamed. He marvelled once more at Jane’s imagination, and all the wonders still yet to see.
The city had also, happily, supplied him with a couple of new shirts, some packaged food and a backpack, which had been sitting unattended and clearly awaiting eventual human consumption in a number of green‑tinged stores. Matt plucked out a few without hesitation, secretly glad to no longer be semi‑naked and getting a bit sick of fish and berries. For Scraps, too, he found a little bowl and some filtered water, a red ribbon and for his fur a children’s comb. One night they slept in a penthouse suite with the dog splayed across the bedspread, utterly alone and watching the dawn mists drift over the city’s green and living canopy.
It was not quite living off the land, but in this strange world the cities seemed just as alive as the animals, the forests as manmade as they were organic. It was a beautiful place, and still Matt kept on walking, looking for a way to leave. Searching for the edge of paradise. Looking for a way back home.
*****
The city functioned. People had moved out into estates, into farms. The lakes, the rivers, the mountains. There was peace, prosperity, order. In her empty hall atop her white stone tower, Jane sat unmoving in her seamless throne, eyes flickering from white to blue to yellow to red to white to blue to black again. Her lips mumbled slow and sightless, her fingers only occasionally twitching, yet she moved more than anyone would ever see. She was submerged – sunken deep within the colour‑woven waters, between the darkness and the light, the ripple and the rock. Soon, she would not dwell on this throne, in this reality, but sink to where the threads were deepest, disappear into the world between the walls. She saw everything her people were, what they would be, what they would ask for before they wanted it. She knew their needs, gave them fulfillment – purged disease, kept the world in balance. Kept everything in bloom.
Jane prevented, now, rather than cured. For desolation, anger, every kind of human affliction. Problems were fixed before they ever manifested, and the problems stemming from those solutions she then resolved separately themselves. If a soul required fulfillment of one kind, she gave it. If thus fulfilled, they yearned instead for something different, that too was met. Yet sometimes, as Jane found herself looking ahead through turn after turn of action and reaction, satisfaction and desire, her blue eyes found no way to permanently resolve. No actual answer. She had every kind of key, yet when she drew them the lock kept changing.
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She tried not to dwell long on the futility of the helpless. There was so much to do, to control in her test city, now her test county as her initial subjects spread. There was the constant manoeuvring of their lives, the minute twitching of small coincidences, keeping that person from ever running into this one, preventing this emotional response or provoking this negative thought. If two people were incompatible, she twisted their roads so they would avoid each other. If someone would one day yearn for something someone else held, they were guided subtly to a substitute. Nudges and bumps, sudden rains, untied shoes and flocks of birds. Those who could not cope with paradise, mentally, she transported back to Earth, returned them to their original location. She would deal with them, the obstinate, the absurd and the simply mentally ill, when her initial utopia had been mastered.
Today was like any day. People moved, gifts created from thin air, mountains rearranged themselves. Jane diverted the path of a wife who would look jealously upon another woman, so she need not ever see beauty which would trouble her and never feel that hurt. Jane had already changed the woman’s body as she’d requested, but it seemed still insufficient, and there was something about the happiness of this other person that would cause Rachel Malley a deep and piercing sorrow. An older regenerator, Percy, ran staunchly, outspokenly conservative, and so Jane directed him away from an elasticisable, dreadlocked man to prevent triggering a violent argument. Both men fancied they would make good mayors of this new colony; both would turn violently angry if they lost. So Jane had underway the creation of another, separate city, divided along ideological lines, one for each man to rule.
Her time’s eye turned to a young couple then. A man and a woman, their names unimportant, who would meet and have a future. Jane wandered through their lifelines, seeing the relationship sour, seeing it cause pain, lifeless and grey. She moved her hand to stop them meeting – yet as she did, she hesitated. Before her, their lifelines untangled, but now she felt less in them; less happiness, less colour. She waved her hand backwards, let them meet. The joy returned. But then again the conflict. Jane flicked forward, trying to prevent it, remove the onset of rot. Yet they were doomed to failure. Yet they were happy after it happened. Yet the loss brought pain. Yet never meeting brought loss.
And suddenly, alone in the throne room, in her white eternal hall, Jane was crying. Silently, openly weeping, tears flowing quietly from her shifting coloured eyes. She saw the couple’s life together and it was beautiful, felt their heartache and their grief. Saw the pain fade, but never truly heal, watched them age and grow. He re‑partnered and found happiness, grown into a better man, a loving parent; she did too. But without the pain, the joy, the experience, for neither of them it happened. Darkness beget light beget darkness. Hurt led to change led to growth.
And suddenly Jane was staring back, remembering, looking at her own timeline, her own immutable path. She saw every failure and defeat, every slight and setback. They had not all of them made her stronger – but they had all made her her. They were cracks and chips in porcelain which one by one she’d filled with gold. Beaten down, so working harder. Falling for a false man, so she knew what it was to fall for a real one. She remembered standing in the centre of an Arena, beaten, broken and bloodied, yet utterly ecstatic, delirious with pain yet not wanting to change anything for the world. Without loss, without struggle, there never was that moment. In the streets of Detroit, a lifetime of pain and resentment on her shoulders, it had not been her strength that turned her from Klaus Heydrich. It had been her mother’s face. The strength of loss.
Alone, as soft rain began to weep over her cathedral, Jane released her hands from the timestream and allowed the couple to meet, knowing the pain before them – and returning them their choice.