“100 billion.” Pain. The old man watched Thomas' reaction, and adjusted something in an elaborate clockwork piece sitting on his desk. “100 billion.” Pain. More adjustments. The exercise repeated, until the pain ceased.
Thomas blinked, as the number slowly assembled itself into something that wasn't a stabby confusion. “Shit.” A blank-faced woman watched from a corner, ignored by Sage Eslan, but always in Thomas' peripheral vision; she visibly failed to react, which Thomas quietly noted. Sage Eslan watched Thomas for a moment more, then nodded.
“Good. We have this dialed in. Now. Do you remember a visual diagram denoting meaning, displayed on a cumpyooter screen?” The word, mispronounced as it was, jogged something, and then – something cracked, and Thomas remembered computers. He blinked at the – no, there were still holes. It was … a thing … that did things … and could display things. It took a moment to recall the question, and a moment more to sort through confusing half-finished thoughts.
“I … remember a lot of things on a computer screen.” The Sage looked down, flipping through a couple of pages of the notes in front of him.
“It portrayed a turtle engaged in intercourse with another turtle, which is some kind of pictograph, meaning unknown, below which was an equation.” Thomas kept half an eye on Faith, who looked entirely too disinterested in this discussion. He was having trouble processing the question, and after considering the issue, and the too-obvious disinterest, decided to pose a different question.
“Sage Eslan, does this access to concepts go … both directions? Can I … add new concepts?” Faith straightened slightly, a frown darkening her – his – and the faceless mask still somehow conveyed a frown. The Sage looked up at him, confused. Then his expression cleared.
“Do not worry yourself about that, Thomas. You can't have concepts that don't exist.” And Faith, now a significantly overweight naked man, started laughing. Thomas suppressed a scowl. “Now, about that diagram. Do you remember it?”
It took Thomas some struggle to work his mind past all the holes in his memory, but he found the picture. It had been shared in a forum – a hole, there – that he had participated in. He remembered it, but the actual text was … a hole. A rather large one. “Yes.” Sage Eslan nodded again, making a mark on another sheet of paper.
“So, good news, of a sort. First, the breach was, I am now reasonably certain, on your side, not ours. Second, sages in your plane appear to have taken notice and removed access to the spell.” Thomas shook his head.
“We don't have magic. Didn't. Don't.”
“You practice it as a matter of course, as far as I can ascertain. Do you understand the nature of the substrate?”
“It's … ” Thomas trailed off, before picking back up. “A place where concepts and gods live?”
“Inaccurate, but I believe that is a matter of language, and possibly some missing concepts. Your home had a name for it, as well, named after an ancient Sage named Plat. Here, please solve this.” Sage Eslan reached out with a wooden object with a rope and a metal ring. Thomas took the strange device, which … what even was this?
“So where do the, er, gods live?”
“The gods, as some call them, live at a level removed from the Substrate itself; a place that represents the interaction between multiple concepts, but which is more than the concepts themselves, as it is a pure expression of these concepts; concepts whose purpose is themselves. It's sometimes referred to as the astral, although that term is itself annoying ambiguous. There's not a good word for it, as there isn't a clear boundary where the substrate ends, and it begins – nor is there a clear boundary between where the astral ends, and the planes begin, although some mistakenly believe that there is.” The Sage wiggled a hand back and forth. “Some words are necessarily imprecise, because we live in an imprecise world. You need to remove the ring from the rope. No, without breaking the rope!
“Anyways, the notable thing, for you, is that the substrate is far larger than the astral, which is itself far larger than the planes. The substrate is where all concepts exist; the astral as we know it sits across a relatively small portion of the substrate; and the planes occupy … well, that's complicated. There are some numbers that cannot be counted to, and we'll leave it at that.
“Which gets into the magic your plane practices, of which the diagram you came across was an example: Your plane is constantly expanding into new concepts. It is spreading, slowly, across the substrate, and that particular diagram intersected with ours in a very particular way. But because our particular place in the substrate was already occupied, as it were, instead of your plane simply expanding, you, and the others from your plane, whose awareness of that concept required them to be near that concept - simply fell through holes into ours.”
Thomas stared at the Sage, feeling … confused, mostly. The words all made sense, but the explanation didn't. Alright, moving along. He figured out the trick with the rope, which just required looping it back over itself through the hole in the wood, and removed the ring. “So … this is good news?”
“Quite; the damage was limited, and once this particular plane is closed, it will likely be some time before your plane expands enough to intersect ours again.” A pause, during which the Sage cleared his throat. “And it's unlikely to reach that point. Some areas of the substrate are … quite inhospitable. Most new planes are failures, expanding into conceptual space that contains some form of self-contradiction, and ultimately must be unanchored, else they destabilize the entire framework. Frankly I'm surprised your plane has lasted even as long as it has. It appears to be centered on a remarkably stable node, which I couldn't describe to you, because, well.” The Sage smiled, even as Thomas' mind revolved around the horror of the words. “I don't have the concept for it.”
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“So my plane is, what, doomed? Everyone will die?” Eslan blinked once, twice, then barked out a short laugh, before his expression turned serious again.
“No, of course not. It just requires guidance. And clearly somebody over there is paying attention; the astral observers suggest the plane has retreated from the conceptual space in question. Which itself is mildly interesting, and we would all love to know how they're doing it.”
Thomas considered the question for a second. “What keeps you from doing so?”
“The astral, of course. Somebody would have to go cut a chunk of it off, maybe, and uncountable numbers being uncountable, getting there can be a bit of amusement. And I am of course joking, we have no idea how to do it.”
“I don't think my plane has … an astral.” Sage Eslan looked at him, then down at his notes, and flipped through them for what seemed an inordinate amount of time. Faith was gone from the corner, when Thomas looked – it would turn up again later – and then the Sage cleared his throat again.
“I can't disconfirm that. Interesting if true. What kind of concept could give rise to a plane without an intermediary?”
“Mathematics?” The word was out before Thomas caught it. But that was one of the concepts that had returned to him, the idea of the mathematical universe. The old man looked at him, then at the clockwork device.
“Concerning if true. That did bleed over. Or at least, the thing your people call mathematics, which is more like … self-constrained creativity. What a concept, a concept to create new concepts.” Thomas frowned, and looked from the Sage to the device and back again.
“Hang on. If one of the concepts is already here, doesn't that means there is already overlap?” Eslan seemed momentarily taken aback by the question.
“Why would they?”
“Uh. Because … we're at the concept. And they're at the concept. Same position?” It took Eslan several tries at a facial expression before he landed on a mild frustration, and then a moment later, enlightenment.
“Oh, no. A concept isn't a point. It's a space. More like a line, really, sort of, but, well - you have some basic Life magic, yes? It's like that.”
“It's like … that?” He couldn't find any words to describe the incomprehensible experience of casting magic. He tried anyways. “Like … being a tree whose leaves are made of trees whose leaves are made of trees?”
“Yes, exactly so. Well, that's one way of thinking about it, there are many – in a sense, each of the spell schools is just a way of thinking about conceptual space, which lend themselves to accomplishing specific things. A thing made of itself, yes? But what it is made of is not in fact identical to the thing that it makes. Your arm is made of arm; it isn't made of leg.”
“What?”
“Well, if I were to take your leg and arm off, and swap them, your leg wouldn't become your arm, and your arm wouldn't become your leg. They are what they are made of; smaller pieces of arm, smaller pieces of leg.”
“So my arm is made up of a bunch of tiny arms?”
“No, it's made up of smaller elements of that-which-is-your arm.” That sounded … not entirely wrong. Sort of. From an entirely backwards direction.
“Okay. But I could take the skin off my arm, and the skin of my leg, and swap those, and you wouldn't know the difference.” Now why the hell was he arguing about this?
“Sure I would. It's not exactly a common skill, as it is mostly used for hunting rogue Necromancers, but it is something I personally can easily do.” Wait, what? Nevermind this argument, he wasn't even sure what he was arguing about.
“I, er, look – alright. So what do you mean by a concept bled over?”
“Alright … ” The Sage considered his words, thumb tapping on his chin. He brightened with an idea. “Alright, imagine you are in a dark room. Now, imagining you are in this room – I am going to put an object in this room, but I'm not going to tell you where I'm putting it. How far away from you is that object?” Thomas ran that question through his mind several times before giving up.
“I have no idea how far away it is, you didn't tell me.”
“Exactly! Also, please mark the squares that contain equations, and please complete the equations.”
“I … what?” Thomas looked down, and started complying. Addition. Subtraction.
“You don't know where the object is. You don't even know where you are.”
“I … yes. Okay?” It was ... challenging to both do the arithmetic, and listen to the sage talk, particularly given the way the sage talked.
“We aren't anywhere in that concept's space until we know what the concept is. But you enter with a concept for a new kind of animal that never existed before – now we know our position, with respect to that particular concept, and because we have it, we're there. We're in its space. The conceptual bleed did expand the astral somewhat, but pantheon has the problem contained.”
“What? So how did we fall into a hole and get here?” Eslan frowned at this, and looked at the clockwork device, poking at one of the dials.
“You must be blocked from something. This isn't complicated.” Then the Sage's attention was caught by the page Thomas had finished, and he picked it up, scanning it quickly, and began making notes.
“Hang on, no. Okay. Our worlds can share concepts, because concepts are big, or long, or whatever. Why can't our world share the concept – what does that thing even do?” Eslan looked up from his notes without ceasing to write.
“It adjusts your connection to the astral. Well, it tells pantheon to adjust your connection to the astral. And our worlds can't share that particular concept because it is wholly encompassed by the astral. You could say it is the concept of the astral, but that's not quite correct.” Thomas frowned, looking between the device and the old man.
“Wait, so you can, what, mind-control me with a clock?”
“No, I can just signal to an authority that certain necessary constraints on your conceptual access can be relaxed, for the duration of this conversation, and for the purposes of ensuring that certain concepts don't get spread around, by helping to identify where exactly in the astral they are represented.” The old man seemed to notice Thomas' reaction to that statement, and hesitated, his tone shifting. “You have knowledge on a process to use nothing but a particularly odd form of mathematics to identify entirely new conceptual space – which brings that concept into existence, here. Given that not all concepts are ... stable, you could literally shatter reality, if you used this to think the wrong thought. Relax a bit.” Thomas slowly sat back, his hands relaxing from the fists they had begun to form. The sage shook his head, turning back to the device, and starting to adjust it again.
“And your plane teaches this stuff to children, as if it were a mere sword or bow. Terribly irresponsible.” Thomas' thoughts grew fuzzy, then pieces of them started … just falling away. He grit his teeth, trying and almost succeeding at not feeling an overwhelming sense of existential dread; on the positive side, he was once again reminded that he had a soul, or something like it, even if the details didn't sound entirely perfect. On the negative side, his connection to it was apparently heavily lobotomized, and for reasons which … sounded kind of reasonable.
Well. Fuck.