Inner Sanctum Underground | 9:33 AM | ∞ Day

  "How old were you, out there?" Nora asked me, taking a drag.

  "...a little over two centuries," I told her, wondering where she was going with this.

  "Huh. If that's including the time you were Dreaming, you must have just been a kid when we were all brought here." She contemplated this information for a moment before continuing, looking up towards the distant light at the inverted city's apex. "Still, you must have felt it, from time to time."

  "Felt what?"

  "God, I'm shit at explaining things like this." She looked to me. "You the type of person to watch the news?"

  The question was enough of a non-sequitur to throw me off guard for a moment. "I don't know. Off and on, I guess."

  More like periods of obsession, followed by enforced avoidance, but that's neither here nor there.

  "You ever see a story about something controversial or designed to rile you up, and find yourself thinking something you don't actually believe?" She exhaled, and the smoke from her lips matched the color of her hair. "Bit of a weird pull, but I remember there was this story the media dragged out for years in my hometown about these two guys who were lodgers in this old lady's house, who ended up robbing her and doing all other kinds of fucked-up shit for years, even trying to sell the place after she'd died. And, y'know, I was a Humanist back in that world - most milquetoast politics you can imagine - and there was a lot more to the story if you actually looked into it. One of the two guys had a bunch of mental health issues and was deep in debt, and the other was really young and basically being pressured into the situation. Like everything in life, it was at least a little complicated."

  This story ringed a bell from my youth - which made sense, given she'd said she was from Illykrios, the mother-country of Oreskios - but I couldn't place if it had been something relatively contemporary or historical, making me wonder just how old she would have been.

  "But you know, whenever I heard that story, I'd often catch myself thinking things I didn't really believe," she went on. "I'd say to myself, 'they should have those guys fucking hung and quartered', or 'men are just disgusting, they're all like this deep down'. Or even completely crackpot ideas about how the government should have cameras in people's houses or that people with mental problems needed to be exiled to an island. Even though I have fucking mental problems." She glanced downward. "And obviously, my mind would always chime in a second later, reminding me I didn't really believe in that shit. That I was just getting emotionally manipulated. I don't know-- Do you know what I mean?"

  "Uh... not really," I told her. "Rather, I can understand getting angry at the news for stupid reasons, but I can't say I've ever had elaborate extremist fantasies contrary to my own beliefs about it?"

  This was true, though still perhaps somewhat deceptive in that I definitely had extremist fantasies in accord with my beliefs. Usually this involved me as some kind of world dictator - sometimes with magical powers to make this possible, though that wasn't a requirement for the fantasy - exercising absolute power to enact what were obviously the correct policy issues, and sweeping away all social ills to usher in a utopia. (To be clear, I'm self-aware enough to realize that if I actually controlled the world, I'd probably cause famine and societal collapse within a week.)

  Maybe it is more common to have more violent imaginings about this sort of stuff, and my past had just neutered my ability to pass judgement on people for wrongdoing when it wasn't personal. Who knows.

  "Maybe that's a bad example, then." Nora sighed through her nose impatiently, looking like she regretted bringing me out here. "What about, I don't know, media? You ever like something that you know you really shouldn't like, that doesn't fit with the idea of what you like? And then talk yourself into not liking it, or stretch things so you do have some reason after all?" She took another drag. "Or, I don't know, anything? Like, you see something you shouldn't be passionate about, or shouldn't believe, and just... want to believe it, for a moment? Until you remind yourself that you don't."

  I was starting to understand the feeling she was talking about, but didn't know what to say. I watched her carefully.

  Nora continued. "I have this friend Ram--"

  "Ran?"

  "No." She shook her head. "Ram."

  "Oh."

  "And Ram, when I was a fresh instance, explained it all to me - I should have led with this, honestly - like this: When you're a kid, you're constantly trying on these ideas of yourself, right? One week you'll say: I'm gonna be a doctor, and your parents will buy you a cute little lab coat and some other props, and you'll go around sticking a stethoscope on all your friends chests for a few days. Until you get bored of it and do something else." She gestured her hand and cigarette in my direction, the smell hitting me sharply, if only for a brief moment. "When we talk about that, as adults... we call it roleplay. Because it all seems to petty and easy to dismiss. But for kids, it's not like that. They don't have enough in the way of built-up identities and histories to distinguish between goofing off and genuine self-direction. In that week, they really are sincere about 'doctor' being the identity they want to have."

  "But as you grow up, you can't do that any more," I said, starting to see where this was going.

  "Right. You have to commit. Because you only get one life, and more importantly, one body. One chance to make an impression."

  I glanced towards the ground. I was sweating a little bit, though not really out of anxiety or even dread. It was a more complicated sort of unease than that.

  "And it's not just jobs, obviously. Little kids try out whole personalities too, usually based on what they see around them or in stories. You wanna be the cool and aloof guy sitting in the corner, the eccentric with lots of funny quirks, the powerful and untouchable genius. You pull these ideas of yourself on, seeing what you can pull off and what you can't. And then... you get locked in. People have an idea of who you are, and you're not allowed to experiment."

  "The basis of civilization is specialization," I mumbled mutely. "The adult world rewards consistency."

  "That's one way to put it," she remarked. "But yeah, I guess that aspect of human nature never really actually goes away. At this point I'm literally just quoting him, but the truth is that humans, deep down, are contradictory creatures by nature. If we don't force ourselves to do otherwise, it's easy for us to believe two completely opposing things at the same time. Both about the world and about ourselves." She seemed to get bored of the cigarette for now, her hand falling to her side. "And as you get older and older... and older older... those contradictions just build up and up, and it feels like there are cracks all over who you are. Until that voice, reminding who you're supposed to be, starts to feel like a burden. You want to see what it's like-- To give in to some of those other little voices."

  "It sounds like you're describing a mid-life crisis," I told her.

  Nora snorted. "I guess I am. Or, well, he was." She exhaled softly. "But out in the real world, you have to compromise when that happens, right? Keep your job, deal with your old worn out body. Plus, well, you're gonna die soon anyway, so at certain point, you learn to suck it up until it's all over." Her expression grew ruminative. "But here... well, with infinite time ahead of you, it becomes too much. And you're not bound to anything, physically or socially. So a lot of people - even ones you'd never expect to - end up trying it. And from there, one thing leads to another."

  "How many is a 'lot'?"

  She considered. "Most."

  I looked back towards the massive curtain, and the people passing through the crossroads underneath it. My eyes darted about, picking out a few at random. A surprisingly old man going in. Another young woman with cat ears coming out. A floating, purple haired woman in a fancy dress going in. A giant wolf coming out. No two figures ever looked remotely similar.

  "So... what," I began. "You're saying this whole second city - this exists for people to live as other people?"

  "Yup," she said with a nod. "You get some property inside and outside with your citizenship. They'll even make a passage between the two for you if you want - the whole structure's like a giant beehive."

  "And doing this is normal for people in the Crossroads."

  "Well, not just the Crossroads," she explained. "They have basically the same system in the Keep, too. Most Domains in some form or another-- At least, the ones that aren't devoted wholly to immersing yourself in some made-up role, like the Magilum. It's been that way for as long as anyone remembers."

  My mouth hung agape.

  "So yeah," Nora said. "You probably just caught your friend switching out their persona. Doesn't mean they were putting on a show for you or anything or that it was their 'real self' or whatever. Hell, people still have a lot of the same hangups here about being seen as the wrong gender-- They're just most willing to fuck around when it's not permanent."

  After several more moments of silence, I finally managed to blurt out what felt like the obvious question. "I-- Do people know?

  She raised an eyebrow. "Know what?"

  "About one another's different personas. Is it treated like-- Like just dressing differently, or..."

  "Oh, I see what you mean." She turned back to face the same direction I was. "It depends. Even though it's pretty endemic, the degree to which people take it all seriously varies quite a lot. Some people are real casual about the whole thing, and don't even care enough to keep secrets. And others are just too honest by nature to not be upfront." A pause. "...but most of the time, they don't."

  "Why not?"

  She seemed a little put-off by how intense my tone was becoming, giving me a funny look. "Well, it would kind of defeat the point, wouldn't it?" She gestured. "It needs to be a clean break with your other self, otherwise there's no..." She snapped her fingers on her free hand a few times, trying to think of the right word. "...fidelity. Relief."

  "So most people just participate in society as two completely discrete identities."

  "Yeah, more or less." A beat. "Well, sometimes more than two."

  I was silent, likely looking aghast.

  "I don't even know what to say."

  "It does feel kind of crazy when you first hear about it, huh?" She laughed oddly. "It took me a long time to accept it at first. That a bunch of the people I was spending time with could just be, well..." She trailed off, once again seeming unable to quite find the words. "I guess there are kind of two ways people deal with it. You can either just pretend it isn't happening - treat people's different personas as if they're different people, and just not think about it - or you can try to shift the way you process your relationships with others towards the abstract. Internalize that they're still them, even if there are parts that aren't." She glanced back at me. "Honestly, though? I mostly end up doing the former. This shit gives me a headache. No need to worry too much about it as long as it works."

  I was barely even registering what she was saying at this point. "Do you do this?"

  She was briefly surprised at the question, then squinted at me slightly. "Well... yeah. I never would have thought I would, but like I said. After long enough, it creeps up on you. You experiment a little bit, and the next thing you know..."

  Her words trailed off, as if the rest were obvious. I felt my face paling.

  "I'm sorry," I said abruptly. "I think I need to go."

  ??

  Near the summit of a beautiful mountain peak, overlooking an idyllic countryside vista on one direction and the edge of the world on the other, I vomited copiously into the snow. My expulsion, growing with multiple heaves as I lost what had to be both Nora's sandwich and the snacks I'd had for breakfast, created an expanding puddle as it melted the surrounding frost. I tried, in vain, to hold my head steady enough to trace the runes to erase it.

  I'd fled here, to what I imagined was the most remote part of the Valley, in the hope that being alone and surrounded by nature would help calm me down. It hadn't. I felt like a rat stuck in a glue trap. My rational self was paralyzed while my disgust reflex and flight response held the controls firmly, leaving me unable to even really process why I was responding like this in the first place.

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

  Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.

  Thinking about it all in retrospect, I of all people ought to have seen something like this coming. I already knew all too well that people liked to fuck with their identities on a physical level in Dilmun, and there'd been plenty of hints it didn't stop there. And outside of the context of Dilmun - hell, even disregarding anything personal - I had plenty of evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, that humans just did this sort of thing when they could. Just the other day, when Ptolema had told me about the Magilum, I'd been thinking about all the different ways people presented themselves on the logic sea, and how the Domains here reminded me of that with their total lack of personal consequences.

  More than that, though, I thought broadly about the idea of persona-crafting all the time. How people wrought different versions of themselves for different social groups, which was basically just this except, like Nora said, limited by social and physical constraints. Hell, I said the stupid thing about never knowing another person to myself practically every day!

  And yet, and yet! This revelation felt profane to me. The idea that everyone here, that all the people I'd seen, were not only thinking about all this, doing all this, but treating it all so casually. That everyone was in on it.

  In on what? My self-awareness managed to squeeze in the thought.

  I didn't know, exactly, but 'it' assuredly felt dirty, somehow gross in a way I wasn't used to feeling, like my hand was stuck in an ant's nest and couldn't get out. It crossed some line that nothing else strange about Dilmun crossed, some deep-seated idea about how the world was supposed to work.

  Or, no, that's not it. Rather, it felt as though something deeply personal, something which was supposed to be contained in myself, had suddenly burst open, and now was spilling its juices around wantonly. I kept thinking back to that girl I'd seen in Bardiya's apartment. Intellectually, I knew; there wasn't, when push came to shove, a human alive who wasn't at least a little curious about the idea of being the opposite gender. It didn't per-se mean anything deep that profoundly contradicted my extant understanding of him; after such an unfathomably long time, even someone straight-laced would be tempted to, as she'd put it, 'experiment'. Nora was absolutely right; Chances were, I'd been making more out of it then was really there.

  But. If I'd met Bardiya like that, in that form... and hadn't known the context, what would I have thought? I wouldn't have figured anything was strange. That would just be my idea of that person.

  And that was the case for everyone here. They could all be just, well-- Faking! That wasn't the right word, but it was the only one I could think of. Faking.

  And everyone just accepted it! Encouraged it! How could something so ridiculous become not just done, but a cultural institution? There needed to be rules! If talent, history, and society didn't mean anything, you needed to at least be able to find stability in others! When you saw someone, talked to them, it had to mean something! There had to be sincerity, something concrete at the ground level of what people expected from one another. There had to be!

  This world-- It was twisted. Grotesque!

  My resonator hummed as I continued to dry heave, now slumped against the rocks in an attempt to make myself feel less faint. I reached weakly for it, glancing at the reflective surface.

  alma: hey su sorry about that

  alma: had some stupid drama to take care of, got a bit out of hand

  alma: i'm done now so i can come get you whenever if you haven't headed back already

  alma: are you there

  I grimaced. Ptolema. Why hadn't she told me about this sooner? The obvious answer was that she'd thought it would be too overwhelming, but I'd been bumming around her place now for nearly a week. There'd been a glut of time for slow and careful conversations.

  My mindset turned conspiratorial. What if she had a different motivation? She'd told me her name was 'alma' on this because of some historical reference, but that could easily just be a lie. She probably had her own completely separate identity too. She was out for hours every day. What if she had another self, and it was someone completely different from the Ptolema I knew? And she was concerned how that would impact my impression of her?

  What if she wasn't even Ptolema any more? What if all our interactions had been some kind of weird roleplay? Nothing was sacred here. Nothing!

  I stuffed the thing back in my pocket. I couldn't even look at it right now, let alone talk to her. Talk to anyone. It just kept hitting me over and over-- How could I even live in this world, now?

  Despite still feeling like I could retch again at any moment, I spontaneously decided on a rather stupid course of action. I levitated back into the void, flying for several minutes until I was a significant distance from any structure - further, I realized, then I'd ever actually gone before. The Valley and the City were only vague blobs on the horizon; if I'd kept at it for much longer, I could have got lost, assuming that was even possible.

  I wasn't thinking about that, though. "I need help," I said, which was perhaps a truer statement in this moment than it had been at any point thus far.

  As expected, within a moment, the neutron star-eyed woman appeared before, instantly annoyed. "Ugh, it's you again."

  "I've found--" My voice hitched as I realized some slime was still in my throat. I shuddered a little, swallowing. "I've found something that breaks the rule you explained."

  She raised an eyebrow. "Eh?"

  "'No one's identity can be transmundanely compromised,'" I recited. "You said that tenet is in place even now, and that's why you can't create a tertiary from a copy of yourself. Right?"

  "I sincerely hope you didn't call me out here just to have me repeat something I already said," she spoke threateningly, although her tone didn't actually succeed in being particularly threatening. "I should be very annoyed!" Suddenly, her expression seemed to shift slightly, and she sniffed the air. "Oh god, what's that scent?"

  "I called you out here because you acted like it was some kind of immutable absolute," I explained, then gestured towards the distant landmasses in this distance. "But out there, people are flouting that rule openly."

  "You stink like death!" She pinched her nose, wafting the air in front of her. "What have you been doing, crawling through a sewer? Actually, don't answer that."

  "People are constantly 'transmundanely compromising' their identities. Using the Power to change how they look on a massive scale. How does that not fall foul of the rule?"

  She squinted. "What are you even going on about?" Her voice was rendered nasally, becoming even more reminiscent of Kamrusepa in the process.

  "People are changing their identities!" I reiterated, my voice taking on the quality of an overly-aggrieved parent worked up about the latest moral panic. "Becoming different people!"

  "No they're not."

  "Yes, they are!" I pointed. "They have a whole device for it in the middle of the City!"

  "You're talking about the habit people have of shape-changing?" She asked, the wafting hand dropping to her side in affected incredulity. "That's what this is about?"

  "I'm talking about the habit people have of shifting their entire selves," I said. "Assuming entirely different roles."

  The woman stared at me for several moments like I was a wet raccoon she'd discovered in her porch, an expression that straddled the line between condescending pity and outright contempt. Finally, she broke into a melodramatic sigh, her arms flopping to her sides.

  "Meet me back in your Domain," she instructed quickly. "And for heaven's sake, reset your body on your way. The odor of your spew is not a memory for which I have developed any nostalgia." Following this, she abruptly vanished.

  I frowned, once again feeling annoyed by how rude she was being, but obeyed. My clothes and hair flickered back to normal, and the faint taste of acid vanished from my mouth. A moment's concentration later, and the distant landmarks of the Crossroads vanished, replaced by the humble little half-built structure and pool I'd created for myself the other day.

  The Playwright was waiting for me there, already impatient and tapping her foot. She approached the slab she'd left containing the rules on my last visit and summoned a pointing stick into her hand, taking on the affect of a school teacher.

  "I once again have pressing prior engagements, so we'll need to get this done quickly," she said, in the tone of someone who didn't actually have any prior engagements. "Let's get right into it and talk terminology."

  She tapped the stick against the stone. There was a grinding noise, and chunks of gravel fell to the ground as new words formed at the bottom of the tablet, beneath the final rule we'd been discussing just a few moments earlier.

  10.A) 'IDENTITY' IS DEFINED AS A CONTINUOUS, UNALTERED, AND UNIQUE CONSCIOUSNESS BELONGING TO A SPECIFIC BODY

  "Though it may be a great inconvenience to me, since I've been charged with babysitting you as you stumble your way back to some vestige of understanding of the situation, there's a misunderstanding I need to clear up posthaste." She looked at me severely. "A moment ago, you used the term 'role' interchangeably with the term 'self'. And that--" she swung the stick from side to side, causing it to snap sharply against the wall, "--was a no-no. Very confusing for the audience."

  "I didn't realize you could just... make new rules up." I said, as I started getting a sense of deja vu from our last conversation. "And what audience?"

  "I'm speaking conceptually. And it's a clarification, not a new rule." She cleared her throat pointedly, then continued: "Now, the issue is that both of those concepts are rather central to the narrative of the production. All throughout, people have been dropping the word 'role' left and right. And while it's not strictly part of the rules - or you might even say it's deliberately omitted for a reason - it has a strict meaning that shouldn't be muddied." She narrowed her eyes. "So let me spell it for you. I'll go slowly, so there's no chance of a misunderstanding,"

  She pointed the stick towards my forehead. I looked at the tip for some reason, probably going slightly cross-eyed.

  "As the addendum to the rule specifies," she said, and prodded me, "the word 'identity', in this context, refers largely to self-identity. Your self-awareness, and the physical medium that hosts it. How you choose to behave is a much more fluid concept that has ultimately no bearing-- It's all about what's behind your massive forehead."

  "I don't have a massive forehead," I protested.

  "When it comes to the body, all that is relevant for the purposes of the rule is the link between the two is never definitively broken." She prodded me again, this time in the side of the neck. "Beyond that, anything else is merely a change in assumed behavior. In role. Allow me to illustrate."

  She conjured three large sheets of thick parchment her free hand. The first - at the front - was labelled FIG. 1, and depicted an adult man making what appeared to be a ':3' face, his hands held up like paws.

  "First scenario! We have a man pretending to be a cat." She narrowed her eyes. "Obviously, this does not constitute a compromise of identity. Any goofus can do that."

  She threw the sheet aside, revealing a second one. This was labelled FIG. 2, and showed a man in an elaborate orange cat costume striking the same pose.

  "Second scenario! A man disguised as a cat. Once again, this does not constitute a compromise of identity."

  I found myself nodding along. The whiplash of the last several minutes was absolutely obscene, but I was still so worked up from what had happened that all I felt was indignant urgency.

  She once again threw the sheet aside, revealing a third, obviously labelled FIG. 3. This time, it was a bit more complicated, depicting a man sitting on the floor with a feral expression. What looks like a swinging pendulum is depicted over his head.

  "Third scenario! A man has been brainwashed to believe he's a cat. While this does constitute a compromise of identity, it is not transmundane in nature. Ergo, it does not fall afoul of the rule.

  Sheet dropped, FIG. 4. The same man with a feral expression, but this time the image above his head depicted a brain with cat ears.

  "Fourth scenario! A man's consciousness has been replaced - or fused, who cares - with that of a cat. Finally, this is a clear-cut transmundane compromise of identity."

  FIG. 5, the most complicated so far, depicting a man's brain being lifted out of his skull and placed in an orange cat.

  "Fifth scenario! A man's consciousness is removed and placed in a cat. Because the mind-body relationship is undermined, this again constitutes a transmundane compromise of identity." Her face flickered, her expression briefly becoming more contemplative. "Can you imagine if someone really did that? Wouldn't that be fucked up?" She shrugged.

  FIG. 6. Similar to the last one, except this time with three images connected by arrows. The first showed a normal man, the second a puff of smoke, and the third a large orange cat.

  "Penultimately, sixth scenario! A man transformed into a cat. Because the mind-body relationship remains intact, though the event is transmundane, this does not constitute--"

  "Hold on," I cut in. "Why would that not count?"

  The Playwright looked irritated by me interrupting her explanation. "I just said. The mind-body relationship is not undermined."

  "But it's functionally the same result," I told her. "The whole body ends up replaced."

  She scoffed as if appalled by my ignorance. "Yes, but imagine where that sort of thinking could take us. Where would you draw the line? Would it count as transmundanely compromised if you transformed a single finger? A man, an arm?" She tutted, shaking her head. "You can't draw lines with this manner of affair. Obviously you haven't heard of the Ship of Theseus."

  My expression flattened.

  The last sheet was revealed. FIG. 7. Once again, the man was depicted alongside the orange cat with an arrow leading from the former to the latter, but this time there was a graphic depicting a brain with an 'x2' symbol.

  "Finally, to bring this back around to what we already discussed the other day and led to this ridiculous misunderstanding, the seventh and final scenario! A man's mind is copied into a cat, effectively creating the same person in two different bodies. Duplicates of the same individual! As already explained, this constitutes a transmundane compromise of identity, because the consciousness ceases to be 'unique'-- Regardless of whether the 'cat' in this scenario is an existing person being overwritten, or merely an empty vessel."

  "I thought that rule was about the whole body being copied," I commented. "Not just the mind."

  "Of course not," she scolded me. "Again, the body only matters in regard to its relationship with the mind. Otherwise, it's just a piece of meat."

  "How is 'unique' even being defined?"

  For a moment, she looked overwhelmed with theatrical frustration, and appeared to be about to blurt some sort of insult out. But then she paused, composed herself, and spoke slowly. "Let me put it this way. Under these rules, within the Sanctuary of Apsu, no mind can come into existence that contains cognitive information possessed in an identical state in another, either in the present or at any point in the past." She raised an eyebrow. "Get it?"

  "I... guess."

  She sighed. "Anyway, with all that said, now we can define 'role'," she digressed, tossing the last sheet aside and pointing the stick upward. "If you've been paying a lick of attention, you ought to know this already, but a role is not who you are - your 'identity' - but rather what you do. It is the visage you wear, the part you choose to play, the meaning you construct for yourself. And also all of those things as they're assigned to you by the world. That's the whole theme." She flicked her wrist, once again pointing it at me. "So no, you're quite mistaken. Rule 10 is not being broken by the affairs you're referring to people indulging in."

  I grimaced. "So in the sanctuary, it could have all just been the work of one person shapeshifting and assuming different identities the whole time? Is that what you're saying?"

  "Of course not. That would violate rule 3. It wasn't something that existed in the Remaining World, and someone certainly can't just pull a shapeshifting power out of their ass over the course of three days." She clicked her tongue, tapping her finger. "I can't believe I've been saddled with this. You're not taking this seriously at all."

  "How can I take anything seriously, if these rules can just be stretched to mean anything?" I whined, not even truly conscious of my own words as they left my mouth. "If people can just use the Power to throw out who they are on a whim? It all feels meaningless."

  "Why are you taking such a strange tone about this-- Oh god." She lurched. "This isn't even about the mystery, is it? You've just pulled me here to play some part in a personal crisis you're having."

  I just stared at her, my face flushed.

  "I can't deal with this right now. I'm leaving," she declared immediately. "I'll give you one piece of advice-- If you want to get anywhere with this, you ought to drop your personal hangups quickly." She shook her head. "My goodness."

  And then she vanished.

  My stomach twisted into a reckless, restless knot. What was I going to do?

  Something even dumber, obviously.

  https://topwebfiction.com/listings/the-flower-that-bloomed-nowhere/ Thanks!