Why Everything Looks Like Everything

On the third day at the Academy, I discovered that my eyes hurt.

I’d been to the optometrist six months ago — vision minus one-point-five, stable, nothing new. It was the thing I was now seeing with that hurt. That organ Wei Lin talked about — dormant, nameless, located nowhere specific and simultaneously everywhere. It ached the way muscles ache after your first workout: you never noticed them before, and now they remind you of themselves with every movement — every one, literally: I couldn’t look at a glass of water without glimpsing, for a fraction of a second, its “contents” — that same packed history I’d discovered in the apple. Glass, water, table, chair, wall, my own hand — everything now had an “underlay,” and Wei Lin’s filter only dimmed it. Like window tinting on a car: you can’t see in from outside, but light still gets through, and you know there’s a city behind the glass. Except instead of a city — six floors of reality, all simultaneously staring at you through the tint.

Comforting.

— Will this go away? — I asked Wei Lin at breakfast (rice, some vegetables, tea; at the Academy you eat three times a day, and each time it’s like a monastery: quiet, focused, and without ketchup).

— No, — he answered. — But you’ll get used to it.

— To what?

— To everything having depth. Right now it’s exhausting. In a week it’ll be background noise. In a month—the norm. In a year you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

— And in seven hundred years?

— In seven hundred years you’ll stop asking questions like “in how many years.”

Fair enough.

---

The lesson was taught by Kira.

That was unexpected. Until this point I’d thought of her as a fellow student—one of the five “bugs” pulled from the system. Turns out she was something in between: student in some subjects, teacher in others. At the Academy, as I was beginning to understand, there’s no rigid teacher-student hierarchy. There are people who know one thing, and people who know another, and they’re all constantly teaching each other. Like a good lab, only without grants, peer review, and chronic funding shortages. (Then again, no coffee either. Perfection doesn’t exist.)

— Today — form, — said Kira. She stood by a table with objects laid out on it: a stone, a branch, a cup, a key, a feather. — Not the form you see. The form that makes things what they are.

— Plato, — I said. — Ideas, forms, the cave. Third-year philosophy.

— Plato was close, — Kira nodded. — But he thought forms existed “up there,” in the world of ideas. He was wrong. Forms hide inside. In every thing. Like a skeleton inside a body. You don’t see the skeleton, but it determines the shape. Remove the skeleton — and the body becomes a sack.

— Beautiful analogy, — said Artyom. In a tone that meant “I don’t care about analogies, show me the data.”

— Then—data, — said Kira. And for the first time, I saw her work.

Picking up an ordinary gray, river-smooth stone from the table and placing it on her palm, she closed her eyes.

For thirty seconds nothing happened. Then—I don’t know what she did, but the air around her hand became... denser. On the first floor I didn’t see anything unusual. But with that organ that had been aching since morning, I felt it: something had changed. As if Kira had clicked “show hidden files” on reality’s desktop.

— This stone is a hundred and twenty million years old, — she said. Eyes closed. Voice—even, like a news anchor reading the weather. — Basalt. Magmatic origin. It was part of a lava flow that surfaced in the area now called Armenia. It lay on a riverbed for three hundred and twenty thousand years. Water shaped it. Seventeen thousand years ago a glacier moved it. Then—the river again. Then—a person. It was picked up from the shore four years ago. A man, about sixty. He had a dog.

She opened her eyes. Set the stone back down.