Immortals Who Don't Care

The next day I met an immortal. And felt sorry for him.

Met him on the fourth floor of the stack. In a space that isn’t a space, because it has no coordinates, only presence. Like a smell: you can’t say where it is, you can only say that it’s there.

Wei Lin brought me there that morning. No warning. (I’d noticed: the more important the lesson, the fewer warnings. The most serious things at the Academy happen without preamble. Like in life: heart attacks don’t send notifications.)

—Today, he said, —you will see what you could become.

—God? I asked. (After “Earth is a project,” irony is the only thing I have left. Like a toothbrush: basic mental hygiene.)

—No. Worse.

“Worse than God.” I tried to imagine what that could be. Couldn’t. Imagination is a powerful tool, but it has a limit: it works with what you already know. And I didn’t know.

---

He removed my filter. Partially. Like a door cracked open: enough to peek, not enough to walk through. (Or—enough to walk through, not enough to walk back. With doors in the stack, like with rabbit holes, you figure out which direction you’re going after you’ve jumped.)

I saw.

No. “Saw” is the wrong word. I detected a presence. The way you detect someone in a dark room: not by sound, not by smell, not by air moving — by something deeper, by the feeling that the space is occupied and there’s extra volume in it.

He was enormous. Perceptually (he had no physical size, the way a number has no length). The scale of his presence was such that I felt like a fly on the wall of a skyscraper: not small, but incommensurable. When the difference in scale reaches a certain threshold, “small” stops being a description. You’re not “small” compared to him. You’re a different unit of measurement.

(The thing that lived in Wei Lin’s black stone was curious. This one had nothing. That one had something like interest—in your species, in your capabilities. This one—nothing. At all. Like a wall: it doesn’t look at you, doesn’t ignore you, doesn’t know about you. It just stands there. And you’re on the other side.)

—Who is that? I asked, very quietly. (My voice dropped on its own in that moment, without any decision on my part — the way it drops in a forest the second the body realizes, ahead of the head, that off to the side, in a darkness the eye can’t map, stands a mass before which your human speech is the scrape of a match on a boot sole, and the only thing that might still divert that mass’s attention for another thirty seconds is to slip down to a volume at which the ordinary sounds of the forest are reliably louder than you.)

—We call him the Seventh, Wei Lin said. Also quietly. —Or the Heptarch. He’s an administrator. Maintains the render within a radius of... he made a gesture that I suspected indicated a scale that didn’t fit in human language. ...the planetary system.

—Maintains the render.

—Keeps the physical layer stable. Makes sure the laws of physics don’t “leak.” That gravity stays gravity, time stays time, light stays light. Without him, all of it would dissolve. Like an image without a graphics card.

—He’s the sysadmin of the universe, I said.

Wei Lin looked at me. Shadow of a smile.

—Essentially—yes.