God's Rough Draft

After the rewrite, they gave me three days — why, they didn’t explain: just three days of freedom from lessons and from Wei Lin with his explanations, the kind that usually make you want to lie down and never get up. Three days of silence, during which, for the first time in twenty-eight years, I stopped counting — the cracks in the ceiling, the percentages of coherence, the particles of memory; counting let go of me first, and everything else was still holding on.

On the fourth day Wei Lin came, sat on the step, and the standard configuration reassembled itself — tea, Schrodinger on his knees, — only now it was tuned half a tone below the usual.

— There’s one thing, — he said. — An old one. Finish it — and go.

— What thing?

— Close the passage on the clearing.

---

We walked there together. The passage was narrow — the way I’d left it after the exam. A thin slit in the November air, through which, if you looked right, you could see the second floor: fractals repeating themselves at every scale. Beautiful and deserted — the toothbrush in the backpack weighed more.

— How do I close it?

— Three ways. First — seal it. Stitch the threads, tighten the fold. In a hundred years this will be a thin spot again, but a hundred years is a hundred years.

— Second?

— Bury it. Layer causality on top, so dense that no perception could reach through. Hiero would choose the second.

— Third?

Pause. Wei Lin was looking at the slit, not at me.

— Third — an anchor. Leave the passage open with a lock that no one can turn — not me, not the Heptarch, not whoever comes here in seven hundred years with my tea and my patience.

— How?

— With a signature. Someone else’s signature — inserted into a loop — keeps the door from closing. As long as the signature is intact, the door stays open. Finding it is impossible if it’s distributed.

— Whose signature?

— That’s no longer up to me.

---

I understood before he finished. Physicist. I see recursion.

Inside me was Mom’s signature. The part that transferred when I was seven. The slippers in the hallway — that was her scent, but now I know: scent is first floor. On the fourth — the signature. On day seven at the Academy, Wei Lin said: “She’s inside you. That’s yours now, not hers. Deal closed.” Back then it sounded like an inheritance. Now — like an invoice.

— If I give it to the door, — I said, — what happens to me?

— The signature is yours. Entirely. After the rewrite — especially yours. You’re its owner. What you do with it — is what happens.

— That’s not an answer.

— That’s respect.

(Respect. A good word — and here, as I was beginning to understand, it meant something literal: Wei Lin refused to tell me what to do and paid for that refusal with his own patience, a resource which, by my observations, is not unlimited in him, however much he pretends.)

— What disappears?

Wei Lin thought. Seven hundred years of experience — one second of courtesy.

— Her — inside. The smell of slippers will stay: first floor, that’s memory. The photograph on the kitchen shelf will stay. But the warm thing you feel when you think of her for no reason — that will go. Because she will go. Out of you. Into the door.

— And she consents?

— You are her. You are her continuation. The consent is yours.