The Choice

9 hours ago

22 min read

Halloween Fun · part 1 of 3. Like everything in the IgoUverse, this piece is subject to change.

Or, The Game of Gods (Rules Subject to Change)

This is a work of fiction, along with some musings by the author. Any resemblance to the end of the world, living or otherwise, is the reader’s own doing.

I should tell you how to read this before we start, because it isn’t a book, exactly. It’s more like a television show. The old kind. The Twilight Zone, something along those lines, where every week was a different story and the only thread holding them together was a certain feeling, and a man explaining things in a calm voice while something went quietly wrong behind him.

The IgoUverse is a chain like that. A collection. Scattered pieces. Right now you’d practically have to scour the internet to find the scraps and put them in order, and even then you’d be guessing at the gaps.

At the moment, I’ll admit, it’s fairly complete.

That’s about to change.

Because it’s going to splinter. It’s going to fracture. We’ll get to that. It’s not an accident and it isn’t a mistake. A fracture, in this particular story, is the whole point. But I’m getting ahead of myself, which is the one thing a narrator is specifically not supposed to do.

Here’s the trouble with a story like this.

Most storytellers get to save things. The goal, the happy ending, the big reveal, whatever everybody’s secretly working toward the entire time. You keep it in your pocket until the last page, and then you pull it out, and the trick lands because nobody saw it coming. That’s the deal you make with a reader. Be patient, and I’ll pay you at the end.

But I’m not telling that kind of story. I’m telling a never-ending one. And in a never-ending story there is no last page to pay you from. So you have to scatter the drama differently. A little suspense here. A little dread there. Hopefully at roughly the right moments, though I make no promises, because I’m doing this in the now, and the now has never once consulted me about its timing.

So that’s all I’m really trying to do here. Put the dread in the right place.

A quick note on where we are, for anyone just wandering in.

The Dreamer is awake. That’s one part of the story — J’s part, a dream I’ve been cooking up for about forty-five years. There are four chapters of it now. People can read those.

Then there’s Bishop. Bishop is a different part of the dream. Also about forty-five years old. Also mine. But different, and I’d be lying if I said he was the friendly one.

And then there’s the Game of Gods. Forty-two timelines. For that one I have, at the time of writing, essentially nothing. A title. A shape. A bad feeling. A lot of circles.

Which, if you’ve read The Crossing, you’ll recognize as roughly how everything in here begins.

Now, as it happens, I’ve been writing this over a few strange days. You half-listen to the news the way everyone does now, and somebody says something about Moab, or wherever it was, and you go over a couple of the details, and a little voice in the back of your head says, oh. Okay. That sounds like the apocalypse.

And then you catch yourself, and you calm down, because it always sounds a bit like the apocalypse, and it very rarely is.

But it got me thinking, the way these things do. Because I still haven’t worked out the physics. The three-body problem, as I’ve come to call it, for reasons that are about to become either clear or considerably worse.

I’ll say this part plainly, because somebody always asks. I’m an atheist. A pretty relaxed one, but an atheist. I’m not here to scare anybody into anything or sell tickets to a rapture. It’s just that, as stories go, the end of the world is a tremendously good one, and I’d like to write about it.

And honestly — three interstellar comets, and that still wasn’t considered enough notice?

Come on.

Let’s talk about the Choice.

One · The Choice

In The Crossing, I tried to describe a moment. The thin edge where everything that might happen becomes the single thing that did. Possibility on one side. History on the other. You, standing right on the line, turning one into the other, whether you meant to or not.

That’s the Crossing. The moment.

This is about what you do while you’re standing in it.

Because here’s the thing I kept circling back to, and I do mean circling. The Crossing happens to you. You don’t get a vote on the fact that time keeps converting your present into your past. It’s going to do that regardless of your opinion, your mood, or whether you’ve had enough coffee.

But the Choice is the part that’s yours.

I went back to the oldest version we still tell. Two brothers. One kills the other. I talked about it last time, so I won’t drag us all the way through it again, except for the one piece that still won’t leave me alone.

The important part was never that one brother killed the other.

It’s that he could choose to.

He could sit there, in the now, holding every possible outcome in his hands like a pair of dice that hadn’t landed yet, understand perfectly well that another outcome was available, and pick the wrong one anyway. On purpose. That’s not instinct. Instinct doesn’t deliberate. That’s something newer and far more dangerous than a hungry animal.

That’s a creature that can choose.

And I’ve come to think that’s the thing the old stories were actually trying to describe, back before anybody had the vocabulary for it. Not a rule. Not a sin with a filing number. Just the terrible, magnificent fact that somewhere along the line, a pile of atoms woke up enough to decide.

You can build a whole universe on that. I’m going to try.

The ending, by the way, isn’t the interesting part. I said that last time too, and I meant it. The choices are. So if you’re reading this hoping I’ll tell you how it all turns out, I’d gently suggest you’re here for the wrong reason, and that you’ll have more fun if you let that go.

Two · A Triangle, Some Circles, and a Very Large Problem

Let me try to draw you the Game of Gods. Bear with me, because I’m doing it in words, and it’s really a picture, and I’m not entirely sure the two of us are going to survive the translation.

Start with a triangle.

That triangle is our reality. The now. And the important, slightly unsettling part is that we’re not looking at it from outside, the way you’re looking at the word triangle on this page. We’re inside it. We live in the middle of it, going about our business, paying our bills, assuming the walls are just the way things are.

On each side of the triangle, there are nine circles.

Forty-two. Everybody.

I’m not going to explain that the way a mathematician would, partly because I like how it sounds and partly because, as I’ve mentioned, math is not my department. If the numbers don’t sit still for you, good. They don’t entirely sit still for me either, and I built the thing.

Now. Outside the circles, out past the edge of everything the triangle contains, there’s a bigger circle. In the real science there’s a word that’s close enough to borrow — a Lagrange point, one of those strange balanced spots out in space where the forces cancel and a thing can just sit, held in place by everything pulling on it at once.

In here, that big outer circle is Monad.

Monad is the one with nothing above it. The monarchy with no king over the king. All of it. Breathing. Compressing.

And that word compressing is the one I want you to hold on to, because it’s going to matter a great deal in a few pages, and I’d rather you noticed it now, quietly, than have me shout it at you later.

So that’s the board. A triangle we live inside. Nine circles a side. Forty-two. And Monad on the outside, breathing in.

Three sides. Three things in tension, all pulling on each other, none of them willing to settle. Which, if you know the term, is the three-body problem. In physics it’s the embarrassing little fact that you can perfectly predict two objects orbiting each other forever, but add a third, and the whole thing becomes, mathematically, a nightmare. No clean solution. Just circles inside circles that never quite repeat.

I didn’t pick that name to sound clever. I picked it because that’s honestly what it feels like inside my own head when I try to hold all three of these stories at once. Three bodies. Spinning. Refusing to resolve.

Circle, circle, circle.

You remember that one.

Three · On Needing a Guide, and the Reverse Deal With the Devil

When things start spinning like that — circle, circle, circle, three bodies and no solution — I’ve found you need a guide. Everybody does, eventually. It’s one of the few pieces of advice I’ll hand out for free, and I’ll even throw in the catch.

Here’s what everyone assumes about guides. You assume a guide shows up, snaps his fingers, pays off your debts, fixes your problem, and then owns you. That’s the shape of every story we’ve ever been told about getting help. Somebody pays your way, and now you owe them, with interest, and the interest is the whole point, and you spend the rest of your life painting their house.

So nobody asks for help. Because help, in the stories, always comes with interest.

You’ve heard the versions. A man at a crossroads, a contract, a signature, and a devil who collects. We love that story. We tell it constantly. I don’t believe a word of it, for the record, but it’s a good one.

My guide isn’t like that.

The deal, when I finally understood it, was backward.

He won’t touch your debt. That’s the first surprise, and it’s a disappointing one, because touching your debt is precisely what you came for. He won’t pay a cent of it. What he does instead is show you how to pay it off yourself. Healthy ways. Slow ways. The unglamorous arithmetic of actually digging out. And I’ll be honest, it’s a lot of work. It’s a pain in the ass. It is nobody’s idea of a rescue.

But here’s the part that got me. If you take the suggestions — actually do the boring, irritating things he points you toward — things start to work out. Not overnight. Not with a thunderclap. Just a little more room each week than you had the week before. And if you don’t take them, nothing happens. Nothing at all. The debt sits exactly where it was. Life goes on, more or less, the way it always has, which is its own kind of answer.

And if you stop listening altogether, quit taking the suggestions for long enough, he might simply stop being your guide. No argument. No lecture. He’s just not there the next time, and things quietly quit working out. The circles start spinning again. Slowly. It never happens fast. It’s like the black holes in this very story — you don’t notice them at first, not for the longest time, and then slowly you do. And the trouble with slowly is that light still travels pretty fast.

That’s the reversed contract. In the old story, the devil fixes your problem on the spot and the bill comes due forever, with interest, and the interest was always the point. In this one, the guide flatly refuses to fix your problem. He makes you fix it, the long honest way, and asks for nothing in return except that you keep showing up and keep listening. The devil sells you a shortcut. The guide sells you the stairs.

A lot of the suggestions are smaller than money, anyway. Keep the lies from piling up, for one — the little white ones, the harmless ones, the ones that grease an awkward afternoon. Left alone they tilt the floor under you, just slightly, downhill, until every possibility in front of you sits a little farther uphill than it ought to. He notices that sort of thing. He points at it. Then he leaves it to you.

A guide isn’t a therapist, mind you. I didn’t want one of those; that felt like admitting something. Nobody knows J better than J does, and he’ll be the first to tell you so, usually right before he’s proven wrong.

And a guide, crucially, is not a god. We’ll get to that too. I keep a list.

Four · Prizm Thinks You’ve Got It Backward

Now I have to let Prizm talk for a minute, because he’s been pacing.

If you’re new, Prizm is a problem I haven’t solved on purpose. A character, a narrator, a future version of somebody, possibly the person who’s been telling you all of this while wearing my name like a coat. I’m not clearing that up. A little uncertainty is healthy, and Prizm would object anyway.

Here’s what Prizm wants on the record.

The scientists, he says, have the black holes wrong. Not the math — the math is fine, the math is always fine. The direction.

They think the black holes are leaving. Drifting off, out, away, the universe spreading thin and cold and lonely until everything’s too far from everything else to matter.

Prizm says it’s the opposite.

They’re not leaving. The reason we’re seeing them now, the reason they’re suddenly showing up in the data, in the images, in the careful measurements of very serious people, is that they’re getting closer.

Remember Monad. Breathing. Compressing.

The universe breathes out, and then it breathes in again. I said that in The Crossing and made it sound rather peaceful, a cosmic ball bouncing gently through eternity. Prizm would like to amend the tone. Breathing in is only peaceful if you’re the one doing the breathing. If you’re the air, it’s something else.

Whether he’s right is beside the point, and anyway he’s fictional, and anyway I made him up, and anyway you’d be amazed how often that last defense fails to comfort me at two in the morning.

But you can see why it changes the story. A universe coming apart is a tragedy you can take your time with. A universe coming back together — closing — is a deadline.

Five · Everybody’s Favorite Ending, Under Several Names

Humanity has a lot of names for the deadline. We’ve been naming it for as long as we’ve been able to dread, which is to say, for as long as we’ve been able to choose, which is to say, from the start.

Armageddon. Ragnarok. The one I keep tripping over, the big bright Christian one with all the spring in it — the Great and Holy Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, Resurrection Sunday. And the older spring word underneath it, Ostara, or Ostern, or Eostre, or whatever the one with the egg is. I genuinely don’t know how to spell it and I’m not going to pretend I do.

I find it interesting, and I say this as the resident atheist, that the end of the world and the return of spring keep getting filed under the same holiday. The worst day and the best day wearing the same coat. As if whoever built these stories couldn’t quite decide whether the end was a door slamming or a door opening, and finally shrugged and said, both, write down both.

That shrug is the most honest thing in any of it, if you ask me.

Because that’s the move. Every one of these stories takes the exact same event — everything ends — and splits on a single question. Is it the worst thing that could happen, or is it the thing that had to happen before anything better could? Destruction, or resurrection? The ball hitting the floor, or the ball leaving it?

Nobody knows. That’s not a failure of the stories. That’s the stories being accurate about the one thing they can actually be accurate about, which is that from the inside, at the moment it happens, you cannot possibly tell the difference.

You only find out which one it was afterward.

And afterward, as we’ve established, is on the other side of the Crossing.

I don’t get to read ahead. Neither do you. Neither, for whatever it’s worth, does the guy writing this.

Six · Bishop, and a Date I Keep Having to Move

So. Bishop.

I’ve been circling him this whole time, which is appropriate, because circling is the only safe way to approach Bishop. He’s the nightmare half. The Dreamer is awake, and then the Dreamer dreams something else, and that something else has a name, and the name is Bishop, and he is coming for everyone.

Not in a cackling, cape-swirling way. I’m not interested in that. The devils that come with capes are easy; you see them coming a mile off and you get to feel brave about it. The ones worth writing about arrive dressed like a Tuesday.

For the Dreamer side of the story, I had Judgment Day pencilled in. An actual date. The thirtieth of December, this year. Nice and specific. Apocalypses play better when you can mark your calendar.

The problem is the slip.

Prizm — and I’m increasingly convinced Prizm has a little Loki in him, a little trickster who thinks rules are a suggestion — does something to the timeline. A slip. A sleight of hand. And travel like that isn’t supposed to be possible, which means the date won’t hold still, which means I keep reaching for my pencil.

Is the slip part of the three-body problem? I think so. Three bodies, no fixed solution, a date that refuses to orbit where I put it. Circle, circle, circle. It would be very like this story to make even its own ending impossible to schedule.

So I’ll say the end of this year, for the Dreamer, for now. And I’ll almost certainly move it. Which is either sloppy craftsmanship or the single most honest thing a doomsday story has ever done, and I’m choosing to believe it’s the second one, because I’m the one holding the pencil and I get to.

Nobody’s supposed to know the date. That’s rather the point of a judgment. If you knew the morning it was coming, you’d just be good that week.

Seven · The Universe Has Terrible Handwriting

Let’s go back to the comets, because they’ve been bothering me.

Three interstellar visitors. Objects from somewhere else entirely, from past the edge of our whole neighborhood, come wandering through, one after another, in a span of years so short that on any cosmic scale they practically arrived together. Things like that are supposed to be rare. Vanishingly. Once-in-a-long-while rare.

And we got three.

If this were my story — and I keep having to remind myself that it is my story, which is a strange sentence to need reminding of — I’d have called that foreshadowing. Three signs from outside the system, waving, and the system mostly argued about whether they were comets or something stranger and then went back to work.

That’s the part that unsettles me more than any apocalypse. Not that the end might be signposted. That it might be signposted clearly, in plain sight, three times over, and that we’d look right at it and reach for the mundane explanation, because the mundane explanation lets us get back to lunch.

I did it myself. You half-hear a word on the news — Moab, or wherever — and for one honest second a voice says apocalypse, and then you talk yourself down, because you always talk yourself down, because that’s the sane thing to do and nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand the sane thing is correct.

The trouble with a universe that makes corrections, though, is that the correction, from close up, looks exactly like a coincidence. Or an accident. Or a miracle, if you’re feeling generous and the light’s doing something nice.

Imagine standing in a perfectly ordinary field, having a perfectly ordinary bad day, and noticing one tiny point of blue light hanging where no light has any business being.

If you’ve read the other one, you know that field. You know the blue. You know I’m not going to explain it here.

What would you do? Take a picture. Call someone. Decide you need more sleep. Probably all three, probably in the wrong order.

And then, if the little point started pulling the snow upward, instead of letting it fall —

Well.

Then you’d finally believe the handwriting, about three seconds too late to do anything useful about it. Which is, I suspect, roughly the plan.

Eight · The One Thing Nobody Can Steal

I want to step out of the doom for a minute, because I promised myself this wouldn’t only be dread, and because there’s a thread here I actually care about more than the ending.

The most valuable thing a person can own is their ideas.

I resisted that conclusion for years, because it meant sharing, and sharing terrified me. If you have one real idea — a genuine, odd, load-bearing idea — every instinct you’ve got says to bury it. Somebody’ll steal it. Somebody’ll get there first, get the credit, get the money, and you’ll die broke having handed the world the one thing that was ever truly yours.

Think of the famous ones. The faces that became the whole image of a hard time, printed on everything, sold on everything, and the actual person behind the face dying poor and unnamed while a fortune got made off their worst afternoon. That fear is not irrational. It has excellent historical references.

But here’s the thing I finally worked out, with the guide’s help, and it changed how I hold all of this.

You can steal almost anything about a person. You can’t steal their ideas. Not really. Take Tom Brady — I don’t even know how many Super Bowls, seven, I think, the point is it’s enough. You can’t steal what made him him. The arm, the clock in his head, the specific thing that happened when the coach and the team and the ownership and the man all coalesced at the same time in the same place. We call that greatness and we pin it on the one guy who did the most visible work, but it was really a sequence. A whole machine of people clicking into alignment, and then one person pushing hardest, longest, through every branch of the probability game.

Forty-two timelines. The Game of Gods. Most of them, he’s just a guy. In a very few of them, everything lines up, and he’s the one who kept showing up to meet it.

Ideas are the same, except better, because ideas float in the ether. They’re just sitting there, available, thoughts and concepts drifting around, and you never know which person — which node — is going to reach up and pull the right one down at the right moment and actually be able to do something with it.

Somebody out there is holding the idea that cures something. They may not have the training to know what they’re holding. So if they bury it, out of the entirely reasonable fear of being robbed, it dies with them, and so does whatever it could have done.

Which is why I’ve stopped burying mine. Steal them if you like. The funny thing about the idea department is the more you try to take, the less you get. The imagination doesn’t transfer. You can have the words. The thing that made the words, you’d have to grow yourself.

So I might as well leave the light on.

Nine · No Idols. Still. Especially Now.

I made a rule last time and I’m making it again, louder, because a story about the end of the world is exactly the kind of story that breeds the thing I’m most afraid of.

No idols.

The moment you write an apocalypse, you create a vacancy. Somebody has to be the one who saw it coming. The one who understood. The prophet, the chosen one, the figure you follow instead of think about. And people will try very hard to hand that job to whoever’s standing closest when the lights change.

If this story ever has a guide in it who starts asking to be followed — worshipped, obeyed, believed on reflex — then somebody in the story should walk over and quietly take away his microphone. And if the person asking happens to be the narrator, take his too.

Especially his.

Because the whole point, the entire reason any of this matters, is that the ending needs everybody. Not one person who crosses the line first and then charges admission to the other side. Everybody, or as near to everybody as we can manage.

Someone who crosses first isn’t better than the people behind him. He’s just on the other side of the line, close enough to call back what he sees. Maybe he can describe it. Maybe he can help the next one across. Maybe he got there by pure dumb accident and is more surprised than anyone.

A guide is not a god. I built that into the guide on purpose, back in chapter three, the one who pays the debt and asks only that you keep showing up. The second he starts handing down commandments instead of asking you small odd favors, he’s stopped being a guide and started being the thing the old warning was about.

I don’t want to be on top of anything. A night out in a big city, fine, sure, woo. But at home, in my own community, the last thing on earth I want is to be looked up at. That way lies the pyramid, and I have no interest in the point of it.

The goal is understanding, not obedience.

Write that one on the wall, if you’re going to write any of it down.

Ten · The Titans Are the Ones in the Corner

Here’s a piece that only showed up because I was paying attention to how I have to work.

I don’t build these stories the way most people would. My wiring sends me the long way around nearly everything, and I’ve stopped treating that as a flaw to apologize for. It’s a puzzle I get to solve differently, and solving it the long way is how I ended up doing any of this at all. I don’t want pity about it. Pity is just a polite way of looking away.

Which brought me to the Dreamers.

You know the scene. There’s a person off in the corner of the room — a chair, a condition, a difference people can see — and everyone gives them a wide, gentle berth, a soft look, and absolutely no conversation. Not out of cruelty. Out of a kind of frightened politeness. You imagine yourself in that chair and you flinch, and the flinch keeps you three feet away.

But I don’t think that’s what they want. I don’t think it’s what anyone wants.

Here’s the part I believe, as much as I believe anything in a book I’m making up as I go. The more the world takes off the table, the bigger the dream gets. The person with the least room to move is very often the one with the most sky in their head. Shrink the outside, and the inside has to expand to hold everything that didn’t fit.

So in the IgoUverse, the Dreamers aren’t the ones you help across out of charity. They’re the titans. The real ones. The biggest imaginations in the whole machine, sitting quietly in the exact corner everybody’s too embarrassed to walk into.

That’s not a sweet thing I’m saying to be nice. It’s structural. If ideas float in the ether and you never know which node will catch the one that matters, then a mind the world has forced to live almost entirely in there, in the ether, is not a mind you want to leave alone in a corner.

That’s a mind you want awake.

That’s what the whole thing is for, underneath the circles and the comets and the dread. A place where the corner of the room is the head of the table, and everybody’s finally, actually even. Not a game. More like a mirror. One where nobody’s disability and nobody’s face gets a vote on their worth.

I don’t have it built yet. I have a website with the lights on and a bad feeling about December. But that’s the dream the rest of it is scaffolding for, and I’d rather say it out loud, badly, now, than perfectly, never.

Eleven · Why It Has to Fracture

I told you at the start it was going to splinter, and I’ve made you wait, which was the whole trick, so thank you for that.

Here’s why the fracture isn’t a failure.

Right now the IgoUverse is nearly whole, and a whole thing, a single clean line of story, has exactly one shape. It can only mean the thing it already means. There’s no room in it. Lovely, finished, closed. A recording.

And I said in The Crossing what I think of recordings. A universe where everything’s decided in advance doesn’t leave any room for the Crossing at all. You’d just be watching. And where’s the fun in that.

So it fractures. On purpose. The one clean line breaks into forty-two, and the Game of Gods is what you call it once it has. Not a single story anymore but a board of them, each circle a timeline, each timeline a version where the dice landed another way. One where Bishop comes on the thirtieth. One where the slip holds and he never arrives. One where the guy in the field calls somebody, and one where he just takes the picture, and one where the blue light was only ever a trick of a tired eye and the whole thing was weather.

All of them real possibilities. Only some of them history.

This is not the multiverse with the goatee version of you, to be clear. I don’t much like that one. Here there’s still only one line that actually happened. The other forty-one were genuinely possible and genuinely didn’t. That’s the part that keeps the Choice worth anything. If every road gets driven by some other you, your particular turn of the wheel stops mattering, and I refuse to build a universe where choosing is just bookkeeping.

The fracture is how a finished thing gets its room back.

It’s also, I’ll admit, how a man who hasn’t worked out the physics buys himself forty-two chances to be right about at least one of them.

We all have our methods.

Twelve · Who’s Telling You This, Exactly

You’ve assumed, this whole time, that it’s me telling you this. The narrator. Day job, too many notebooks, a pencil he keeps using to move the apocalypse around.

You’re right. Mostly.

But row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. We hand that to children and never once flinch at the last line. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily — life is but a dream.

What if it’s true. What if every one of us is a dreamer, rowing along, dead certain we’re awake.

That’s the question the first book is built on, and it has a title that gives the game away if you’re paying attention. The Dreamer Is Awake. Once you start asking it, it gets very hard to say for sure who’s narrating anything. Including this.

There’s the man typing. There’s J, who dreamed it first, decades before a word of it got written down. There’s Bishop, who is also a dream, and who may be dreaming a little of this himself from the wrong end of it. There’s Prizm, who keeps making everything sound like it was always going to happen, and who moved the date, and who I’m no longer certain works for me.

And there’s you. Reading this right now, in your now, adding your own interpretation to the pile, which means you’re in it too. You were the moment you started. A little of it comes with you. I did warn you about the gravity.

How many stories are happening here? One? Three? Forty-two?

Depends entirely on where you’re standing.

And I’d be deeply suspicious of any narrator who claimed to know exactly what the Game of Gods means. Even this one.

Especially this one.

Thirteen · The Choice, One More Time, and Then I Really Do Have to Go

So let me put it back where I found it.

The Crossing is the moment. It happens to you, with you, through you, whether you’re watching or not. The now keeps turning possibility into history, and it does not care in the slightest whether you approve.

The Choice is the one part of the whole arrangement that’s actually yours.

And I’ve spent this entire piece threatening you with an ending — Bishop, the thirtieth, the breathing-in, the black holes getting closer, the universe doing its terrible handwriting across the sky three comets at a time — so let me be clear about the one thing I actually believe underneath all of it.

The ending being near, if it even is, doesn’t make the choice smaller. It makes it the only thing of any size left.

If there were a god in here — and I’m the atheist, remember, so take this as a story and not a sermon — the interesting version wouldn’t be the one with the power to decide everything. It’d be the one who could decide everything and specifically, deliberately, didn’t. Who knew every roll of the dice and refused to force a single one. Who built a creature that could choose, and then — this is the part that would take real nerve — let it.

That’s a terrible way to run a universe. I’ve said so. If it were me I’d want a committee, a review process, somebody from accounting signing off before we let the thing that can commit murder also commit everything else.

But it might be the only arrangement that leaves the Choice meaning anything at all.

A universe that knows every possibility. A fracture coming that breaks it into forty-two. A character in a field who has no idea what he’s supposed to do. And one possibility that slipped the calculations and came back wearing a small point of blue light.

What happens next is a choice. His. Mine. Yours. The now’s got room for all three, which is a tighter fit than it sounds, and it never lasts, and that’s exactly why it counts.

Anyway. The phone’s ringing. Something in the ordinary world needs a report, and the printer is, I’d put money on it, out of paper.

The world may be ending on a date I keep having to move. The printer is out of paper now.

That’s the Choice, too. Go deal with the paper. Come back to the ending later. It’ll keep.

It always does.

Choose well. Or choose badly, and make it a good story.

Either way, something crosses over.

And around we go.