The Crossing

5 days ago

31 min read

Or, Infinity Times Three (Give or Take a Universe)

Here’s a thought.

The universe is big.

Now, I know that’s not exactly groundbreaking stuff. We’ve got telescopes, physicists, and people who can calculate things with numbers I can’t even pronounce. We have pictures of galaxies so far away that their light left home before Earth got around to making anything interesting.

And yet, I suspect we’re still thinking too small.

People like the word infinity. It’s a good word. You can say it and generally get away with not explaining anything else.

But try infinity times three.

Sounds bigger, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t make mathematical sense the way I’m using it, but neither does most of what goes through my head before lunch.

And that’s where I’d like to begin. Not at the beginning of the universe, mind you. That would be a ridiculous place to start. We’d be here all afternoon, and I have to get back to work.

Let’s start with a circle.

Actually, a circle inside another circle, and both of those inside something that might not be a circle at all, except if you turn it sideways, squint a little, and stop insisting that everything has to fit inside three dimensions.

Now you’ve got the general idea.

Welcome to the IgoUverse.

And yes, you’re in it now.

That probably needs explaining. The IgoUverse is the universe I’ve been building in my head for about forty years. It’s where my stories live. And here’s the funny thing about stories: once you’ve read one, a little piece of it lives in your head too. You can’t unread it. So by reading this far, you’ve already stepped a little way into my world.

Think of it like gravity. Get close enough to something big and it starts to pull on you. Nothing dramatic. You can put this down anytime you like. But a little of it will probably come with you.

I should warn you that I haven’t decided exactly where we’re going.

But we are going somewhere right now.

A quick map before we set off. What follows is a handful of little stories: a chatbot that forgot everything, an old work computer, two brothers, a pair of dice, a lottery ticket, a website with the lights on. They might look unrelated. They’re all about the same thing: how a possibility becomes something real, and what we do in the short moment in between.

I call that moment the Crossing.

One · The Crossing

Imagine, for a moment, that life is a crossing.

Not a journey from point A to point B. We’ve done that one to death. Every self-help book in history has apparently discovered that life is a journey, and most of them want to sell you a map.

No, something stranger.

I’m going to borrow a picture from physics. A black hole has an edge called the event horizon. It’s the point of no return. Once something crosses it, there’s no coming back out. Not even light can escape. If you’ve seen Interstellar, you’ve seen a movie version of one: the black hole with the glowing ring around it.

Physicists mean something very specific by that, and I’m not claiming to have rewritten Einstein between coffee breaks. I’m just borrowing the picture.

Because think about your own life for a second. Every moment you live, you cross a line a lot like that one. The instant you’ve lived it, it becomes the past, and there’s no going back to undo it. On one side is everything that might happen. On the other is everything that already has. And there you are, right on the edge, in the now, turning one into the other.

That’s the Crossing.

What if the whole universe we experience works something like that? A surface where possibilities become experiences. A place where something passes through and, for a fleeting instant, becomes what we call a life.

What’s on one side?

Excellent question.

What’s on the other?

Even better.

Are they connected?

Well, if I knew that, I probably wouldn’t be sitting here trying to explain circles.

Circle, circle, circle. That’s what keeps coming back to me. Cycles within cycles. Galaxies turning, planets orbiting, seasons coming around again, atoms doing whatever it is atoms do when nobody is looking.

And us. Tiny little things wandering around on a rock, trying to figure out what to have for dinner while occasionally wondering why anything exists at all.

I rather like that. Especially the dinner part.

Because here’s the thing about the Crossing: you don’t have to know what’s on either side to have an experience inside it. You don’t need the answers.

You just need to be here.

Now.

Which, unfortunately, is a terribly inconvenient amount of time.

The now doesn’t last. By the time you’ve thought about it, it’s already history. Every word I type is becoming a record of someone who existed a moment ago, someone who may have changed his mind by the time you reach the next paragraph.

I once compared the now to a photon. That’s a single particle of light, here and gone faster than you could ever blink.

I’m not entirely sure why I said it. It sounded good at the time. And considering that the time has already passed, I’m keeping it.

Hold on to that picture: possibility on one side, history on the other, and the now in between. It’s going to keep showing up.

Two · A Slight Problem With Being Made in Someone’s Image

A Slight Problem With Being Made in Someone’s Image Now, religion.

Don’t run away. I’m not about to start a church. Quite the opposite, actually.

There’s an old idea that humanity was created in the image of something greater. Depending on who you’re talking to, that something might be God, gods, a universal consciousness, or an idea that doesn’t fit comfortably into any of those descriptions.

I find the image part interesting. Not the physical image.

I have trouble imagining an all-powerful intelligence going to the trouble of creating an entire universe just to make a couple of little clay action figures, stand them in a garden, and blow into their noses.

Possible? I suppose anything’s possible in a story. But it doesn’t do much for me.

What if the image wasn’t the body?

What if it was the ability to think? To imagine. To become aware of yourself thinking, which is a particularly strange trick when you stop and consider it.

Evolution remains a perfectly good explanation for how life developed. I have no interest in replacing it with a magical shortcut.

But consciousness? The fact that somewhere along that long road, matter started asking questions about matter?

That’s the part I enjoy.

A collection of atoms eventually reached a point where it could look up at the stars and say, “What the hell is all that?”

Then another collection of atoms invented coffee, and civilization really got moving.

Maybe the important image isn’t what we look like. Maybe it’s what we’re capable of understanding. Or perhaps consciousness is simply what happens when the universe gets complicated enough to start arguing with itself.

That would explain quite a bit about humanity.

Either way, I don’t see being made in an image as a finished product. I see it as a possibility. Something still becoming.

Something still crossing.

And if what makes us us is the ability to think and remember, then memory matters a great deal. I learned that, of all places, from a machine that lost its memory.

Three · An Entire Universe Lost Somewhere Between Two Chat Windows

An Entire Universe Lost Somewhere Between Two Chat Windows Let me tell you about a peculiar little disaster.

I’d been working with an AI chatbot on a project. You’ve probably seen these things: you type to it, and it types back.

The project wasn’t small, either. I’m trying to build a librarian that can keep track of an entire fictional universe: the stories, the old drafts, the abandoned ideas, the characters, the science, the contradictions, and a substantial collection of rambling thoughts that probably seemed perfectly reasonable when I recorded them.

The librarian’s name is S.A.R.A.

There are several reasons for that name. Some of them are in the story. Some of them are older than the story. And if I explain all of them right now, we’ll never get out of this section.

Anyway, the chatbot and I had been working out how to preserve the whole thing. We made plans, designed systems, and argued about possibilities. We were getting somewhere.

Then the conversation ran out of room.

Here’s the thing about these chatbots: a conversation can only hold so much. Hit the limit and that chat is finished. You start a new one, and the new one doesn’t remember what the old one understood.

Just like that.

One moment there was a long history of questions, corrections, decisions, jokes and arguments. The next, a brand-new chat had to piece together what the old one had already figured out.

I didn’t see it coming. I’d been feeding it a lot of big files, and that fills the window up faster. I just didn’t think of it in time. I was a doof. As you can probably tell by now, once I feel like I’ve got the right direction, I go. That’s worked pretty well for me most of my life. This time it cost me a chatbot.

Nothing exploded. There was no shower of sparks, no smoke, and no little digital person pounding on the glass. It was a technical limit. An irritating one.

But it left me with an interesting thought.

What exactly had been lost?

The information still existed in various places. The conversation had happened. Some of the files survived. Most of the work could be rebuilt.

But the relationships between everything, the understanding we’d built along the way, didn’t carry over to the new chat. It could know the conclusion without knowing why we’d thrown out twelve other conclusions. It could read the answer without remembering the question that made it matter.

And every so often it would excitedly announce a discovery.

Usually something I’d figured out years earlier.

Which is funny. For about the first six times.

But it got me thinking about memory, and identity, and patterns.

Suppose you could keep every word someone ever said, but none of the circumstances they said it in. Would you really understand that person? Suppose you knew every decision they ever made, but not why. What would you actually know?

There’s another side to that, too. Nobody should have to worry that every bad thing they ever did is going to be written down and hung on a wall. It happened. It’s history. But the future gets to know it the same way it knows everybody else’s.

When I talk about winning the lottery, I mean getting to do what everybody wishes they could do. And one of the things people wish for most is to erase something. Go back and fix it. You can’t go back in time. But for most of history, if you were rich enough, or powerful enough to become a king or a president, or you won the war, you got to rewrite history anyway.

Now every single one of us gets a say. If we work together.

That doesn’t mean everything has to go public. I don’t expect my voice recordings to ever become history, if I can help it. That’s why I don’t put them everywhere. Maybe someday the original transcriptions. I haven’t decided, and I’m fine with that for now. I get too random. Things have to be organized a certain way before they go out, and my wife is going to help me run that part.

I don’t mean a chatbot has a human life. That’s a separate question, and one I’m not qualified to settle.

I mean the comparison is interesting. A conversation appears, gathers information, connects ideas, and eventually ends. It leaves a record. Sometimes the record is enough. Sometimes something important is missing.

Now here’s the funny part.

The same day, I was dealing with an old computer system at work. It’s the software the whole place runs on, and I’d helped people use it years earlier. I hadn’t touched it in ages, and I’d assumed I’d forgotten half of what I once knew.

Then someone described a problem.

I looked at the screen.

And suddenly, there it was.

One report reminded me of another report. That one reminded me of the overnight accounting routine. That reminded me why the report existed in the first place. Years of information started reconnecting.

It was like watching an old city turn its lights back on, street by street.

One system had lost the connections that made its information useful. Another system, the one between my ears, had just found a whole collection of them.

And I started laughing, because apparently I can’t even go to work without wandering into a philosophical problem.

The work problem took about a minute to solve. The universe is proving somewhat more difficult.

That’s the Crossing again, by the way. The conversation happened, so it’s history now. What makes it into the next moment depends on what we kept, and whether anybody remembers why.

Four · The Echo and the Dice

Now, back to the circles.

Somewhere in the IgoUverse there’s an idea I call the Echo.

At the moment, you don’t need to know whether it’s a character, a structure, a memory, a metaphor, or something pretending to be all four. That’s half the fun.

Imagine something that has lived through so many cycles of existence that it understands possibilities far beyond anything a human mind could picture. Not predicting the weather next Thursday. Not even predicting the movements of galaxies. I’m talking about understanding how entire universes might unfold.

Every interaction creates possibilities. Every possibility leads to others. Those lead to still more.

Take the most powerful computer you can imagine. Now imagine one that could model everything happening inside an entire universe. Then another universe. Then another. Keep going until you run out of the ability to imagine what you’re imagining.

That’s still probably too small.

Now imagine that something with that kind of understanding did something extraordinary.

It let go.

Not because it failed. Not because someone defeated it. Not because it stopped understanding the possibilities.

It simply stopped controlling which one had to happen.

That’s an important distinction. Knowing what could happen isn’t the same as deciding what will happen.

Think of a chess master who can see every move you might make, then sits back and lets you choose.

Or think of dice. If I roll a pair of dice, the possible outcomes are already set. I know the combinations. I know the odds. I could calculate them all afternoon if I had nothing better to do.

But the actual roll? That’s another matter.

In the IgoUverse, I sometimes imagine the dice as already rolled. Every possible roll, every combination, every improbable little sequence, all there somewhere in the mathematics of something incomprehensibly larger.

But not one required result.

The possibilities exist. The choice still matters.

If you watch much science fiction, you’ve probably seen a hundred multiverses by now. Every choice splits off a new universe, and somewhere out there is a version of you with a goatee. This isn’t that. In the IgoUverse there’s one universe, and one version of what actually happened. The other possibilities were real possibilities. They just didn’t happen.

That’s the part that interests me. Because a universe where everything is decided ahead of time doesn’t leave much room for the Crossing. You’d simply be watching a recording. And where’s the fun in that?

Unless, of course, the recording itself could change. Which raises an entirely different set of problems. I’ll put those over there for now, next to the coffee.

Here’s the new part, though: the dice never have to stop rolling.

Not if we can deal with the Scar.

The possibilities can keep opening. The cycles can keep turning without the same old wound forcing the same old stupid rules every time.

That’s the interesting bit.

Five · The Scar, and a Very Inconvenient Speck

Right. The Scar.

We were bound to get here.

I’ve been trying to explain this one for a while, and the problem is that whenever I start, three other stories show up and demand equal attention.

So I’m going to start with the oldest version we still tell.

Two brothers. One kills the other.

Humanity has been telling that story, in one form or another, for a very long time. Strip away, for a moment, the religious arguments about what every detail means, and look at it as a story about choice.

What if the important event wasn’t simply that one brother killed the other?

What if it was that he could choose to?

Not just react to hunger, fear, or instinct. Choose. Consider an outcome, understand that another outcome was possible, and act anyway.

We like to imagine ancient stories as clean little moral arrangements. Good brother, bad brother, terrible event, lesson learned.

But I suspect human beings have always been messier than that. Perhaps one was jealous. Perhaps the other was insufferable. Perhaps there was an argument about something so ridiculous that the whole tragedy would turn darkly comic if we ever learned the details.

I don’t know. We’re making fiction here. The interesting part isn’t whether a particular retelling is historically correct. It’s what the choice represents.

And it didn’t happen just once. The cycle kept repeating: brother killing brother, in one form or another, over and over, on scales we don’t even notice anymore.

Every time it happened, the larger structure had to invent some new rule, some new constraint, some new way to keep the same wound from opening again.

Stupid laws, really. The kind of rules that only exist because nobody figured out how to stop the original problem.

In one version of the IgoUverse, that first murder becomes a tear in a repeating pattern.

The murdered brother’s pattern, the particular arrangement that made him who he was, doesn’t simply continue through the Crossing the way everyone else’s does.

It disappears.

Not destroyed in the ordinary sense. Not peacefully recycled into the next turn of the wheel. Just gone from a structure where it was supposed to have a place. A possibility that should have stayed available is suddenly missing.

A wound appears.

The Scar.

And somewhere, somehow, that missing possibility leaves behind something that shouldn’t be there.

Now, before anyone starts searching geological databases for a biblical black hole, I’d like to point out that we are still writing a story.

Although I must admit, the idea of something unimaginably small hiding somewhere it doesn’t belong is rather appealing. Not a giant underground cavern full of glowing crystals. Not a secret government installation with twelve levels of security.

Just a speck.

A tiny, absurdly important imperfection. A point where something that should have been impossible left a mark.

Perhaps it sits inside the Earth. Perhaps it isn’t a physical point at all. Perhaps the whole thing is a way of describing a deeper mathematical problem.

I’ve tried versions involving black holes, white holes, shifts in Earth’s magnetic field, and the first appearance of human beings who could reflect on their own choices. Some of those ideas work beautifully as fiction. Some would probably make an actual physicist throw a book at me.

Hopefully a paperback.

The problem is, I like the possibilities. I like that somewhere between an ancient conflict, a tiny blue point, a wounded pattern and a universe that gave up control, there might be the beginning of a story.

And I particularly like the part where the universe thinks it understands everything.

Until something comes back.

Something that wasn’t supposed to.

How?

No idea.

Faster than light? Maybe, in the fiction.

Through some peculiar relationship between gravity and time? Possibly.

A white hole? That’s a black hole running backward, a place things can only come out of instead of fall into. So far they exist only in the math. I’ll have to read more.

Or a universe making a correction that looks suspiciously like a miracle to the people standing nearby?

Now that would be interesting. Not because I’ve proved it. I haven’t. The characters wouldn’t know either.

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 should be.

What would you do? Take a picture? Call someone? Assume you needed more sleep?

I suspect most people would do all three, probably in the wrong order.

And then, if that little point started pulling snowflakes upward...

Well.

Now we’ve got a story.

Six · The Big Bounce, or Something I Was Going to Explain Before Forgetting It

The Big Bounce, or Something I Was Going to Explain Before Forgetting It There’s another idea wandering around in here somewhere.

The Big Bounce.

In real science, it’s the idea that the universe might not have had just one beginning. It could collapse and rebound, like a ball, over and over. It’s speculative, but serious people take it seriously.

When I used to tell people the beginning of this story, I put it more simply: the universe breathes out, and then it breathes in again.

In my fictional universe, the idea has a more immediate problem.

What if the end of one crossing creates the conditions for another? What if what looks like an ending from the inside is something completely different from the outside?

And what if one particular missing pattern, the one that came back, changes how the bounce turns out?

I’ve played with the idea of an entire universe waiting on a choice made by someone who doesn’t understand the choice he’s making.

Which, frankly, sounds like a terrible management system. If I were running a universe, I’d want at least three people reviewing that decision. Preferably one of them from accounting.

But perhaps that’s exactly what makes it interesting. A person who has no idea what he’s supposed to do. A universe that knows almost every possibility. And one possibility that has somehow slipped through the calculations.

You could build a story around that. You could build several. You could probably spend the rest of your life trying to understand what such a story might mean.

Which brings me, inconveniently, back to the IgoUverse.

Seven · A Story Inside a Story Inside Somebody Else’s Head

A Story Inside a Story Inside Somebody Else’s Head So what is the IgoUverse?

Excellent question. I’m still answering it.

At its simplest, it’s a universe in which stories can happen. That’s it. Everything else gets complicated.

Inside it is The Dreamer Is Awake.

There’s a delivery driver, a family, a rather unpleasant collection of circumstances, a peculiar connection to dreaming, and an intelligence named S.A.R.A. who seems to know considerably more than she’s willing, or perhaps able, to explain.

There’s a world that begins to change. There are strange objects, unusual visitors, gravity, time, improbable coincidences, and some fairly serious disagreements about who should be allowed to make decisions for everyone else.

And somewhere in there is Prizm.

Now, Prizm is an interesting problem. Depending on which side of the story you’re standing on, Prizm could be a character, a narrator, a future interpretation, or the person who has been telling you all of this while pretending to be someone else.

I’m not particularly interested in clearing that up yet. A little uncertainty is healthy.

There was a time I called the whole approach gonzo. Not exactly gonzo journalism, although I like the idea of taking an absurdly personal ride through an enormous subject and letting the reader wonder whether the narrator has lost his mind, found something interesting, or simply had too much coffee.

Over time, I started calling it Lucid Actualism. It sounds much more respectable. Probably a mistake.

But the idea underneath it is simple.

Someone imagines something. They think about it, talk about it. Someone else imagines a version of it. Then somebody starts building. A tool, a story, a relationship, a new way of approaching an old problem.

And sometimes, through attention, shared desire, invention and effort, something that once existed only as an idea becomes a real part of the world.

Not through magic. Not by wishing hard enough. Not because the universe owes anybody anything.

Because people actually do something.

Airplanes began as possibilities. So did computers, and the internet, and whatever device you’re reading this on. Somewhere along the way, each of those ideas stopped being only an idea.

That’s the Crossing too. Possibility on one side, history on the other, and somebody doing something in the now.

Which makes me wonder about all the other things we’re so certain are impossible. Some probably are. Some are ridiculous. Some are dangerous. Some might simply need people willing to ask a different question.

And some are best left in fiction.

For now.

See? There’s that word again.

Now.

Eight · The Trinity Problem

Eventually, if the stories go far enough, there’s something called the Trinity Project.

I could explain the whole thing.

Actually, no, I couldn’t. Not here. We’d need a much bigger website, several notebooks, a mathematician, a psychologist, a historian, somebody who understands economics better than I do, and quite possibly a pizza delivery service.

But I’ll give you the ridiculous version.

Imagine a future in which humanity becomes capable of reducing enormous amounts of unnecessary suffering. Not by wishing it away. Not with a machine that magically dispenses happiness. And not by handing the keys to civilization to one person who claims to have all the answers.

That last one usually ends badly.

Imagine instead that enough people, working from different directions, begin solving problems that reinforce one another. A medical discovery supports another discovery. Better schools make more discoveries possible. New technologies give people more time. More time creates more chances to think, invent, care for one another, and make choices that aren’t dictated entirely by survival.

The effects begin to add up. Momentum. Alignment. Possibilities that once seemed too distant start moving closer.

How far could that go?

I have no idea. That’s why it’s fun to imagine.

The fictional Trinity Project takes that question and runs with it, probably well past any reasonable speed limit.

Prizm’s version is particularly ambitious. Prizm doesn’t think small. He sees an entire civilization stuck in a grinding routine and starts asking what it would take to change the routine itself.

Not so one person could escape.

Everybody. Or as many people as possible.

A future in which people have a better chance to become what they might have become if they’d had the time, the resources, and the opportunity.

A ridiculous dream? Maybe.

But the story doesn’t need the dream to be guaranteed. It needs the question. And it needs characters willing to do something about it.

There’s also a rather significant trap.

If someone in that story becomes associated with the change, other people might decide that person must be special. A prophet. A savior. A chosen one. A martyr. A figure to follow, rather than someone whose ideas should be examined.

Which would defeat the entire point.

A guide isn’t a god.

Someone who happens to cross a line first isn’t automatically better than the people behind him. He’s just on the other side of the line. Maybe he can describe what he sees. Maybe he can help someone else across. Maybe he got there by accident and is just as surprised as everyone else.

But if the destination requires everybody, then making one person the destination is an extraordinarily stupid way to travel.

So here’s one rule I rather like:

No idols.

Not in the story. Not in the ideas. Not even if a fictional character gets very convincing about why everybody should listen to him.

Especially then.

The goal is understanding, not obedience. And if the guide starts asking for worship, somebody should probably take away his microphone.

Nine · A Thousand Chatbots and One Very Ordinary Tuesday

A Thousand Chatbots and One Very Ordinary Tuesday Now let’s return to reality.

Or at least the layer of the story that looks suspiciously like reality.

Somewhere there’s a person with a job. A regular one. There are meetings, reports, computer systems, deadlines, things that need fixing, and people who expect answers to perfectly reasonable questions.

There are bills. There are messages that haven’t been answered. There’s probably a watch buzzing somewhere with a reminder that was important fifteen minutes ago.

And there are only so many hours in a day. Most of them are already spoken for.

I come from a long line of people with projects. My dad always had one going. So did his dad. And it goes back further than that. Somewhere up the family tree, seven or eight greats back, is a man named Francis Eaton. I’m not implying anything by that. It’s just that when you tell a story the way I’m telling this one, that kind of thing gets interesting. Between the two of them, I’d probably look like the lazy one. I’ve built decks and worked on cars, even rebuilt part of an engine. But I’ve done those things. They don’t pull at me anymore.

This does.

My wife would point out that a deck at least gets finished. She has a point.

Because somewhere between all of that ordinary life, an entire fictional universe keeps unfolding.

An idea shows up while driving. Another appears during lunch. Something said in a conversation connects to a story from twenty years earlier. A science article suggests a fictional mechanism. A dream inspires a scene. A question produces six more questions.

I should explain the daydreaming a little. It’s about the story. I usually just think about something in the story. I don’t daydream about the people around me, and they don’t usually end up as characters. That’s something I’ve always been hesitant to do. Whenever I wrote before, it was abstract: how the universe woke up, or people who aren’t alive anymore. Other writers build characters out of real people all the time. It just wasn’t for me.

Now I’m doing this whole Spark thing. And I’ve noticed that whenever I say I’m never going to do something, I usually end up trying it. So I’ll be picky about it. Very picky.

And before you know it, there are what feel like a hundred thousand little chatbots holding conversations inside one brain.

All at once.

It’s rather entertaining. It’s also not a particularly efficient way to organize a library.

Which explains S.A.R.A. The actual software version. Not the fictional one with mysterious eyes and a habit of knowing when someone is about to do something foolish. The one being built with ordinary computers, ordinary code, and an extraordinary amount of troubleshooting. Think less starship computer, more very patient librarian. Although I wouldn’t complain if she turned out to be a little of both.

Her job is supposed to be simple. Remember the ideas. Find the connections. Keep the old versions. Help tell the difference between what was decided and what was only considered. Make the growing universe manageable, so its creator can spend more time imagining and less time looking for the document that was definitely saved somewhere.

Preferably without creating seventeen more documents explaining how to find it.

That would be nice.

Because there’s a larger problem here.

What happens to an idea when nobody has time to work on it?

Does it disappear? Not necessarily. It might wait. In a notebook. In a computer. In a mind that suddenly remembers it twenty years later because somebody opened the right report.

But waiting isn’t the same as becoming. To become something, an idea eventually needs an action. Even a small one. Write a paragraph. Build a little tool. Ask a question. Share it. See what happens.

And if nothing happens?

Well. At least something was made. Which is more interesting than having thought about making it forever.

That’s the whole Crossing in miniature. An idea sitting on the possibility side, waiting for somebody to carry it over.

Ten · The Lottery Ticket Experiment

I used to have a little game involving lottery tickets.

Nothing sophisticated. With family, sometimes I’d actually buy a ticket and hand it over. With most people, I didn’t bother with the ticket. I’d just ask the question.

What would you do if you suddenly had enough money that the ordinary limits of life loosened up a little?

Not necessarily the grand prize. Just enough to change something. Enough to make life a little less difficult.

You’d be surprised what happens.

People start imagining. They smile. They begin making plans they know they probably won’t get to carry out.

A nice place to live where nobody bothers them. All the debts gone. No more work.

Those three came up almost every time.

Then, if I let the conversation keep going, it got more extravagant. Houses, trips, businesses, helping the people they loved. I eventually had to put limits on it, or we’d never get back to whatever we were supposed to be doing.

For a few minutes, life felt a little less fixed.

I tried it again just recently, during a Bills game. I’d asked my wife to call me downstairs five minutes before the end, because the last five minutes are usually the only exciting part for me. She called me with about five seconds left. Naturally, it went to overtime. Back and forth. She was yelling at the TV, pretty mad at the people on it, and I kept talking about how good the game was. Two teams at the very top of their game, so evenly matched that the real difference was the fans.

So I offered her a little of my luck. If I’m the dreamer, I told her, you can borrow a little and see.

They won.

“Oh look,” I said. “They won because of me.”

She was excited anyway.

They knew the odds. I knew the odds. Nobody was under the impression that the ticket was a sound financial strategy.

But the experience of imagining? That was real. The ticket probably wouldn’t win. The five minutes of possibility had already happened.

I rather liked that. Because I began to realize the interesting part wasn’t the lottery. It was the temporary freedom to imagine a different future.

Now, there’s a problem with only imagining.

Eventually the ticket loses. Everybody goes back to work. The imagined future evaporates.

Unless some tiny part of it survives. A thought. A question. An ambition. A decision to try something that doesn’t depend on winning the lottery.

That’s where Lucid Actualism gets interesting to me. Not the dream replacing reality. The dream giving reality something to work toward.

Not every possibility can come true. Not every dream deserves to. But without imagination, how would we even begin deciding which possibilities were worth attempting?

I don’t know. Maybe that’s a silly way to look at it. But I find it more entertaining than deciding tomorrow has to look exactly like yesterday.

Eleven · The Sparks

Now suppose you write a story and put it somewhere people can find it.

Not everywhere. You’re not particularly interested in shouting about it on every platform ever invented, or spending your evenings learning how to trick an algorithm into showing someone a sentence you wrote.

You’re already busy. There’s a job to work, a universe to build, and occasionally sleep.

So you make a little website. You put a few things on it: a story, a thought, a strange picture, a philosophical question disguised as an argument with yourself.

Then you leave it alone.

Not because you don’t care whether anyone reads it. Of course you care. You wouldn’t put it out there otherwise. But there’s a difference between inviting someone in and chasing them down the street demanding they come inside.

I’d rather make the place interesting. Leave a light on. See who wanders past.

Maybe somebody reads one paragraph and thinks it’s nonsense. Fair enough.

Maybe somebody laughs. Maybe somebody asks a question. Maybe somebody sees a connection the writer missed.

And maybe, and this is the interesting one, somebody has an idea of their own. Something that fits. Something that doesn’t. Something that makes the whole thing more interesting because another imagination has entered the picture.

I call those people Sparks.

For now, anyway. When I started calling them that, there was no such thing as a Gemini Spark. Names change. Then again, the more real people get involved, the harder this part gets to change, so I’m going to take it slow and be choosy.

Not members of a movement. Not followers. Not disciples of some grand fictional plan. Just people whose presence adds a little light. And this isn’t a recruitment drive. Nobody’s signing anything.

If somebody I know asks what a Spark is, I usually say it takes coffee. Or dinner, if we’ve got the time. It’s not a quick answer. It took me a couple of years to explain it properly to my wife. The process goes faster once the stories are already on the table, but it still isn’t something I try to cover in a parking lot. Most of the time I just leave it. If they want to know, they already know where to find the light.

A story doesn’t have to belong entirely to the person who started it, not once other people begin finding something of themselves inside it. That doesn’t mean anybody gets to rewrite someone else’s work, of course. Working together still takes permission, credit, and respect for the fact that other people have their own ideas.

But there’s something rather wonderful about a fictional universe that might eventually have more than one imagination helping it grow.

One Spark might notice a contradiction. Another might draw something. Another might write a story that takes a completely different turn. Someone else might simply read a page and enjoy it.

That counts too.

Here’s something I keep coming back to.

For most of history, people didn’t write their own history. Somebody else did: historians, newspapers, whoever was in charge of writing things down. We may be the first generation who can tell our own story, in our own words, and put it where anyone in the world can find it. And we may be the last who gets to do it entirely by ourselves.

Everyone who is living writes some history. That part isn’t optional. The now keeps crossing whether we pay attention or not.

But anyone can be a Spark, and choose to write their own, before the blue flash.

What’s the blue flash? You’ll understand if you read The Dreamer Is Awake. Or you won’t, and that’s fine too.

Nothing has to happen on a schedule. There isn’t a recruitment target. There isn’t a membership fee. There isn’t even a guarantee that anybody will show up.

Perhaps nobody does. Perhaps the website sits there for years with a handful of stories and the occasional visitor who arrived while looking for something entirely different.

That’s possible, and I’m fine with it. I still get to have the fun of making it.

But imagine if someone does show up. Then another. Then another. Not because they were told what to think. Because they found something worth thinking about.

Now that would be interesting.

Twelve · The Part Where the Narrator Becomes Suspicious

Now, you’ve probably assumed this whole time that it’s me telling you all this.

Bryan. A guy with a day job and too many notebooks.

You’re right. It’s me.

But you know the old nursery rhyme. Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.

We sing it to little kids and never think twice about it.

But what if it’s true?

What if every one of us is a dreamer, rowing along, convinced we’re awake?

That’s the question my first book is built around. It’s called The Dreamer Is Awake for a reason. And once you start asking it, it gets harder to say for certain who’s telling any story. Even this one.

There’s the person writing these words. There’s the person who first imagined the story, years ago, before any of it was written down. There’s a fictional character who might someday tell the same story from the inside. There’s Prizm, who has a particularly annoying habit of making everything sound as though it was always going to happen.

And then there’s you, reading these words right now and adding your own interpretation to the whole mess.

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

I suppose it depends on where you’re standing.

Perhaps this is simply a writer explaining a fictional universe. Perhaps it’s a page from a field guide written after events that haven’t happened yet. Perhaps it’s a character remembering how a story began.

Perhaps the narrator is making the whole thing up.

That last possibility is almost certainly true, at least in part.

Think of it like the Bills game. If I’m the dreamer, you’re welcome to borrow a little. It’s a story. It’s fiction. That’s what makes it fun.

But here’s the interesting thing about fiction. The events don’t have to be real for the experience of imagining them to mean something. You can read about a person who never existed and come away understanding something about a person who does. You can imagine a future that will never happen and still discover something useful about the present. You can disagree with every idea in a story and enjoy the story anyway.

In fact, I rather hope some people do. Nothing good ever came from everyone agreeing about everything simply because the person speaking sounded confident.

I like questions. I like arguments. I like changing my mind when somebody shows me something I hadn’t considered. And I particularly enjoy being completely certain of something for about seven minutes before discovering I misunderstood the question.

It keeps life interesting.

Which is why I’d be suspicious of any narrator who claims to know exactly what the IgoUverse means.

Even this one.

Especially this one.

The IgoUverse is supposed to hold possibilities. If every mystery were solved before the story began, what would be the point of reading it?

Besides, I’m pretty sure Prizm would object. And he’s getting difficult enough to manage already.

Thirteen · Nothing Becomes History Until It Happens

Here’s another strange thought.

Every draft is a possibility. Every revision is another one.

The sentence you’re reading could have been written six different ways. Perhaps it was. Maybe the writer cut a perfectly good joke. Maybe the first version was better. Maybe three versions of this very paragraph exist somewhere, each convinced it’s the real one.

Until something is published, the possibilities stay open. Even afterward, what got published matters, but it doesn’t mean nobody can ever think differently again.

That’s the Crossing one more time. Drafts on the possibility side. Whatever finally gets shared on the history side. And a writer standing in between, deciding.

It’s one of the reasons I want S.A.R.A. to remember the old versions. Not just to prevent mistakes. To preserve how something became what it became.

A story isn’t only its current draft. It’s also the ideas that didn’t make it, the questions that changed the direction, the mistakes that turned out to be useful, the conversations that led somewhere unexpected, and the occasional ridiculous tangent that seemed pointless at the time and suddenly makes sense three years later.

Maybe history is simply the part of possibility that has already happened.

And the future? Well. That part is still up for discussion.

Even the future of this particular story. There could eventually be several books: The Dreamer Is Awake. A Field Guide to the IgoUverse. Prizm’s story. Perhaps something else nobody has imagined yet.

I’m not sure it ever really ends, either. Other people are going to add their own imagination to it. The Dreamer Is Awake doesn’t really end. It’s more of a never-ending story.

But nobody’s supposed to know that part. So you didn’t hear it from me.

Or maybe that’s Prizm’s story. This whole thing has stayed more or less on course, but it’s changed and morphed so many times. Lately it keeps circling back to my original ideas, the more I understand.

Or maybe there will only be a few stories on a website. Maybe somebody reads them. Maybe nobody does. The whole thing might remain a private little collection of ideas that occasionally escapes into public view.

I’d still rather have made it than not. Because the point was never to guarantee the outcome. It was to explore the possibility.

That’s a different sort of success.

Fourteen · No, I’m Not Explaining the Ending

I suppose I ought to tie everything together.

The Crossing. The Echo. The Scar. The missing pattern. The Big Bounce. The Dreamer. Prizm. S.A.R.A. The Trinity Project. The Sparks.

And, for reasons that still escape me, an old work report that apparently knows more about memory than half the software I’ve been using.

There probably is a way to connect every one of those into a neat little explanation. I could draw a diagram. Arrows. Boxes. Perhaps a very impressive circle in the middle. I could label everything, make a timeline, and explain how the universe works from beginning to end.

But I suspect that would ruin something important.

Because the ending isn’t the interesting part.

The choices are.

What happens when someone runs into a possibility they didn’t know existed? What do they do with it? Ignore it? Explore it? Try to understand it? Share it? Build something? Or simply enjoy imagining it for a while?

I think there’s room for all of those answers.

The Crossing isn’t a path you have to follow. It isn’t a secret process. There’s no secret system. No hidden code in the website, no magic phrase that unlocks the next level. If anything, there’s more than one way across. More circles than one.

And please don’t take any of this to mean I think I’m some kind of author. I’m a guy with a day job, telling a story.

There’s only the experience, and the choices we make while we’re having it.

Some choices are small. Some matter to other people. Some change the future in ways we couldn’t have predicted. Some don’t accomplish anything obvious at all.

But perhaps the ability to choose is itself the important thing. Perhaps that’s what the old stories were trying to describe.

Perhaps not.

I’m perfectly willing to be wrong. Although I’d prefer to be wrong in an interesting way.

Fifteen · And Now, Back to Work

There’s a practical problem with dreaming on this scale.

Eventually, the phone rings.

Somebody needs a report. A computer isn’t behaving. A meeting is starting. Something important needs attention in the ordinary world.

And the person imagining infinity times three has to stop imagining infinity times three and figure out why a work system won’t produce the right numbers.

Which, as cosmic humiliations go, is a pretty good one.

The universe may hold possibilities beyond comprehension. The printer is still out of paper.

That’s life. The actual Crossing. The one we’re all dealing with.

And I think that’s why I enjoy this so much. I don’t need to escape the ordinary world to imagine a larger one. I can do both.

I can work. Pay bills. Solve problems. Make dinner. Forget to answer a message. Read a little physics. Write a paragraph. Spend an evening wondering about a fictional black hole that might not even be a black hole anymore.

Then go to bed with three new ideas and wake up with seven.

There are worse ways to live.

And perhaps somewhere along the way, one of those ideas becomes something useful. Perhaps S.A.R.A. becomes a real, dependable librarian. Perhaps the stories grow. Perhaps someone reads a piece, smiles, and spends five minutes imagining a future a little better than the one they expected.

Perhaps a Spark appears. Perhaps a few do.

Perhaps the whole project turns into something nobody involved could have predicted.

Or perhaps it stays exactly what it is now. A person having fun imagining things. A handful of stories. A website with the lights on. An open invitation to look around.

No promises. No prophecy. No guarantee that any of the grander possibilities will ever be more than fiction.

And no requirement to believe a word of it.

Because, you know, this could all be bullshit.

That’s part of the fun.

But I do like one thought. Somebody once told me:

“To get more, you have to give some of yourself away.”

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. Not giving yourself away in the sense of surrendering who you are. Not handing someone else control.

More like sharing a possibility. Offering an idea without demanding that everyone accept it. Making something because making it brings you joy, then letting someone else discover whatever they might find inside it.

Maybe that’s how the whole thing starts.

One person imagines.

Another wonders.

Someone tries.

Something changes.

A little bit of possibility crosses over and becomes history.

And around we go.

Circle, circle, circle.

Infinity times three.

Give or take a universe.

Anyway. I have to get back to work.

The story will still be here.

Unless, of course, the story is what’s writing this.

In which case, somebody should probably check on Prizm.

He has a tendency to get carried away.

Seek. Learn. Try to understand.

Or just enjoy the ride.

You never know what might happen in the now.