Skyscrapers
This is written mostly for me, partially for Laine, and entirely for the sake of the characters and philosophies contained herein. It probably will not make sense on the first reading.
Laine is © Laine_Mathis
Siber is © me
Quixar is
The sick smell of cigarette smoke infects my lungs. Again. Carcinogens and combustibles scrape down my throat, inflicting micro-cuts: tiny little razor slashes that let the arsenic penetrate mucous membranes, while the tar sticks itself over pockets of air that will never regain their usefulness. Compounds I wouldn't wish on Hussein diffuse into my bloodstream and get filtered like everything else that turns to piss, but their particular breed of sadism is only further bolstered by unwitting cleaning systems and allowed to infect my kidneys with a cancer that will probably metastasize and make me puke blood on my deathbed.
I breathe deeply, close my eyes, hold in the filth to give it time to work its magic, and then flick my gaze over my shoulder. "Hello, Laine."
In the black night, under starlight like shotgun blasts in the veil of a widow whose believed-dead husband has deluded himself into thinking she has the strength of will to forget him and move on to someone less jealous than a monster who once wrote vicious libel about his best friend because that friend had a 2008 model and he only had a 2006; in that light, we meet again, but the only way I know he is there besides the gaseous toxins is the simmering, red eye of his cigarette.
"Siber," he acknowledges, sitting next to me. We don't look at one another.
My feet dangle over the edge of a skyscraper. At one point, businessmen held meetings thirty stories under my ass. They talked about whether the cost of using something other than lead paints in their dolls was greater than the cost of the court cases, and argued that the target demographic hadn't the IQ to realize why their children's central nervous systems were failing; the chance of a lawsuit was slim, and any that managed to flourish could probably be easily settled out of court. Now, black glass was cracked and shattered where I had systematically broken it out, window by window, for each former occupant that would no longer be returning. When I first met Laine, that was the only building affected. Now that he's been meeting me here for God-knows-how-many years, the city has become a wasteland. And the military has learned to stop trying. No one likes their children's last image of them to be... well. I shouldn't wax graphic.
He, on the other hand, sits cross-legged, and hunches over his lap as the glow pulses with his lungs. His tail lays flat and inactive behind him. Absentmindedly, he takes a knife out of his pocket and drives it noisily into the concrete, twice.
"Who were they?" I ask, not really caring.
"Fucked their children." He stamps out the cigarette with his hand and flicks it a hundred stories into the darkness, then leans his chin in his hands and sighs.
"Literally?"
"Paternal unit, yeah."
"Mom was schizo?"
"Mother was a prostitute. Had my doubts."
"Any luck?"
He shakes his head, and I nod, understandingly. There is silence between us for hundreds of seconds. Occasionally, wind blows, and I wish again that I had remembered to burn the corpses earlier. Really, I just need to set this city on fire. Come back later and hope the steel hasn't melted. Worship the carbon shit that reminds me the electrical current that once made it fake life has diffused into the gasoline vapors in the air. Maybe sit up here and throw the glass off the roof, see if blood still shoots its geysers like it did from the citizens. Think of a city as an organism; what does it bleed?
The fingers of the hand closer to me drift fleetingly over the concrete near mine. They prick at the chips of material that broke off when I made my own marks.
"An entire clan?"
"Maybe I got carried away."
"Unlikely. Incest?"
"Eldest needed accelerated learning."
"But they slaughtered politics and a god to feed a whining runt."
"Yep. Earwax."
"It keeps me from jumping."
"You have wings."
"So do you."
Our eyes meet for the first time in months. "Mine are mundane." We're so dead. Metaphorically, it doesn't bother me. However, approaching reality, our poles tend to switch on the subject. "Yours'll sprout went you splatter."
"And when you finally want to taste asphalt?" he laughs, pulling out a new cigarette and breathing on it to light it up.
I snarl and furrow my brow, but I have trouble frowning at him. Only a glower seems appropriate. The word is more euphonic. "I'll glide low and lick it."
"Coward."
"Idiot."
It's not a new disagreement. I shouldn't get angry anymore. I think it's probably a rudimentary fear that I could be wrong surfacing. I don't know whether he ever doubts his position. In general, I lean towards the idea that his approach is firm. Mine is less certain, but no less determined; we both shoot for eternity. He's just... less afraid. If afraid at all.
Smoke wreathes my face. I don't recall him looking away, so I guess it makes sense. I'm back to considering the depthless drop. A hundred stories depthless. God, I am a coward. "So how about the eldest?"
"Foster home, full ride."
"How'd you wing that?"
I shrug. "Some days, I don't want to watch them vomit nothing and live in cardboard."
"Whims of Gods."
"Presumably."
A slow drag. "So where's the one behind this?"
"In me."
"Queer."
"I keep forgetting it's not the same with you."
"Mostly 'cuz I'm not a slut."
My tail swishes a bit behind me and I bow my head in concession. "I hate my writer," I whisper. I've been here for decades, while simultaneously I've sucked off giants, been fucked by demons, and inelegantly proclaimed an incurable desire for protection so that my author can live vicariously through my submission, unable to fulfill his own fantasies in a world that would drown him in guilt and shame.
Laine adjusts himself on the ledge and looks out at the stars. "So you're an actual representative embodiment, then." I nod. "Whereas I'm... well, more than a projection, less than an entity." Between his black, draconic lips, the smoldering ash is like the last vestiges of a dying fire pit used to sacrifice cannibals to a cruel pantheon.
...what does that metaphor even imply? Much less mean anything...
"So there's someone like me, then. More than a character, less than human, for your author."
"Oddly, also more suited for this conversation." I snort derisively. "Recently, he tried to define us better. Figured out I hated living like I do. I get these moments of clarity, now, but I'm usually pretty damn insane."
"So I've noticed. Nice skirt, by the way; I was wondering if that would ever catch on." An attempt at men's fashion made a hundred years ago; some of us prefer the enhanced mobility, now that most of the people I know are dead. And the draft; feels nice on humid nights. "So what's his name?"
"Eh..." I trail off, swinging my legs childishly against the building. Can my writer really overcome his fear of revealing that? Honestly. Authorship already makes any given human being dissociative, so there's no fear in that. And it's the internet. Who the hell cares? (The answer is no one.) Laine is here; it can't possibly be that bad for his writer.
Another voice penetrates the night, and the sound of crunching pieces of abraded concrete under feet, like the cracking and knitting together of children's skulls, nears us on the rooftop. Simultaneously, we turn. My face is expressionless, but Laine raises his eyebrows as we hear, "He's afraid of corrupting me."
The newcomer sits behind me and I imagine him putting a hand soothingly on my shoulder. I hunch over as goosebumps traverse my spine, his reptilian flesh cool against my fur. Even though it's not there. Laine watches for a moment, then shifts himself again to see the other better. "Nice to finally meet you."
He nods in acknowledgment. "Same to you. I won't be saying much," he comments distractedly. "You understand."
"So how about you? Would you splatter?"
"Never." The word cuts the air. It spins out like a bladed star, sonic blast of silence in its wake as it seeks to nick the throat of a monarch and make him bleed his strength to be drunk by his subjects that he will no longer be regarded as absolute. It leaves a sort of immutability hanging there, until its speaker explains. "It's not an option. I will keep on. For him." He nods at me.
"Living in terms of another? For the sake of another? Worse than dying for them. You only are as much as you mean - if you're him, you're redundant." He sucks on the cigarette and we watch the following smoke scatter and fade. "There's already one of him."
"He's not effective, though, and understands that." He holds up a pacifying hand at Laine's attempt to retort. "With help, he'll change."
"What? You think giving a cripple a crutch is going to heal him?"
"No, but making him walk on that leg is stupid."
"It'll make him learn."
"At the same time, it is more likely to make people pity his condition than admire his strength."
"So that immediately makes you one-dimensional."
"You only get a static crutch if you confine yourself to the metaphor," the newcomer points out. He takes a moment to ponder. "We're all philosophers. All five of us. The Philosopher's journey is one preparing for death. Our preparations are not yet complete, and may not be for another millennium." I have been here for centuries. "You can't deride us because he is afraid."
"I am afraid," I muse, "though less so, recently. No more shivering myself to sleep at night."
"Why be afraid?" Laine asks. "I understand the fear, but not coming from you. It seems like a scientist's curiosity would force you to eliminate that fear. Besides, what fear of death? What fear of the unknown? The thunder rolls, lightning flashes, and a character fails to come back on stage. Where did he go? He didn't just vanish. The players play, acting through their lives, and then emerge from their cocoons backstage. It doesn't make sense to believe in oblivion." He cuts us off as both of us try to say that that isn't an issue anymore. "I know that's what you fear, as much as you claim immortality."
"Emerge from an actor's cocoon as a director?" I offer.
"It'd be nice, but..." The other cuffs my ear in gentle correction. "Unnecessary metaphysics."
Laine watches the two of us curiously, like a cat watches a ball of string. To intervene and have a little fun, or not? "So what's your name?"
A pause. "You know, I'm surprised you're a digimon, I gotta admit."
"That's not what I..."
"It was a dangerous move, in my opinion."
There is a growl. Now that, I'm not used to. "Your opinion is about to be making some pretty dangerous..."
"To embody oneself in a child's toy is simply not something every fantasizing mishap has the courage to do. He's brave, to hang on like that. I can respect that."
"What, like I'm some kind of freak?" He knows that's not the case.
"Pretty much." I can't see this conversation coming to anything but an incredibly entertaining conclusion. "Although I can't give him altogether too much credit; he did choose one of the more socially acceptable ones. Hanging tight to Card Captor Sakura would have taken a bit more courage. Thank God it wasn't something he'd forget, though; you'd be more useless than Siber." I snarl at him. "Than Siber was," he amends, playfully flicking my ear with a little grin.
I suppose I should start explaining things. None of the three characters I've mentioned - me, Laine, and the reptile -have any solid claim to reality. Laine and I are fairly firmly bound into "character-ness"; that is, we're characters, written by authors. Laine is less of a character than I, and more of a pseudo-entity; whether he can exist apart from his counterpart is uncertain. I know for a fact that I can exist without my writer; I'll sit here in the tubes until the end of time, comatose. The other is one hundred percent pseudo-entity, and it is precisely because of that that my writer refuses to name him.
By carelessly putting a consistent name to a character, even one as simple as "the man" or "the ancestor," you define it within the context of a story, rather than just in concept in the author's mind. They become simultaneously bound to text and unbound from the author's psyche. Right now, the third member of our little party is in a hesitant limbo as my writer decides whether or not to put a name to him. If he has connoted a single word wrong, that one hundred percent will be broken.
Originally, I was just an avatar; a persona, really; a mask my author could wear online, and a name. Later, my name was given to characters. First there was only one, but his amateur writing ability meant that I was fairly ill-defined. Then, he began toying with my psyche, always basing it on his own. This whole time, he recognized the dragon sitting behind me as a pseudo-entity, but believed me to have no concept of self. And I suppose I didn't. And then, one night in a movie theater, watching God-knows-what, he had an epiphany, and I was half-born.
From that time on, I have gained less definition as a character, destabilizing my psyche whenever I do appear as one, and more definition as a pseudo-entity, setting me in a dualist realm where part of me is constantly infuriated over the half that doesn't ever want to be concerned by anything... ever.
I don't know Laine's story very well. I know that he's here and that without his counterpart/author I would likely be different and probably less self-aware as part of that difference. He shares more of that other guy's ideals than my own, because as I said, I'm ill-defined. It's surprising for every moment of this story how long I've retained a semblance of order and sanity.
So the two of us talk a lot, about various subjects, generally philosophy. Politics and psychology play a role, and well... I guess that about covers every single aspect of human nature that there is to cover. Sometimes it's the big stuff, like tonight, with death, suicide, and immortality, but sometimes it's women's breast sizes. (I think that falls under politics.) We sit up here, and he smokes because it feels good, and I breathe in the second-hand to satisfy my self-engendered masochism, and we wonder what it would be like if more people like us inhabited the world.
We'd probably all sit around on skyscrapers and talk about the dumb shits below us, then go about our daily lives, trying hour by hour to remember that we are alive, and that we're getting something done. The only difference between then and now is that the freer exchange of ideas might lead to some sort of breakthrough, for any of us. We all have our problems. Mine are unfathomable arrogance and an almost crippling fear of death. I'm pretty sure he suffers the former (if you can call that suffering), but the latter certainly isn't a problem for him. He has his demons, his skeletons. But if we could somehow eliminate those weaknesses, we might get somewhere.
"The problem, really, is a fear of stasis. If we move on, will we be stuck? Is the process of moving on really just another form of being stuck?" He tosses another cigarette into the darkness and we all watch its dim glow fade out. We've all said and heard those statements a thousand times, if not more.
The thing behind me pulls me into his arms. "It's like a curve on a graph. Stasis is a y = C function, where C is a constant. So you fix that, and you turn your life into a more elaborate function, say y = 3x2 - 1. But that's just as useless. Take two derivatives, and you get y = 6, which is just y = C where C equals six. No different."
"And you can't cheat and use a sine curve," Laine interjects, "because that's repetition. You need something that never repeats, that has no sort of pattern. So no sort of diminishing wavelength or some shit."
"I doubt you can have a pattern at all. It needs to be something like... I dunno. A matrix. The universe is basically a system of equations, anyway."
"Solve for 'why,'" I snort, trying to get comfortable. "Shatter the brackets."
"Except we don't even know what 'why' represents," Laine reminds us, chuckling at the ridiculousness of our chosen metaphor.
"'What does why mean?' God, we're talking like Buddhists." God, we're talking like Buddhists. Now if that isn't a paradox... "Just seems like a paradox." Like trying to break a rotating algorithm in a supercomputer just using a punch card. Computers don't even read punch cards anymore, and Lord knows you need more than one to do anything useful.
"Yeah," Quixar murmurs, his chin on my shoulder, "that's the idea."