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Spoke knows a lot of infinities. Unclosed loops in code, fractals, repeating numbers. Mapicc, for his part, knows a lot less. And Spoke trusts Mapicc more than anyone else in the world, but he isn’t sure if he trusts everything Mapicc says.
“The universe loves you too, y’know,” he offers Spoke one day, over lunch (bread) in an underground campsite (not theirs). Spoke is skeptical.
The universe… loves Mapicc because he is love. Spoke, alternatively–
Unclosed loops, fractals, repeating numbers.
Measurement, singularities, and the void in Spoke’s chest.
Spoke slyly reaches over Mapicc to steal a piece of bread from him.
“How do we know if something’s symmetrical?” Spoke says back, and Mapicc looks at him like he’s speaking a different language.
If he’s talking more abstract than fractals, more theoretical than infinite numbers, then he can bring up space, light, energy. If the universe is as infinitely expanding as he thinks (which before him, Jamato thought that, and before Jamato was whoever he learned it from, and before whoever he learned it from was another person and another and another and another), then he can always get bigger and smaller. As small as the parties thrown inside Planck’s constant, or as big as Everything.
Spoke’s current scale is the breathing room between his heart, and the beating mass of variegated kaleidoscope shapes in front of him that is Mapicc, viewed from a different angle. Colors are not infinite, but there are enough of them to create the effect of it. It’s hard, viewing the universe from between two dimensions– not quite the third, not quite the fourth. To put it on a smaller scale, he is in between the first and second shells of an electron. To put it on a larger scale, he exists between the collision of multiverses, the hazard zone where the debris lands.
That’s a good comparison, universal debris. Spoke is not something intentional. His species is not meant to even exist really, and the only reason he does is because an angel looked into the void some 10 to the eightieth years ago and saw its reflection. Spoke is the rubble of an accident– there was a positive without a negative, a direct relationship without the inverse relationship, something impossible; he's basically a big electron. He was created to be the mirror of some angel, so that when the universe wraps itself in a hug, and everything runs a count of itself, the number of angels and their opposites cancel each other out, and the everything's tally amounts to a total net nothing.
Spoke, for all that he tries to break free of the universe, is only a part of it. He is a culmination of life and death, but even with all the effort of Things to exist; he is not worth anything.
He is especially not worth love. He is especially not worth Mapicc.
(Selfishly, he doesn’t run from Mapicc. He could, though. He could.)
Mapicc, sometimes, is ginger root. Mapicc apparently contests this claim.
“What?” Mapicc laughs, tilting Spoke’s head back to feed him tea. Everything is hazy, because Spoke is sick and the world is evil.
“Like– spicy.” Spoke provides, letting the tea go down his throat. It doesn’t help the fever, but he feels warm and cozy.
“I’m spicy,” Mapicc echoes, pulling the cup away and sitting on his legs. Spoke nods slowly.
“But good,” he continues, slumping onto Mapicc’s side, noting the way Mapicc’s muscles move through ones and zeroes, noting the way that, if Spoke paused the universe right here, Mapicc’s shape would fade entirely into the background. Spoke ‘sees’ Mapicc through his movements, each breath, each muscle, all of his neurons. If he paused, the polychromatic blur of movement would simply fade into the background– just another layer on the digital canvas that is the world. Just a polychromatic blur, no movement.
“What does that mean?” Mapicc hums, putting an arm over Spoke, and angling them towards each other.
“It’s good you have horns,” Spoke decides with a grin, looking up at the two red spikes on Mapicc’s head. Mapicc’s face, below them, tilts bemusedly. “Otherwise, everyone’d think you’re an angel.”
“Who the hell said that?” Mapicc retorts immediately, sending Spoke into a fit of squirmy giggles. Mapicc’s funny.
“Me,” Spoke beams, shoving himself against Mapicc’s side. Mapicc laughs, and holds Spoke tighter.
“Oh, well that’s the only opinion that matters then,” he teases, but Spoke knows knows knows that Mapicc means it. He can tell by the ones and zeros firing in Mapicc’s frontal cortex and sparking shades of red orange yellow green blue purple pink brown white down his nerves. Spoke knows Mapicc, knows every hueshifting vein of his body.
Before Spoke drifts off to the comfort of Mapicc, he looks up one more time, and mistakes Mapicc’s horns for a halo.
Another infinity to be considered: Player life. There are players of legend, there for risen and fallen kingdoms, older than anyone should have the right to be. But there are also spawnerdowners, who load up a world and take a spot of infinity, and then quit the game of life, the long dream, barely after they start.
The time that the universe has been around is not hard to find. 13,187,563,478 years, 117 days, 16 hours, 23 minutes, 38 seconds, 10 deciseconds, 59 centiseconds– There’s infinity, again. Measurements.
But it’s not particularly hidden, is his point, that running tally of time in the layers of code. It’s barely even encrypted. Spoke knows for a fact that there is someone, in all of the infinite worlds and infinite creations, as old as the first picoyoctosecond of the universe. Why else would the universe exist, when they explicitly say that love is a key concept? Who would the universe love if not another?
Unlike the universe, Spoke can’t trust in players to keep themselves around. The universe will always believe in itself, but players are prone to forgetting what alive means.
Mapicc is 20 years, 22 days, 19 hours, 56 minutes, and 5 seconds old. A month ago, he forgot his birthday. April fifth. April fifth.
An infinity Spoke doesn’t want to explore: How much can he take?
An infinity Spoke doesn’t want to explore: How much can his best friend take?
The universe is on the back of a turtle. And under that turtle is another turtle. And under that one is another turtle. It’s turtles all the way down. At the bottom? More turtles. It’s a turtle tertulia!
It’s also infinity. Spoke learned that one at some point between duping and worldtearing, from someone who could see a lot more code than Spoke. He’s pretty sure it’s a joke, but he can’t really waste time and fall an infinite amount of years to check for turtles. He has food to eat, Mapicc to see, a void to fill much closer to home.
Mapicc rolls over, on top of Spoke.
“Stop being a dog,” Spoke complains, crushed into completion. If Mapicc keeps pressing like this, maybe they can flatten the hole in Spoke, maybe it’ll be 2D, and then Spoke can use it to land fully in the third dimension. Faraway aspirations. Pressure, however, does create diamonds.
“That’s dog-ist,” Mapicc tells him, with sun held between his horns. Oh wow. Oh wow.
“You’re dog-ist,” Spoke quips smartly, and shoves Mapicc off of him. Unfortunately, due to being pinned, he doesn’t have a lot of leverage, and Mapicc quickly bounces back.
“Okay fine, fuck you,” Mapicc says while grabbing Spoke’s arms and pushing them to the floor. Spoke isn’t sure how to feel when his brain clicks into place, as if being here, held down, is what he wants. He doesn’t. He wants to grab a star and use it to fill whatever he was made lacking. “I was gonna be nice, we could’ve sat in the sun and chilled, but we can do this too.”
Mapicc notably doesn’t grab Spoke’s wrists. That could be a blessing or a curse.
For an erroneous heartbeat, Spoke thinks that he could stay like this forever. The sun, held between Mapicc’s horns like a kitten in a scruff, brightens his vision, a pastel photopsia narrowing his world into a small cocoon.
There’s nothing to worry about when Mapicc is in control of him. Mapicc isn’t volatile like he is.
But that’s the fun of being himself, that unpredictability, that false infinite of possibilities– No one knows what he’s planning, he's the cat in Schrödinger's box. And if Mapicc takes control over all of Spoke, puppets him around, regulates, observes, then a decision has to be made. Poisoned, or alive? What is he planning? And worse, if Mapicc controls Spoke, then who’s gonna love Mapicc? And who’s gonna round out the tally when the universe closes in?
Spoke refocuses on Mapicc’s face, slightly twisted to worry, and then he twists like a slippery snake and bites Mapicc’s arm.
“Ow!” Mapicc hisses, letting go of a grinning Spoke. But Mapicc’s smiling too, he’s not hurt, he’s fine. And Spoke will never really hurt him, never ever. Or at least– not again, he won’t go invis and cart and he won’t push too much and he’ll never send Mapicc solo and– “You’re such a– Bro chilllll!”
“I’m so chill,” Spoke says quickly, stopping all his movement and staring up at Mapicc with big, bright eyes.
“No you are not, boy,” Mapicc calls out immediately, wiping Spoke’s spit off on the mysterious Mapicc-biter, whoever did that.
Spoke keeps staring. It makes Mapicc pause, sun scintillating behind a horn, because Spoke changed angles. The kaleidoscopic look is back, with the false infinite amount of colors.
What are horns but an incomplete halo? What is a halo if not a color wheel? What are colors if not light? And what is light if not infinite?
Mapicc is infinite, and that’s why the universe loves him. Mapicc is love, and that’s why the universe loves him.
Spoke is the exact opposite. He is a void, infinitely longing and forever ravenous. That’s why the universe doesn’t acknowledge him.
“Spoke?”
There are a lot of ways to die. Not a false infinite amount, but a lot. Spoke approaches an event horizon, a point of no return, which isn’t exactly infinite, but it does seem endless inside.
The veins in his body behave like lichtenberg figures, fractal patterns of lightning without the fulguration that makes lightning pretty. Spoke is an ugly, ugly infinity.
Unclosed loops, fractals, repeating numbers.
Measurement, singularities, and the thing he was created without.
Players are not created, they’re creators. They are a living piece of the universe that slipped away from the fabric of the rest, and used their love to fold a world. Personal, intrinsic, linked to them. Create New World?
Spoke’s first world was torn apart with a threadripper. He– The hole in his chest was as dense as a supernova, and he hadn’t learned how to suppress it. Spoke was not born, like a player. He left the fabric of the universe violently, tearing the soft shroud apart as he slid into consciousness, like a cat down curtains. The player tastes the universe, and tastes themself. Spoke tasted the universe, took a breath of his first world, and knew immediately that he was something other. Maybe he is not separate from every other thing, but he is wrong. Fundamentally incorrect, a zero somewhere where there should’ve been a one. A necessary sacrifice to balance things out.
Spoke could die in a very unique way, a way that a normally born player cannot achieve. He has the capacity to rip his own code apart. Take the line that links player to SpokeIsHere, and cut. He’s considered it. When people left him– When Spoke became a corpse chittering out a languished “mayy-pickk, mayy-pickk,” he considered it.
Tonight won’t be any different, apparently. The grand total of everything he’s ever loved is a three-strip technicolor movie pulling him away from the edge, taking the sword out of his hands and guiding him into a supportive hug.
The linking line taunts him, twanging in his chest to the tune of his heartbeat. SpokeIsHere has never been a natural player, he carved himself into one. He sewed the rope that makes him a player, and he’s regretted it every day of his life. With the link, he cannot return to the peacefulness of having nothing– Spoke is stuck in the long dream.
“Spoke,” the technicolor motion calls to him, red and blue and yellow and pink around the edges. Spoke looks up, meeting its eyes.
Infinite[adjective]: boundless, lasting, forever, inexhaustible
Examples: Unclosed loops, fractals, and spoke’s best friend
“Mapicc,” Spoke says quietly, and the shuffled colors fade away to the solid tan and red that marks Mapicc. Oh. Oh, he was looking through the wrong lens.
“What are you doing?” Mapicc asks, soft as ever. Spoke blinks, and furrows his eyebrows, looking down at his hands. He’s not–
“Oh,” Spoke realizes, with a sudden shallow wave of pain. He lifts his arms up, scratch marks all over them, like he fought a raccoon. “I don’t know.”
“You were holding a sword,” Mapicc comments, and starts gently guiding Spoke towards their bed. Oh. Oh, oh oh oh.
“I was gonna– I was gonna cut the rope.” He recalls, looking up at Mapicc.
“You were gonna cut the rope.” Mapicc repeats. Spoke nods and looks ahead, pressing into the space Mapicc leaves for him. “What does that mean?”
“The SpokeIsHere and Player one,” Spoke explains. Mapicc, unfortunately, is not a monster the universe should never have let live, and doesn’t understand what it means to literally build yourself a body.
“You need sleep,” Mapicc decides, which Spoke can agree with, shakily. He almost did it. He was– If Mapicc hadn’t– Spoke wants to apologize. He wants to tell Mapicc sorry, i was just curious, i just don’t know when enough is enough and i’m sorry. He doesn’t.
As Mapicc tucks them both in, Spoke thinks that, among other things, he and Mapicc are like the unstoppable force and immovable object. The aching abyss inside of him meets the flowing ocean of Mapicc’s love. If they knew each other from the first picoyoctosecond of Spoke’s life, maybe he wouldn’t have such a gap in his heart. From where they are, Spoke is the universe running away from itself, and Mapicc is the galaxies chasing him.
Spoke learns one more infinity, one Mapicc knew that he didn’t. Spoke learns to trust one more thing Mapicc says.
Maybe the universe doesn’t love Spoke, but Mapicc, infinite, endless, limitless; Does.
And his universe says “You don’t have to do everything alone.”
And his universe says “I love you.”
And his universe says “Goodnight, Spoke.”