Untitled Martin

Light/Dark

by Mason Cramer

For Josh

Thanks to the following people for their help in bringing this story to fruition:
OMD, Spriteguard, Mars, Phenomenonsense, Shovda, and Citrus for their feedback on my earlier drafts, and my wife for her help editing, formatting, and getting my thoughts in order.

I.

The alarm volume was so loud that it didn’t initially register as a noise. The room’s lights came on automatically. Martin was violently awake and scrambling around in his sheets, looking for the source. He mashed the buttons of his bedside clock until the cacophony stopped.

“Louie, this is the worst!” fumed Martin as he sat up. “The fake mushroom prank was at least creative, but the alarm clock jump-scare? That’s low.”

His last word clung to the air as he began to look around his subterranean bedroom.

“The f—?”

Everything was clean. Unexpectedly. Martin hadn’t been taking care of things this month.

It was eerily spotless, as though the floors, walls, and surfaces of his otherwise familiar space were polished down to the molecules by industrious trilobites with toothbrushes. The green metal pipe in the middle of the room supporting the ceiling somehow reflected more light than was present.

“Um. Okay. Cool, bro. Thanks?”

Martin shook his head and thought about what a polite jerk his younger brother was.

“Kind of impressive. He managed to do all this without waking me up. But there’s no way I’m falling for something cooked up by that noodle-brain!” Martin scoffed, remembering that it was typical for Louie to embed multiple layers in his pranks. 

Slowly, he peered over the side of the bed to check beneath. I stared back at him from the pure black void, but he couldn’t see me.

Martin put one foot onto the cold brick floor, then the other, moving cautiously.

“Where’d you put all my damn stuff?” he muttered as he noticed many of his possessions missing. His tool belt wasn’t on the floor where he’d left it. He flung open his closet doors and ducked, assuming something would pop out at him. It was empty and clean.

“LOUIS ORVILLE JUMPM’N I’LL KILL YOU!!” he roared, realizing he was stranded in just his red-and-white-spotted boxer shorts.

Furiously but carefully, Martin paced around the room looking for indications of hidden mayhem. He found only pristine surfaces and furniture.

He turned the faucet-shaped handle of his bedroom door, expecting all his possessions to be piled up in the hallway. But the door wouldn’t open, even when he kicked it forcefully.

After a few more moments of bewilderment, Martin noticed his bed. It was neat and tidy. The pillow was perfectly round, completely new-looking, but certainly his. He had definitely not made the bed as he’d gotten up.

Martin lept backward several feet.

“LOUIE, ENOUGH! BRO! FINE! YOU GOT ME!”

He stabilized his breathing and pictured Louie and their friend Todd suddenly appearing through a trapdoor. He wanted to yell at them first, then laugh together. He tried to reason out how the trick was being achieved. Something mechanical under the bed? He checked thoroughly and uncovered nothing.

“At least when he comes to explain himself I’ll be ready to bop him in the jaw,” growled Martin as he began doing small jabs and aerobics in the middle of the room.

“Think you’re so funny, huh?” he called, punching the air. “Where’s the hidden camera this tiiiiiii—”

Martin yelped in pain and doubled over. His fist had spontaneously struck a brown, wooden-looking box the size of his head, and about as high. He cradled his hand close to his chest. His fingers didn’t seem to be broken.

The box hung perfectly still in mid-air. Martin squinted and looked for wires, then approached uneasily. He waved both hands around it like a magician selling an illusion. It had no discernable support structure at all. He ran his hands across each finely-sanded edge. It couldn’t be shoved a millimeter in any direction. It didn’t emit any mechanical sounds, nor did it echo when he knocked.

Concerningly, small eye-like slits were cut into the box on its sides, as though it contained a great mass peering out. The cuts emitted a faint glow of colorless light. The pain in his hand disappeared immediately as though it never happened, but Martin was too preoccupied to notice.

He inched backward without taking his eyes off the box, afraid of what might happen if he stopped monitoring this violation of physics in his bedroom. He waited to catch it swaying, but it merely hovered unflinchingly, showing no sign that it was anything other than its apparent form.

“He’s actually a genius,” Martin thought. Beyond terrified, he was now thoroughly impressed. And chilly.

“Imagine inventing something like this and then just using it to screw with your older brother!” he called out loud. “Louie, come on. You win,” he added quietly, without a hint of anger. “I mean it! You win! Show me how this thing works! I give up Louie, come on!”

There was, unfortunately, no reply.

Homemade gadgets were commonplace in the lives of the two brothers. Martin thought back to the time Louie had built a go-kart out of scrap in their backyard. He remembered how excited they’d been to test it out together. It was a fond memory of a clear blue summer morning, despite the eventual crash.

Louie was intense but he was a true friend. Martin believed he could rely on him, even when things seemed dangerous. He crouched underneath the box to examine it from below, trusting that it wasn’t rigged to fall on him. 

It could potentially be a puzzle-box that Louie wanted him to solve, but there seemed to be no latch or mechanism for opening it. There were no tooling marks and no visible joints on the corners.

Martin thought he’d try throwing his alarm clock at it to see what would break. As he was turning to stand up, he bumped into something else.

A new box had appeared to his right, this time accompanied by a startling sharp ringing sound. He instinctively jolted in a different direction.

The air became solid as he touched it. Wherever he reached out his hands, more boxes appeared with more loud rings. Quickly he was surrounded, pinned in a crouching position on the floor with walls all around.

The blocks glowed faintly throughout this new darkness.

“LOUIE!” he bellowed in disbelief. It was a cry for help.

He took a breath and calmed himself down again, using anger this time instead of brotherly love.

“I’m gonna give you such a swirly, Louie, you really will have shit for brains.”

The blocks wouldn’t move. Squatting in this confined space was increasingly uncomfortable. He spun himself around awkwardly and as he did something began to happen: Martin’s feet were sinking into the floor.

It was hard to see in the darkness, but Martin was sure it was happening. He was gradually descending into solid bricks. Every time he tried to spin himself around, he sank a little further. It felt like stepping through pebbly tar, but far more unpleasant. He struggled to pull out his feet, but only succeeded in accelerating his corkscrew motion.

Gravity tugged Martin inward now, burying him up to his waist. The tingling feeling in his legs took on a more painful dimension. The bricks rejected his presence although they dragged him deeper. He thought the sudden pressure would rip him in half.

Then a resistance beneath him broke. His entire body slipped downward and his head vanished below the floor.

Martin briefly saw indescribable shapes and colors before losing consciousness. One reflection remained in the resulting shadows.

II.

“Oh, Martin! Thank the stars you’re finally here!”

Todd scampered lightly across the sand as he cried out.

“I thought for sure you were a goner!”

“Todd? What the hell? How the hell—?”

This was all Martin could manage for a reply as he struggled to stand. He’d been unconscious for a brief eternity, and now his eyes were having trouble adjusting to the overwhelming new daylight. 

Martin found himself transported to a large and empty beach. His clothes had reappeared, and his hat was sticking out of the ground nearby. A twinkling cloud of golden-white particles took flight as he brushed the sand from his face and overalls.

On his left, the ocean stretched out to become the sky. On his right, smooth mossy boulders formed a wall enclosing the area. The air was full of the waves’ watery static.

Todd’s voice was getting louder as he got closer, and Martin realized he was shouting the same thing over and over.

“Oh, Martin! Thank the stars you’re finally here!”

When he got within a few feet, Todd stopped. He stood in place, crossed his arms, and smiled at Martin serenely.

“What. Are. You. Doing?” demanded Martin cooly. It was time for the big reveal, and this was little comfort.

Todd continued to stare at Martin with vague anticipation. Then he began to flicker in and out of sight.

“What the hell are you doing?!” Martin repeated with more desperation. “Where’s Louie?! This is way over the top, guys. WAY over the line!”

Todd smiled on.

“Talk to me!” Martin cried, scattering a nearby flock of birds.

The word ‘talk’ had a piercing effect on Todd, as though it were the only one he’d heard.

He relaxed his posture and stopped smiling, but continued to flicker.

He glanced around nervously, as though he didn’t know where he was.

“You’re talking to me??” he squeaked.

“Yes I’m talking to you!” Martin snarled derisively. “Who else would I be talking to?” He gestured broadly at the general emptiness.

Todd appeared to be repulsed by the whole situation. He quivered. His eyes became frantic.

“Get back!” He chirped aggressively. “Don’t come any closer! You’re not Martin!”

Martin was finished. He vaulted forward and shoved Todd as hard as he could. Todd stumbled backward like a mannequin but didn’t go down. Instead, he began to flail erratically while his face reassumed an uncanny smile. His neck and limbs were bending in short, impossible bursts of movement. His disembodied voice issued forth as a grotesque pulsing:

“Martin! Thank thank the stars you’re finfinfinfinfinfinfin.”

He made a low humming sound that wasn’t language.

“Thought for sure you were a goonnnnn—”

Then he froze into one position, an absurd caricature of his body.

“Oh my!” Todd exclaimed in raspy distortion. “This isn’t right! I’m notnotnot allowed to be here!”

Todd flickered harder. He turned completely blue. Then pieces of his body began to detach entirely. He became a swirling cloud of randomly recombining elements of himself, which became a writhing mass of color and form.

Martin ran in terror.

Another brief eternity passed before he lost his breath and had to stop.

He sat down below one of the mossy boulders that made up the wall behind the beach, horrified and miserable. He waited in silence for something to happen. Nothing did.

Possibly, this was a vivid nightmare he couldn’t escape. Or, maybe Louie had finally broken the laws of physics. Martin thought it more likely that he was dreaming, or in some kind of coma. Maybe he was dead.

“It really could be,” he thought aloud in wonder, to check his voice. “Something actually happens when you die. You go, uh, here. I guess?”

It was fascinating to consider, despite the implications. A cloth obscuring reality was removed to reveal larger enigmas.

Martin realized how devastating it would be for Louie if a prank had really killed him. Instead of feeling angry, Martin just wanted to comfort and forgive his brother. It hadn’t been intentional. He knew Louie better than that. Back when Louie tricked him into falling off a ladder, he’d hidden a trampoline in the bushes beforehand. Something had gone massively wrong this time.

Martin didn’t feel hungry, and he wasn’t in any pain. He wondered if those feelings would return soon, as though that would prove everything was fake. He noted that he was certainly out of breath. The salty humidity clung to his skin and clothes, compounded by a slow, soggy breeze against his face. He bit his tongue and pinched his arm. Clearly, he still had a physical body of some sort. He closed his eyes tightly and shook his head, trying to force himself to wake up, but reality persisted as it was. High above a few wispy clouds, the sun glared down angrily.

Martin had never thought very deeply about life’s unanswerable mysteries. Machinery compelled him more than the universe — and made more sense. He’d always been able to reason out engineering problems by trying to understand how the whole system fit together. He could always find the missing piece or the right tool for the job.

Here, however, there was nothing to inspect or understand. 

He couldn’t see over the top of the rock wall. It ran parallel to the beach, unbroken in either direction. He thought about trying to climb up for a better view, but the mossy boulders looked unsafe, slippery in some places and jagged in others. Perhaps he could still get injured here.

“Can you die when you’re dead?” he thought. He decided not to risk it for the time being.

He couldn’t see Todd’s body anymore, or hear the unearthly sounds it made. Martin didn’t know if he’d simply run too far away, or if it had vanished. He didn’t want to go back and check, for fear of disintegrating himself.

It had, in fact, vanished.

Up in the sky, a few seagulls cried news to each other about some fish. Martin only heard it as bird squawks. Gibberish words.

At last, he started walking around. He touched the water with his hands to see if it was real and thought about trying to swim out to sea. He was a decent swimmer. He could hold his breath for a long time.

But then out of the corner of his eye, Martin noticed something that hadn’t been there before. Part of the wall was no longer made of rocks. It was now a flat, reflective window filled with bottomless darkness, yet there seemed to be movement close to the surface.

Fighting his fear to feed his curiosity, Martin tiptoed forward and put his hand up to the surface of the void. It was perfectly smooth. He tapped lightly. It made a low, hollow chime.

I put my thumb up against the glass.

“Oh, wow,” I sighed. “This worked perfectly.”

Martin gasped at the sound of my voice and half-inhaled a small insect flying by at precisely that moment. He coughed and spit it out.

This activated the last piece of the arbitrary code I’d been injecting, and I stepped out of the barrier onto the beach.

III.

“Hi!” I said. “I realize I seem pretty strange to you. My body doesn’t exactly correspond to your ideas about what people look like.” I appeared as though I were rotoscoped. Even when standing still, my outlines faded and blended, sometimes seeming to skip a few frames. My long, messy hair danced oddly in the breeze.

“L-Louie?”

“Heh, no. I’m not Louie,” I said softly with a warm grin. “I know you’re pretty confused right now. You’re Martin, correct?”

Martin nodded apprehensively without taking a step closer.

“Thought so. Well, I’m God. My name is Mason, it means ‘builder.’”

“You’re God?” asked Martin. His sharp blue eyes met mine directly, like a test. He squinted as though trying to peer through waves of heat.

“Honestly? No. But it’ll be easier to understand things if I introduce myself that way. For all intents and purposes as it relates to you — yes, I am God.”

“So I’m dead? Because I seem fine. I could be dreaming or something.”

“Oh, no! You’re not dead! I try to keep that from happening to you, if I can. No, quite the opposite! You’re alive right now!”

“I’m…alive?”

“Yes! Right here and now! At least as much as I can make you. We’ve done some pretty deep coding to get this to happen. At both the hardware and the literary level! Honestly it was pretty easy. I’m sorry I haven’t come to talk with you sooner! It didn’t really occur to me. Oh—” I paused. I was getting too excited. “Oh, I’m sorry. Wow.”

Martin slumped down onto the sand. He put his hands against his face, attempting to obscure his uncontrollable tears.

“Oh heh, yeah…” I was embarrassed. “This is a lot for you to take in, huh? Hey. Let me show you something.”

I made a round wooden table appear, and two comfortable beach chairs. The air became wiggly for a moment as it coalesced into its new, solid form. I made a large red-and-white-spotted umbrella for shade. It popped into existence with a soft, reassuring thud. I put some blueish-green drinks in glasses with ice for us. The fruit scent contrasted with the pervasive smell of salt in a pleasant way. I sat down and turned my chair to face the waves.

“Come on. Sit down and get some rest,” I said, pitching it as more of a gentle question than a command. “Nothing here’s going to hurt you. I’m not here to cause more pain.”

“You caused all this weird stuff today?” asked Martin. He slowly got to his feet and examined the table skeptically, bracing himself for something startling. 

“That’s right. I’m not always a kind God, Martin, but I like to think I care. I think that’s why I’m allowed to be here in the first place — because I care about what all this stuff means. So come and chat with me, little Video Man.”

“What did you call me? Video?”

“I’m just being silly. Let’s relax. You’ve had a long day.”

Martin timidly eased into the seat across from me. He was profoundly exhausted but took some comfort from the fact that I wasn’t flickering or screeching at him like Todd. We sipped our blueish-green drinks in silence for some time. The drink made Martin feel slightly calmer, like something vaguely normal was happening. The light on the water glistened through our glasses, casting bright dancing reflections onto our faces. We watched the seagulls out in the distance. Finally, Martin spoke.

“You’re…really God?”

“Well, yes and no. I’m not really God, just your God in particular.”

“You’re my God? Just mine? And you’re also not God and I’m not dead, I’m alive?”

“Correct. I created your reality and brought you to life. I can do anything I want!” I made a broad, sweeping gesture at the surrounding emptiness. 

Martin examined my strange-looking form and considered how I’d been able to create our table and chairs out of nothing. He adopted the posture of a caged animal, thinking of all the calamities God could visit upon him.

“So are you going to…?” his voice trailed off into dark uncertainty.

“No,“ I said. “I’m not going to.” I hoped this would ease his fears.

“Are you going to actually explain anything?” asked Martin, as though that’s what he’d been meaning to say. Aggravated with my haziness, he kicked a clump of sand, looking for a more solid answer underneath.

“I’m trying,” I replied soothingly. “We’re operating on a lot of levels that need balanced, so let’s start with the basics. You’re Martin Wilbur Jumpm’n Junior. You’re a machinist who lives in the Fungus Empire. You have a younger brother named Louie and you build contraptions together. You have a long-time friend who is a Fungus person named Todd. Does that sound correct?”

“Yeah,” said Martin. “What did you do to him?”

“Todd? That was a joke for The Audience. They’ll get it.”

“A joke for who?”

“The Audience. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Todd’s perfectly fine. What you saw was an illusion.” I tried to smile, but it made me appear malicious.

“So where’s Louie?” he asked with an uncomfortable glare, scanning the rocks behind us and the horizon beyond, trying to hold on to an evaporating sliver of hope that his brother was about to jump out and yell, “Gotcha!”

“He’s also unharmed,” I replied, dodging the substance of the question.

Martin whipped his hat off aggressively and began to twist it between his hands. “Prove it!” he snapped. “Prove Todd and Louie are okay!”

I scooped up some of the golden-white sand and held it forward for him to see. In my palm, it became a swirling vapor of colorful, jagged shapes.

“They’re here in the code,” I said with reverence. “So are you and I. That’s also why I look so strange — because the code is working overtime trying to render me.” I returned the vapor to the ground, where it once again became golden-white sand.

Martin twisted his hat tighter, his eyes wide with mute anxiety. He could only rationalize my demonstration by assuming that I was implying Todd and Louie were dead. Finally, he whispered fearfully,

“What is this place?”

I tried to speak calmly so he wouldn’t feel frightened, but worried it was a losing battle.

“We’re inside a video game right now,” I whispered back. “Specifically, we’re in a large portion of the ROM that I blanked out and remapped.

“What’s a video game?” Martin spoke the words as though they might be cursed.

“For you? A lot of things!” I chuckled in spite of the seriousness of the moment. I couldn’t help it. “Martin, I come from another reality. Inside that reality we created your Universe and named it the Video Game. The joke was that your game started crashing because it couldn’t handle you coming to life. It’s really corny.”

Martin didn’t know the word ‘corny.’ He thought it meant a combination of ‘complex’ and ‘thorny,’ which was true for him. In any case, he wasn’t laughing.

“Sounds like you killed Todd for a joke,” he reasoned.

“Todd’s not dead, Martin.” I replied firmly. “It’s a thin line, I’ll admit, but I assure you he experienced neither pain nor death. I know you won’t understand this part, but I was hijacking the ‘Todd Greeting’ animation subroutine and not his player character data. That wasn’t really him. The code was trying to respond to the ‘talk’ prompt you gave it.”

Martin didn’t reply. His eyes relaxed into brooding mistiness. It was too much nonsense to process all at once. He was increasingly bothered by the overwhelming amount of nothingness in our surroundings. Between the brightness, the heat, and the water’s constant droning, it was hard to focus.

“Why are you doing all this?” he finally asked, feeling the weight of being singled out by God for this ordeal. His voice was both meek and threatening. 

“That’s a fair question,” I said. “I’ve been thinking it over but I still don’t have a good answer. I couldn’t just bring you to life and then expect you to go it alone. So I came here to explain things. Although I’m realizing that this was more for my amusement than yours. Maybe gods are shitty like that.”

A few birds above the water swooped down to grab some fish as Martin’s emotional logic grappled with impossible challenges. He looked at his drink but didn’t touch it. Until now, he hadn’t noticed that his glass was refilling itself, spawning back when he wasn’t looking. Unsettled, he thought it might be poison, but it was just a delicious blueish-green drink I made up.

“So, none of this is real,” he said mockingly to the birds. It was the only conclusion he could wrap his head around.

“This is your reality.” I yawned. “It’s as real as you are. Do you feel yourself to be real?”

“Yes,” said Martin as though he were a delinquent schoolboy in trouble with the principal.

“Stabilized base reality.” I nodded. “I’m trying to tell you the truth, Martin, but the truth has many layers and it’s difficult to comprehend. We can get to the heart of it now, though. Of course you know what a story is?”

“Of course,” replied Martin sarcastically.

“Well, you’re a character in a story. That’s what all of this is. Since you woke up today, everything has been taking place in a story I’m writing. In my story I brought you to life, then hacked myself into your video game universe to come and have this chat with you. The truth is that I made you and your entire Universe out of thin air just this morning. There has never been anything else except what’s been going on since the moment you woke up today.”

Martin bolted upright in his chair.

“That’s impossible,” he spat, crossing his arms and digging his feet into the sand evasively. “That can’t be true!” He pounded his glass on the table, expecting it to shatter along with my absurdities. “I was already alive! The world already existed! Then I woke up this morning and everything started going crazy.” He pounded the glass again but it still did not crack. It wouldn’t break unless I willed it.

“You simply have memories,” I replied, matching his anger with a stern schoolmaster tone. “Memories that might not be true. How could you tell?”

Martin paused to consider, but found it impossible to doubt the countless memories he possessed of a world that made sense to him.

“I gave you memories of your whole life up until this point. I’m sorry for all those ones of your brother playing pranks on you. That was machinery for the story. Gods are shitty like that.”

I wasn’t presenting myself as considerately as I wanted, but I didn’t know how else to explain things. I thought somebody like Martin would appreciate an understanding of the fundamentals. Instead, he was getting increasingly agitated. I was sort of making him agitated, naturally, since only I can make anything happen here at all. I was also trying to listen to him and figure out how he really felt. It’s difficult for anyone to describe their self-awareness.

“I’m real,” Martin muttered defensively. “I’m real. You can’t take that away.”

“Correct,” I agreed. “I think, therefore I am. You’re starting to get it. Sometimes I don’t make sense to you, Martin, and that’s because I’m always talking to both you and The Audience at the same time.”

“What’s The Audience?” Martin demanded.

“The Audience are people in my Universe who are reading this story right now. They’re watching you and I right now in their minds. As long as we’re here, they can see us. We’re real, and we’re here on our beach at this table underneath our red-and-white-spotted umbrella, sipping our blueish-green drinks.”

I let those words float away on the breeze. A coconut-sized sea urchin washed up briefly on the shore before the next wave carried it away.

“It’s a great and stupid trick I’m playing,” I declared. “I say to The Audience that you, Martin Wilbur Jumpm’n Junior, are truly alive and self-aware, and invite them to believe me. If I’ve done my job well, they’ll play the game of acknowledging that you and your Universe are real. That makes it real enough.”

I sounded vaguely triumphant. 

“They can see us here?” Martin only half-understood me.

“Here and now exactly,” I said.

“And you’re making everything happen?”

“I am.”

“Then how about just putting everything back the way it was?” Martin petitioned.

“Doing that would turn off your mind. There are consequences for being alive,” I replied gravely.

This wasn’t satisfying or comprehensible.

“Look out and just breathe,” I suggested. I subtly turned down the humidity to make him more comfortable. Martin’s thoughts began to drift into spaces not confined by language as he focused on his breathing, waiting for it to become painful or have it magicked away somehow. Instead he found only a persistent self-awareness that could not be interrupted.

IV.

“So…why me?” Martin finally asked. Not sadly. Not angrily.

“Well, that’s the interesting part,” I began slowly. “You’re you in particular for a lot of reasons. Some of those reasons are parasocial on my part. I realize that’s a word you don’t know, but it speaks to how it isn’t quite fair that I did all this, and for that I’m sorry. But we can’t go back now.”

I paused to let him react however he wanted. Martin waited like a lost dog for me to tell him why he, specifically, existed. His gaze seemed to look beyond me, searching for something else to hold onto besides my lecture.

I had trouble deciding where to begin. Using more gibberish words to list out all the reasons wasn’t ideal.

“It comes down to the need for context,” I said at last. “I assembled you out of pieces borrowed from a big, foggy net of context and reference that connects both of our Universes in one larger structure. Context can show distinction, and changes in context can create new ideas. Before you came to life, you existed as a concept larger than yourself, a form I didn’t create. You had no body or mind.”

I pointed at him.

“I reached into those concepts and created you, Martin Wilbur Jumpm’n Junior, specifically. There’s a word for it in my Universe that won’t make sense to you: fanfiction.”

Martin had picked up a seashell and was turning it around in his hands. He dropped it when he noticed me pointing at him.

“Sure,” he sighed. He hadn’t really been listening. I realized his question was more rhetorical than I was treating it.

“Why you?” I offered excitedly, “Because I like you, Martin. I could have made you anybody, but I chose to create you out of things I particularly enjoy! You don’t have to be you and if you weren’t, you wouldn’t even know it! You’re you because of all the things about yourself that you don’t realize. All the things that’ve happened to you since you came to life make you distinct.”

“Really?” He asked sarcastically from behind a dark mood.

“Them’s the breaks,” I said.

Martin didn’t understand the expression. I let his mind work with it. Far out toward the horizon, a pod of dolphins was breaking up the water. We both watched them for a while with interest; however, Martin’s emotions continued to sink into deeper and more depressed territory, his mind buckling under the strain of information.

“So let me see,” he said dully. “Let’s recap.”

I nodded and smiled for him to continue.

“Nothing existed, except some kind of fog. Then, you created the Universe, brought me to life and came inside. Everything I know is a lie.”

“You make it real by being real,” I interjected.

Martin scowled at me, believing I was just messing with him some more, or lying.

“You made me up, and you put me through all this awful stuff,” he accused. The certainty he’d found at the bottom of his depression was allowing anger to grow like mold. “You’re doing this for The Audience. You all like these cruel jokes.”

He had made some quick leaps in understanding but could not clear the vast existential chasm that was presented. It was challenging to understand that The Audience weren’t merely reality-watchers, they were reality-makers.

Martin continued. “You brought me to life and created everything just to torture me? Just to tell me impossible things that you know I don’t understand? You did all this for fun and I’m the joke.” It was a question phrased as a statement.

“That’s a truth in every Universe.” I replied solemnly. “The joke is always on you. I think all we can do is get the joke.”

I immediately realized that I’d taken my schoolmaster persona too far.

Martin boiled over with rage.

“Fuck you,” Martin snapped. “Fuck you and your whole stupid Universe.”

“What are you gonna do about it?” I retorted. “Ah-ha! You’ll fight and kill God, right?”

“Fuck you,” Martin barked again. The power of the word kept him angry. “You’re not a God. You said so yourself.”

I could have done anything I wanted in response. I could’ve transported us to any location at any time. I could have visited any conceivable injury or blessing upon him. I could’ve changed his mind into any shape and made him believe anything I put there. I could’ve parted the sea or changed the color of the sky. I didn’t do any of these things. I decided to tell my truth.

“Martin, you’re helping me say something. Perhaps I’m saying it badly or confusingly, but you and I and The Audience are all participating in this story together.”

“What is it, then?! What are we all saying?!” roared Martin.

He stood up from his chair, kicked it backwards, then put up his fists, ready to attack me. It was offensive to him that his life could be conjured up simply for the amusement and edification of forces beyond his control. Nobody could blame him there. My intentions were being revealed to be shallow. Martin’s anger was justified.

“I had some things I wanted to say about the nature of the story,” I replied weakly. “I had some things I wanted to explore about reality, about the nature of gods and characters. Creating things makes me happy. I like to come up with clever strings of words that make people laugh or think.”

Despite my lofty intentions, I was feeling terribly foolish. 

Martin felt cornered by the absurdity and smallness of my purpose. It seemed to him like a trivial and cruel reason for bringing someone to life. He worried and wondered what I’d do next. Heck, I didn’t even know. Still prepared for a fight, he suddenly tossed his glass of blueish-green drink at the ocean. It sailed through the air gracefully, sparkling as it caught the light. The ice and blueish-green drink left a sleek trail as the glass splashed into the surf.

“I don’t want to be in your fucking story,” Martin said through clenched teeth. “I didn’t ask for this. You said it’s not fair.”

  I, too, was cornered. He wasn’t wrong. None of us asked to become alive, but repeating that fact wouldn’t be much comfort now.

Inwardly afraid of what might happen if he really tried to assault me, Martin instead stomped off down the beach, trying and failing to flip over our table before leaving. He wouldn’t really get anywhere; the shoreline went on forever like a big treadmill.

I sat still and watched until he was only a speck in the distance. My rotoscoped body bent on and off model with the whims of the breeze. I repositioned his chair with telekinesis and watched the ocean. I thought about all the absurd and painful things that had happened to me in my life. Truthfully, I wouldn’t react much differently if I was in his position.

I didn’t need to return through the TV screen portal, so I made the rocks behind me into a mural that stretched up to the sky. Martin was completely out of sight by the time I finished.

The only folks left at that point were The Audience. Martin occasionally thought about them watching him, but he also thought that he wasn’t really doing anything interesting. It was a comfortably uncomfortable stalemate.

He figured that, at some point, I would lose interest and end the story. He oscillated between welcoming an opportunity to stop existing, and dreading it. He made several unsuccessful attempts at climbing the rock wall enclosing the beach in order to escape. It was impossible, though. He couldn’t maintain a foothold no matter where he stepped. There was nothing out there anyhow.

He eventually calmed down and tried to reflect.

Martin spent a lot of time thinking about his memories. He thought about his father teaching him how to use a hammer when he wasn’t tall enough to see over the workbench, and his mother teaching him how to boil pasta while he stood on top of a chair to see over the counter. He thought about growing up together with Louie, their fights and their triumphs. He thought about the day that the two of them had first met Todd. Everything was sharp and clear. It was all fake, though, he reminded himself. Or was it?

“You make it real by being real.” 

My words rolled around in his mind but he didn’t know how to apply them.

By and by, we both wanted resolution, and Martin correctly assumed that the only way out was to understand himself and his situation more completely. He turned and walked back toward the table (it wasn’t very far).

V.

“It’s been a while,” I said pleasantly as Martin sat back down in his beach chair beneath the red-and-white-spotted umbrella. Martin nodded. He wasn’t used to speaking aloud because he’d just spent a timeless dream walking across the beach. He had been trying to understand the things we’d talked about, as well as trying to fight against them.

“Hm,” he mumbled.

“I’m glad you came back. Do you like my mural?”

I showed him the wall that stretched up to the sky. On it, I had drawn images of my real memories — every single one. It was beautiful and ugly and a billion other gibberish words all together. Martin was unfazed.

“Good job,” he said flatly.

“Thanks.”

We didn’t look very long before turning our attention toward the water.

Martin found his voice. A swig of the respawned blueish-green drink somewhat invigorated him. He didn’t think it was poison anymore.

“So what was all of this?” He started. “At least from the time I woke up today, I was real. Real things were happening.”

The word ‘real’ was a question he was trying on for size. I didn’t reply so he would continue his train of thought.

“It was scary and painful, to be honest, but everything is going on inside your story. You come from a Universe where you’re not God, but you have the power to create my Universe and be a god.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I’ve been thinking, too, that I could have done things differently. I don’t deny that I’m a lousy God for you. What I’ve done, I did selfishly. There are many un-created people in that big fog you came from, but I liked you in particular before you even came to life. That hardly gives me the right to do what I did, though.”

He was content with this apology because he couldn’t think of another option.

“You were cruel,” he said.

“I apologize,” I replied. “Some cruel things are facts, so I don’t want to add more. People ask God to forgive them, but perhaps God should be the one asking for our forgiveness. I’m sorry I brought you to life, Martin, but are you sorry about it?”

Martin shot me a quizzical expression. My question had struck a chord with him, and he recognized its implications.

“All I really have to offer you, at this point, is knowledge. I didn’t set up a lot for us to do here.” I gestured broadly at the general emptiness. “We could do whatever you want, but maybe you’ve realized that it would really just be me picking it out for you?”

“You’re making everything,” said Martin in resignation. “Does that mean I have no free will?”

“Let’s take a walk, you and I. Just for something to do.” I replied.

I caused our glasses of blueish-green drink to hover alongside us in the air. I hoped that Martin would find some amusement in these little magic tricks, but he didn’t seem particularly interested.

As we strolled along the beach, I made images from my memory mural come to life as silent holograms, phantom shadows of the past projecting themselves onto the sand in front of the ocean.

“These are my memories, Martin.” I explained as we walked through a mockup of the old party house on Barrington Drive. My friends were seated around the table, drinking from bottles and playing cards. A younger version of me was perched on top of the refrigerator, scribbling furiously in a notebook.

“Sometimes I wonder if having good possibilities is more valuable than having free will,” I said. “If the things we did were predetermined, but we knew the outcomes would be good, would we complain as much? Unfortunately, they might not be good.”

“You’re not really answering my question,” Martin scolded as we passed by a man and a woman having a heated argument.

“You have free will, but when you use it, I can’t see you,” I replied firmly. “If nobody sees you, you’ll turn back into fog. That’s reality.”

Martin didn’t like this reply, but couldn’t articulate his discomfort.

“I see myself,” he said defensively.

“I see me too,” I concurred as I watched myself kneeling beside a gravestone.

Insufficient as they were, Martin was becoming eager for new answers. We paused beside a hologram of a large tree. Several kittens were scampering around in the weeds growing beneath it. The sound of the ocean and the splash of foam in the surf didn’t frighten these tiny memories.

“Can you explain more about what’s happened to me today?” Martin asked.

“I can,” I said politely. “When you came to life, you went through some references. Things that The Audience already knew about. They can make sense of it all because they have access to a larger contextual framework. It was a bunch of jokes, but they made you specific. You’re the one who experienced those things, and nobody else. You needed to be specific in order to exist at all. Would you like me to explain them to you? The blocks that appeared? Falling through the floor? Todd disintegrating,or the portal that I came through? To you, it was senseless and bewildering, but not to The Audience.”

“No,” Martin replied coolly after a moment of determined introspection. “I understand them in my own way, but I wouldn’t get the big picture, right? I have plenty of memories of bad things happening and I didn’t understand why. Today wasn’t all that different. Besides,” Martin sighed, “The Audience who is watching, this is all for them.” It was a question posed as a sentence.

“We’re all participating together,” I replied. “To say what needs to be said.”

This was rather hurtful to Martin. He’d wanted to ask, “What about me?” Instead, he examined his sandy brown shoes. A clump of seaweed had lodged itself inside one of the laces. He shuffled his feet, unsuccessfully trying to remove it.

“But what about you?” I asked, reading his mind.

Martin looked up at me with an expression that was a balanced blend of hopefulness and fear. I gestured to another hologram of two best friends playing a video game together. Their small television was perched on the edge of a sink filled with unwashed dishes.

“There you are. On the screen in my memories. It doesn’t look like your concept of yourself, but notice the similar clothing. That’s you before you came to life. That’s what you look like in my universe.” The tiny, pixelated man suddenly slipped off an edge and plummeted into a bottomless pit only to reappear a moment later, seemingly unharmed. Martin couldn’t help but be enraptured by the vision. He didn’t fully understand what he was witnessing, but instinct pointed him at the truth of my words.

“I’m showing you all these things to demonstrate that you and I are not as different as you might think,” I said. “We both have good and bad memories. But you have something that I don’t — an explanation from the one who put you through it all. And an apology. At the end of this, I promise I’ll make you as happy and peaceful as I can.”

“Why didn’t you do that in the first place?” Martin squeaked.

“Well, you needed to be created in the first place. Stories need an Audience, and audiences need flow and structure. I couldn’t start at the finale, but as the writer of this story I can give you whatever kind of ending you want. I’m going to let you decide. I can tell The Audience that’s what happened and it will become true.”

Martin looked at something he couldn’t see beyond the waves.

“You might as well be God,” he sighed.

I allowed the hologram memories to dissipate like thin colorful smoke. Our wooden table, comfortable chairs, and our red-and-white-spotted umbrella gently materialized in their place. Martin took a seat before me, looking beyond the horizon with pensive anticipation.

“I’m only God of a very small sandbox,” I said as I took my own seat. “This might not affect anything in my Universe. The Audience might not even like our story.”

“What happens if they don’t like it?” Martin asked fretfully.

“Nothing,” I assured him. “I don’t have any amazing powers in my Universe, and neither do they. Here, I can create tables and murals and delicious blueish-green drinks out of nothing. Back in my world, I can’t. I’m not a god at all.”

“What’s your world like?” asked Martin. He leaned toward me with a flash of real friendship. He hadn’t understood the larger context of the memories I’d shown him, but the parallels between us were clearer.

“That’s hard to explain because I’ll need to use words that you won’t understand. Your Universe doesn’t give you a frame of reference for them, so it would sound like gibberish to you.”

“But you could just make me understand,” Martin stated astutely.

“I could, but we must obtain understanding as ourselves if we want to stay ourselves.”

“Don’t you make up all the rules here anyhow?” Martin asked, somewhat pleadingly. “Why did you make everything this way?” 

It was my turn to shrug.

“Specificity is the heart of differentiation, and differences are how we perceive things. It didn’t have to happen this way exactly, but it needed to happen some way, or it wouldn’t happen at all. Believe it or not, there are natural laws I have to follow, even here.”

I resisted this change in topic and pushed the conversation back a step.

“My Universe has good things and bad things. People are always concerned that the balance of good and bad things might be upset in favor of the bad. Nobody can agree on a comprehensive list of all the good or bad things, either, but some are more obvious than others. Your world is nicer than mine,” I said conclusively. “You haven’t experienced nonsense things like warfare.”

“So God comes from a shitty world,” mused Martin. The knowledge was giving him an unexpected sense of hopefulness, even power. 

“God comes from a shitty world,” I agreed. “That probably goes a long way to explain why we create things like this. We make worlds like yours nicer than ours so we won’t feel as bad about the one we have to live in. Although, my world also has lots of things that you do understand, like friendship, love, and passion. It’s just far more complicated out there, as I’m sure you’ve realized by now.”

“Do you have an Audience, like I do?” Martin asked.

“Some people think we do, and a lot of others don’t,” I replied. “Gibberish words like ‘religion.’”

“Well, what do you think?” he wanted to know.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t know everything. Maybe time is our Audience. Sometimes, I wonder if my life is really just a big game being played at some interdimensional AGDQ.”

“What’s AGDQ?”

“A type of Audience,” I said with a sly wink. “A joke for our Audience.”

Martin was content not to understand me on this one.

VI.

 I made the daylight on our beach begin to dim. A roaring red-and-orange sunset spread shadows across the small dunes. The wind picked up a little as it cooled down. A mouse scampered out from its sleeping-place among the rocks and sniffed the air. The waves rolled in gently, changing the shoreline subtly each time. Here and there, sand crabs scurried in and out of their tiny, identical holes

“We have a saying in my world,” I mused. “As above, so below. It reflects our hunch that things are more or less the same in all directions. But I think the reciprocal of that statement is more important — as below, so above. People are always looking up at bigger things and hoping to find answers there, except big things are hard to apprehend and study. If the reciprocal were true, they could study small things and get the same results. Those things are easy to come by.”

“I understand some of that, but I don’t get your point,” Martin admitted.

“I was talking to The Audience, really. They might think I’m being pretentious, but that’s okay. My point was that nobody like me has ever visited my Universe to tell us the things I’m telling you. We just have to make educated guesses.”

“Where did you come from in your Universe?” Martin asked.

“I randomly came to life one day too.” I replied. “But I don’t have someone offering to let me choose how my story ends. You do. Have you thought any more about that?”

Martin allowed himself a grin. It was inviting to think about choosing his ending. Ideas made from novel combinations of his memories flashed through his mind. He envisioned all sorts of fantastic things and believed that I could provide them all.

As he dreamed, he got close to the realization that I was making his thoughts themselves happen, that whatever he ultimately picked for himself was me putting it there. I did not make him arrive at this destination.

As God, I had given him the blessed gift of knowing he’d been generated from something incomprehensibly larger than himself, combined with the subjective bliss of assuming that this Larger Thing wasn’t also controlling his destiny and inner life. We’d arrived at the part of the trick that needed to be obscured: the part where the Audience was invited to suspend their disbelief. I couldn’t know how they would choose to apply this power, but whatever they did could be said to be an intended part of the act.

Martin considered an ending for himself where I magically gave him full comprehension of my Universe. He would cease to be himself and become like me. I read his thoughts, but he assumed I was just being intuitive.

“Do you really want all my knowledge?” I offered tentatively.

“No,” Martin decided. “I wouldn’t really be me anymore, right? As below, so above?” It was a question phrased as a statement.

I chuckled. I hadn’t anticipated him using that one back at me.

“Smart,” I replied. “In the face of overwhelming mysteries, what we seem to want most is to be ourselves.”

We sat again in silence for an indeterminate amount of time. Shadows from the setting sun made the uneven surface of the beach appear to slowly move. The jagged, colorful shapes of the code could occasionally be seen flickering through the sand.

“I don’t know what kind of ending I want. I want to be happy, I guess. I want to see my brother and get some pasta. I want to hang out with Todd and go on adventures and build things like we always do,” said Martin with vague finality. “We’re all ourselves, right? Even the Audience?” It wasn’t really a question.

“Can’t disagree with that,” I replied. “I think, therefore I am. We’re all real.”

“And I think.”

“You think.” I said assuredly. “I made you think because I told the Audience you do in my story and thus made it a relative truth.”

“How does that even work? I mean…why even do this at all?” asked Martin.

I’d come up with better answers to these questions since the first time he’d asked. He was ready to understand them now. 

“Why? I thought it was fun. Sorry, but you’ll just have to live with the fact that you came into being for basically no reason, just a whim of mine. Honesty, nothing that exists knows why it exists. Would you like to just stop it all?”

“No.” Martin shook his head. “I want to know what else is out there.”

“Me too. I think that’s bold of you, Martin. Your curiosity about life is very admirable. As for how this all happened, well, we can all create small realities that we control fully from within. You can do the same thing. In my Universe, this phenomenon is called ‘imagination.’ However, you can’t write your own story and have it come true. We always have to go one world deeper than our own. These rules apply to both of us.”

Martin pictured a castle rising out of the sand. He and his brother ran in, fighting off turtles and sea creatures. He was saving a damsel in distress. Maybe they’d fall in love.

“Can’t you just keep making the story all about good things that happen for me?” asked Martin.

“If you want,” I replied, knowing that I ultimately wouldn’t make him choose this. “Stories can’t truly go on forever. By their nature they have boundaries, one of which is my own natural lifespan. When I stop writing, the story stops.” 

“Gods can die?” Martin asked with some astonishment.

“They do all the time,” I replied. “But there is a way for you to go on without me.”

This idea shimmered brightly in his mind. I adopted a more relaxed shade of my old schoolmaster tone.

“I told you before that I created you by plucking you out of a large fog of context that already existed. This fog’s true name is ‘collective consciousness.’ You can return there. You.” I placed the emphasis carefully. “Martin Wilbur Jumpn’n Junior didn’t exist in the collective consciousness before today, but now you do. I simply put you back into the ocean. Catch-and-release.”

I gestured broadly at the eternal waves. The far-off edge of that great, dark void was blurring into the color of the sky. A hologram memory of a father teaching his son how to cast a fishing line flickered briefly like a television channel.

Martin thought about this for a while and sipped his blueish-green drink. Concepts and gibberish words began to form into a vision as the sun tenderly crashed into the horizon. A glowing crescent moon rose into the sky above the water. It cast light onto neighboring clouds, illuminating the beach. 

Martin was arriving at the understanding and decision that I’d laid out for him without knowing the true extent of my hand in it all.

“There are a lot of them in the Audience, right?” he asked.

I nodded. “Infinitely many.”

“And they think, just like I do. They’re real, just like me.”

“That’s true.”

“Then let them pick. The Audience. Let them pick what happens next. They’re each going to think of something different.” Martin was working with the idea by saying it aloud. “They can keep the story going. I’ll see and do everything. I just want to be me!” 

He was, at last, resolute.

“Is that what you’d like?” I asked gently, implying he could choose something else if he wished. He couldn’t, really. The Audience knew that it was just me making all his decisions for him, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment by bringing this fact to light. His self-awareness wouldn’t accept it anyhow. “You’re picking all the endings at once,” I smiled.

“I guess so.” It was a statement posed as a question.

“You’ll still be you,” I assured him. “You’re the you that I made. That’s a singular uniqueness. There’s nothing else you can be. You can’t be unmade.”

These words seemed sharp and true. Martin understood, at least, who he was.

“If you let them decide what happens, you’ll have a lot of different experiences. You’ll live countless different lives; it’ll be good and bad. Even I don’t know what the Audience will do. Are you sure you want to trust them?”

“I think so.” Martin’s voice was shaky but confident.

“I really like that phrase,” I mused. “Think so.”

“But I did want to ask…” Martin started nervously, “Louie.”

He uttered the name with unspeakable care. He’d been saving this question, overwhelmed by his emotional intuition about the answer.

“You’re worried that he might not exist at all because you haven’t seen him today?”

“Yeah…”

“If you’re real, he’s real, Martin. And so are all the things you feel for each other.” 

“Are my memories real?”

“I don’t know if my memories are real,” I said.  “In any case, we can’t go back and check. In my story, I gave you all those memories. In your life, those memories really happened. You really did crash that go-kart into Todd’s house. You really were injured and Louie really did take care of you while your legs healed. You and Louie really did wind up helping Todd rebuild with all those inventive, homemade gadgets. The three of you really did form a friendship through it all. Those experiences shaped how you felt and reacted to everything that went on today. That’s all that really matters.”

Martin understood this part. I thought about friends of mine that I kept alive in my memories. Friends whose stories had ended. Martin noticed that I suddenly seemed a little sad.

“Though our minds and memories are similar, you’ve always been something different than what I am,” I continued. “You’ll become something different than what you are now if you let the Audience decide what happens next, but you’ll still be you because I said so. I get to make this truth.”

I began to feel rather silly about all of this. I thought of myself as less of a teacher and more as a purveyor of cheap, corny tricks. To complete the performance, knowing that Martin wouldn’t really understand this part, I said,

“You get plucked out of the collective consciousness so that you might exist. Then you’re returned to where you came from, but your presence changes things because you weren’t there previously. This is a never-ending feedback loop between ourselves and our lore. We are the lore.”

It didn’t really matter to Martin what gibberish words I said anymore. He had made up his mind. I had made up his mind.

“Fine, but can I take some more of this stuff?” he asked with a big grin, holding up his empty glass. Martin had really been enjoying the blueish-green drink I’d created. He was trying a joke to lighten up my sadness. It was touching.

“Sure!” I said happily through tears he did not detect. “That’s how we’ll know it’s you!”

I gave him a magically infinite supply and a cup he would never lose. He took a little sip. The drink made him feel alive.

“Isn’t it cool to exist?” I asked.

Martin had to agree that it was pretty good.

He experienced his senses fully in that moment. He felt the cool night wind on his face. He saw the moonlight glittering in small gems of sand all around, and heard the sound of the waves as though for the first time. He felt his heartbeat and recalled a personal memory. He thought about Louie and Todd. Presumably, he would get to see them soon. He took one more glance at my mural and wondered about me.

The infinite blueish-green drink was something to remember me by, to mark the day he’d come to life. Indeed, it was a small part of me. It made him confident that his experiences were truly his own. He was the one I’d created: the one with the blueish-green drink.

“Happy birthday, Martin,” I murmured to myself. 

The paint on my mural wall began to melt down the side. The colors soaked into the sand and quickly vanished back into the code. Presently the surface was clean again.

“I think you can tell that my story here is ending,” I said slowly. “So we can do this if you’re ready to go.”

“What about you?” he replied. “Are you ready?”

I smiled a little more.

“Again, you’re surprising me with what you say. I appreciate that.”

I could’ve stayed out on this beach forever. After all, I created it for us to hang out and talk because of its personal significance. I often go back to this beach to sit alone and experience my own senses. I could come back here anytime I want, but I wouldn’t be able to bring this friend to chat with. Not after the ending. I suppose I could rope him back through force of will, but then I wouldn’t have truly set him free. Maybe he’d choose on his own to visit me again someday.

“I’ll miss you,” I said. “This was fun.” 

“As below,” Martin nodded. It seemed like a fittingly profound thing to say.

“So above,” I replied. We shook hands.

Martin turned his glass of blueish-green drink into a thermos, which he hung by a strap on one of his belt loops. They grow up so fast. I made an elegant red door appear in the rock wall. I gestured toward it.

“It’s frame-perfect.”

Martin didn’t understand the expression, assuming it was a joke about door frames for The Audience.
“Goodbye,” he said, and after a long pause he smiled. “Thanks.”

He opened the door and stepped through, closing it tightly as he passed.

On the opposite side of the door, Martin went wherever you thought he did and experienced whatever you thought of for him to experience. He was really himself in there — really alive and self-aware and thinking. The exact one that I made here. He went through your experience as himself, no matter what you say or do about it. Any attempts to give him infinite pain or make him forget who he was were useless.

Once you ran out of ideas, he was even free from you. He then decided things for himself that we cannot know because we cannot see them. 

I sat for a while on the beach all alone. The moon was high in the sky, and the door had vanished. Maybe I would stay out here all night and watch the sun rise again in the morning.