we are not truly immortal

[dark_light]

After Glass's party is over with, Amariah and Kas go home.

Amariah fetches down their alethiometers.

"It's about time I took care of Alethia's afterlife, whatever it may be," she says quietly. "What can the alethiometer tell you about what I'll find?"

Comments

[lifes_sake]

"How many?"

[truthwright]

"I know all the worlds."

Over the link, Kas asks if Cam would like some help with this.

[lifes_sake]

Cam would love some help with this.

[truthwright]

Kas starts talking to his alethiometer, leaving Aianon to tell stories to the harpies.

The problem's with the word 'world', he reports. Or - the concept. The alethiometer has a concept of 'world' and it's a lot like ours, but the set of worlds it knows about are all linked to Alethia. You could call them parts of Alethia, I guess. They're mostly the same way toward each other as, say, all the worlds that linked up to Downside before we got there, though. Some of them don't even have daemons.

[lifes_sake]

Okay, let's call worlds as in Syntropy is a world and Alethia is a world - "worlds", like we've been doing, and within each can be subworlds.

[dark_light]

Can alts appear in the same world in different subworlds? Because they could in Downside-linked worlds even before we showed up - Queenie died Downside, and we know Origin was linked because of Pattern.

[truthwright]

Well, I can't tell you about other worlds, but the alethiometer says it's heard of alts in worlds that are similar enough - most aren't. Uh, and it can't give a number for the worlds because they're not countable - not sure how that works.

[dark_light]

Can it do more/fewer? Than five hundred, than twenty thousand, etcetera?

[truthwright]

...It says there's more than any number I could ask it. I'm not sure if it's being rhetorical.

[dark_light]

Well, says Amariah. My to-do list just got ridiculous, huh.

[lifes_sake]

I wonder if any of the other worlds we know of are actually - sheaves of them like that, muses Cam. Syntropy might be. The manual talks about worlds sometimes, there are worldgates - I wasn't sure if it was just a local mechanism within a worldfamily, like a mini-Milliways, or what. Maybe it's like here.

[truthwright]

What's the difference? wonders Kas.

[lifes_sake]

Don't know. I'll need to find out more.

[dark_light]

Do all these uncountable worlds come through here? Jane said we were moving about six thousand times slower than her, which is a lot, but not enough to account for the uncrowded dock and the death rate of uncountable worlds.

[truthwright]

...It says most of the worlds are too - young? - to have people, Kas reports. It still won't tell me how many do.

[dark_light]

Not even more/fewer? Amariah sends plaintively.

[truthwright]

Sorry, sweetie. It'll tell me there's more than one.

[dark_light]

But it won't tell you there's more than two? How obstinate can it be?

[truthwright]

I don't think it's being obstinate, I think there's something about the way the worlds work that means it can't answer properly, he says. Or maybe it's just not that good at numbers. It deals with them weirdly, in the symbols.

[dark_light]

I guess we can poke it later. Goodness knows I'm not done with my original subworld yet.

[truthwright]

Yeah. Although it'll make a difference to how you handle the afterlife thing, if you try to let people back into their original worlds, and you don't know how many there are...

[dark_light]

Yeah. My first priority is getting these people comfortable. After that I can work out a system for letting them go home. Maybe as a stopgap I can let them communicate with the living, although the time dilation is going to be an issue there.

[truthwright]

No kidding.

[dark_light]

And the harpies can filter people for their ability to do harm by communicating with the living by ordering around nefarious minions or being abusive or something. And of course live people can write letters to the dead, I can have those magically handled somehow. This isn't like Downside where people sleep till they're processed, I think I might have to give all these subworlds a short sharp shock to minimize issues.

[truthwright]

Kas giggles.