Full Vessels (3 page)

“Well?” Hess demanded. “Don't you have
anything to say?”

“I was bored,” Griff said. “Going after you
was something to occupy the time. I never cared about Ingrid's
reasons. Your misbehavior was an opportunity to do something.”

Hess leaned forward. “Then I'll have a little
fun at your expense. As someone much smarter than you, let me
educate you a little. Your insightful idea is called nihilism. It's
a concept that depressive personalities routinely invent to justify
their existential grief.”

“When I mentioned people smarter than me, I
wasn't talking about you, Hess.” Griff's eyes darted to Erik. “You
neither. Both of you run around the worlds obsessed with doing
things. You might as well be people.”

Greg pointed imperiously at Hess. “This is
not a forum for you to service your grudges. You are being asked to
maintain your decorum for a single week. If civility proves too
difficult for you, then perhaps you should remain silent in these
meetings.”

“What about me, Greggie?” Erik exposed his
teeth in a smile-like expression. “You wanna read me my rights? Lay
down the law a little? Come on, big boy, pull out your cock so we
can measure how much of a man you are. You had a tiny little pecker
back in Iteration five. You let me play with it before I brought a
cheese grater to bed. Remember that? You cried like a baby while I
ground your nub off again and again.”

Erik held a hand to his mouth as he chortled.
“I decided I wouldn't stop till you quit with the begging. Itty
bitty Greggie didn't know the rules, so his tiny tinkler got
trimmed for hours. You ever figure out why I did it, shit licker?
Did you ever work out why I quit with the humping and moved on to
the kinky shit?”

Greg shrank back into his seat, shame and
fear warring on his face.

“Let me enlighten ya a bit, Greggie. Sex
never did it for me with the people. Didn't do it for me with an
Observer, either. But then I had the idea to make the genital play
interesting. And sure as shit, mutilating your tiddly bits was
great fun. Things only got better when I made the condition of your
release that you had to eat some feces.

“I convinced you to show so much enthusiasm
for your foray into fecophelia that over the years I found myself
wondering if your convincing act had some basis in reality. I'm
dying to know your thoughts, Greggie. Did I turn you onto a new
food group? Or are you just that fucking terrified of
moi
?”

“Easy now,” Drake said. “There's eleven of us
and only one of you. If things get crazy, you're going down. We
don't have to worry about you coming after us in future
Iterations.”

“Drake, did you just grow a pair? Should we
throw you a fucking party or something? Or are you just posturing
like a twat because you think you're safe from me?”

“It's over, Erik,” Drake said.

“The fuck it is!” Erik shot to his feet. “You
cowards voted to kill us, but at this moment I'm as alive as ever.
And I'm pissed as hell that shitheads like you are dragging me down
with you. The Creator has all of us gathered together under a white
flag and I respect the rules of the Big Boss. But if you break the
truce, you're going to discover a level of violence you can't
conceive. Your imagination can't go to the place I live.”

“Your scary imagination doesn't matter if we
lock you up.”

Erik jerked his thumb in the direction of
Hess. “Then my boy breaks me out and we go to work on the lot of
you. Remember, me and Hess are BFF's now – Best Fucking Friends.
And if you try messing with Hess, then the wrath of Elza comes down
on you.”

A piercing whistle from the other end of the
table interrupted Erik. San pulled her fingers from her mouth.
“Nobody is going to break the peace. So why don't all of you turn
the hostility down a few notches? I think everyone here knows that
nobody would follow Drake on a shopping trip, let alone into a
fight. The most oblivious Observer imaginable couldn't help but
notice that you've emasculated Greg . . . again.

“But we're on duty at the moment. The Creator
wants our opinions to cross pollinate. So we need to have heated
discussions without the threat of taking the arguments physical. I
think we're all more or less loyal to the Creator. We can agree on
that, can't we?”

Erik, every eye glued to him, chewed her
words for a minute before turning to face Griff. “Making something
from nothing is a fucking miracle. Existence isn't meaningless
nothing. It is meaning-filled everything. Every spec of matter
contains its own rules for interacting with other specs. Those
specifications are meaning. Physics is meaning.

“The fact that everything ends makes what we
observe infinitely more precious. Actions happen in a single moment
of time and are lost forever if one of us isn't there to record it.
Uncountable trillions of actions happen every second. This isn't
some game of deterministic cause and effect, cupcake. We're talking
a probabilistic model where the Creator Itself can't predict the
outcome of a given universe. Existence is wonder and awe and
terrible beauty.

“If you truly doubt that, then spend the rest
of this week in my room. I will definitively, viscerally prove that
actions positively radiate meaning.”

Griff folded his arms. “I'm talking about the
long view, not how a body feels in a moment.”

“There's your mistake. You got a false
dichotomy. Eternity ain't nothing but a shit ton of moments crammed
together. When your brain rebels and says otherwise, that's a
limitation of your psychology.”

“Actually,” Elza said, “infinite numbers are
not the same as mundane quantities, even if we assume time is
quantized to reduce eternity from an uncountable infinity to a
countable infinity. But the mathematical treatment of an infinite
set is still different.”

Erik spread his hands. “Seriously, Elza?
Everyone here is thinking WTF right now. I mean, are you a fucking
robot whose purpose is to give technical definitions to people who
don't give a shit? What does mathematical treatments of infinity
have to do with the topic of Griff being a self-hating delusional
asshole?”

“I'll try to explain using little words.”
Elza spoke with cold precision. “Infinity is fundamentally
different from normal quantities. As creatures whose experiences
are based on non-infinite spans of time, all of us lack the mental
capacity to intuitively understand eternity. An educated individual
could talk about eternity in the abstract using mathematical
terminology, but neither of you are qualified to be part of such a
discussion.”

“In summary, everyone but you's an idiot?”
Erik squinted at her. “Then tell us the answer, oh great and wise
Elza. Does everything mean nothing or something mean
everything?”

“Griff's argument is riddled with unfounded
assumptions,” Elza said. “First, we don't know what exists between
worlds. Divine knowledge seems to imply that there is no physical
matter, but that doesn't prove a literal void. The fact that every
world has so much in common suggests to me that there exists some
fundamental order that limits what can be created.

“But even if matter possesses no true
corporeal component – whatever that means – that does not imply
anything about the meaning of existence. Neither does the fact that
everything might be forgotten. Griff assumes that memory is a
prerequisite for meaning without ever providing a convincing
rationale for that belief. All of this metaphysical chest beating
falls apart upon rational examination.

“Not that you need to bother. The whole thing
dissolves as soon as you try to define meaning. You could replace
it with any number of synonyms and still not have a working
definition. Significance? Importance? Interpretation? Meaning is a
hazy concept, but I think if you boil it down to its bare
essentials, what you have is social utility. The significance of
anything could be considered an opinion.

“You could very easily get sucked into a
moral relativism issue here, but fortunately for us we work for the
Creator and She provides an absolute for us to measure against. So
I would venture that by virtue of the fact that the worlds keep
coming, they have meaning.”

When it was clear that Elza was done, Erik
returned to his seat. Everyone sat in silence until Greg cleared
his throat. “While polite debate is welcome, I don't necessarily
think this is supposed to be an exercise in proving opposing
viewpoints wrong. There are twelve Observers and there are going to
be twelve equally valid opinions. No one should be attacked for
contributing a unique perspective.”

No one responded to Greg, so he turned to
face Mel. “Let's adjourn for a fifteen minute break before you
begin.”

“Stupid people,” he grumbled as he squeezed
deeper into the dense vegetation. The susurrations of nervous
whispers from behind spurred him to redouble his flight through the
brambles. This was what he got for climbing a tree to search for
eggs.

Ironically, the people's reaction to seeing a
man's crushed skull reassemble itself had been to crush it again.
Then again. And again. They had been arguing over whether fire or
burial in a deep grave would provide a permanent fix to their
problem when he escaped. In the hours since then, Griff had snuck
eastward, pushing and crawling his way through thick jungle growth
bordering the river.

So far snakes, crocodiles, stinging insects,
and poisonous plants had only slowed his pursuers. They sought him
with dogged persistence, determined to rid the world of an immortal
man.
Why do they care so much
, he wondered. They hadn't
seemed angry the three times they killed him. If anything, they had
been terrified by what was happening.

Maybe they do this because they're afraid of
me? I am like a snake that has been on their sleeping mat. They
must kill me to feel safe again. Stupid people.

Griff pushed against a stiff screen of green
growth and plunged through it to land head first in the slow-moving
river. He started to scramble back out of the water, but impaled
his back on a row of sharpened sticks hammered into the shore. With
a muffled groan of frustration, Griff pulled himself free. He spat
out water the flavor of feet as he studied the river.

The still brown liquid obscured everything
beneath its surface except the stench of decay. Both banks were
lined with spears preventing anyone unlucky enough to be in the
water from escaping. After a moment's hesitation, Griff began
wading downstream.

His destination was the Lake of Death, and
the river would get him there faster than the jungle. The only
question was how many times it would kill him on his journey. Some
forty years before, shortly after the world jumped into motion,
Griff had been swept out to sea while on a fishing expedition. In a
terrifying ordeal, he had drowned to death a dozen times before
washing ashore. Memories of ineffectual flailing and desperate
gasping still haunted him in restless dreams.

Surely the Lake of Death could not be as bad
as drowning in the sea. Most locations people named as places of
death had to do with diseases, which never bothered him. Of course,
the further into the forests he had gone, the more deadly animals
he had discovered. So far he had managed not to encounter a
crocodile up close.
Today has been a bad luck day for me. I'll
probably walk myself straight into their feeding grounds before
long. Might be sorry the people didn't get me first.

Griff sloshed down the river, eyes roaming
the banks for a safe place to depart the water. The muck stole his
moccasins one at a time, sucking them beneath the surface when he
dared take a step forward. He picked leeches from his legs and
threw the things far from him. Critters beneath the opaque waters
darted their slimy bodies past him at random intervals.

Stupid people
, Griff thought.
They
should have run away from me if I was so scary. Instead they chased
me into the stupid river. Something is going to eat me now because
of those people.

His silent complaints faded into wary
attentiveness at the sound of growls in the distance. Jaguars,
judging by the throaty wails. Another animal to kill him. Griff
studied the shore, wondering if the cats would dare enter the
water. The spears lining the bank did not hinder entry, only
escape.

Griff moved quicker, eager to put the
horribleness of the day behind him. If he had survived the sea,
then he would survive whatever the Lake of Death did to him.

So complete was his focus on the shore that
he did not notice the river had widened until something splashed in
the distance. An abrupt turn sent him tumbling beneath dirty water.
Griff emerged thrashing, head darting about to take in his
surroundings. In the distance, what could be logs floated in
stately grace. He glanced at the spear-lined bank and gritted his
teeth.
Stupid people making traps for other people. What is the
point? Nobody would ever want to live in the stupid Lake of Death
anyway.

After a moment, his eyes spied a bridge of
sorts leading from the jungle and over the water to an island with
a large building on top made from pieces of rock. The bridge looked
to be made of woven vine fiber with bunches of sticks spaced apart
as steps.

Where the bridge met the bank of the island,
there were no spears. He would need to climb a steep cliff, but
then he would be free to run across the bridge and escape this
nightmare. His decision made, Griff ran for the island. He made
good time, at first spurred by his determination to escape, then
further motivated by the realization that the logs in the water
were in fact swimming towards him.

He reached the island after the crocodiles,
but they held back for some reason. Griff dragged himself from the
water and up the slope as fast as his breathless body would move.
The bridge grew closer. When Griff crested the cliff, he beamed
with exultation, feeling his freedom.