Flicker off.
Flicker on.
The Universe 9000 Delux Megasystem doesn’t change much after that fateful year at Emporium. As it is reset – over and over again, by its pair of skilful custodians, for every kind of reason – it persists, much as it ever has.
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Oh, it runs a little better. The little gear-trains that set the end of the world in motion have been replaced, and Winifred has cleaned out all of the entropic fluff that’s accumulated throughout all the systems and engines. There’s nothing like that awkward moment when you push the button to destroy everything, and then you have to wait for a little while, and then just as the client’s opening their mouth to ask wha-
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Vinifred helps. The acquisition of a new body – donated by Eska, who wasn’t needing it any more; careworn but robust, hardwearing – gives it a new perspective on the world, as does the experience of being inside the collapsing universe in the Grow Zone. The two entities are not well suited to each other. One is an extremely helpful sapient assistance system, whose every mote of being is designed to support, advise, and empower; the other is a nightmarishly driven urge to hammer that reset button, shoved into ensouled and corporeal form. But, ill-matched as they are, they do begin to find areas of common ground, mutual understanding, connection.
After all –
They have all the time in the world … and more.
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Flicker on.
Vinifred takes up the violin. It helps to ground its energy, it allows, one evening. IF – and that’s a colossal if – they are going to allow their inherent desire to reset the universe over and over and over to soften, to wear away around the edges, on roughly the same timescale as the erosion of a mountain to sand by the bird that lies on its summit … then it should at least have a hobby. Keep its hand occupied while it’s changing its behaviour
Winifred, ever the helpful being, offers to listen to its double. Provide some constructive feedback.
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The violin lies broken on the floor of the office.
Neither Vinifred nor Winifred is particularly interested in talking about what that was about. Both sit quietly, pondering the mysteries of the multiverse, and, pointedly, not make a sound.
Flicker off.
Flicker on.
Another round of trips to Emporium, replenish the supplies.
Aeons pass inside the Universe 9000 Delux Megasystem for every season at Emporium (the greatest chronological disparity every recorded between local and homeplane time, Ciel reports, wide-eyed), but this only means that its maintenance entities skew the opposite way – building a homeplane to last, to endure, to require resupply and renewal on a scale longer than any other known plane. The intervals are getting longer, too – slowly but surely, Winifred and Vinifred are beating back entropy, closing in on perfect, unpatched, sustainability.
This means a lot of new faces at Emporium, and few familiar ones. Ciel, Amanda, Hadley … but the others have largely headed on to pastures new. Vinifred’s usual self-confident swagger falters for just a moment when it learns that Emporium's mirror dimension has once more been closed off.
Flicker off.
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The next time the pair visit, to fix one of the last components still subject to decay or damage, there’s no-one familiar left working the tills, security, the specialist departments.
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Flicker.
Flicker.
Flicker.
Flicker on.
That’s strange. The Universe 9000 Delux Megasystem (now augmented, Ship of Theseus-style, into something almost unrecognisable to what it was) has reset a number of consecutive times that may as well be infinite, and yet it just – stuttered. Like something struck it during the reset.
Donning protective suits, Winifred and Vinifred clamber outside the superstructure, redundantly maglocked on to prevent them from drifting off into the inter-universal gulf.
The sky is calmer than it once was. Where once it was a dark night sky, lit by stars, it is now a cool, infinite sea, broken here and there by tiny bubbles of reality – like a handful of diamonds strewn onto black velvet. Hand-over-handing around the hull, Winifred and Vinifred work their way around the outside of the Megasystem, fixing the damage (just a couple of bits of flotsam hitting the outside – nothing major. Between each little repair, the two rest their eyes on the stillness, the blackness.
It is tranquil and beautiful and horrifying.
This is an infinite multiverse, without beginning or end, where new worlds can blossom from the primordial chaos between realities just as they can be swallowed up and consumed. There’s no risk of the multiverse ending. But it can fluctuate. It can go through lean times – winters, famines, periods of quiescence, little hibernations between its heartbeat. And, right now, looking out into an almost empty sky, Winifred and Vinifred get a sense of what multiverse itself might feel like, during its own reset cycle.
They spend a long time looking out into it.
But there’s work to be done in the Megasystem – internal users requesting a test run of the automated reset process. No need for it, of course – the machines are perfect, the regular ‘spring-cleaning’ the Megasystem gets from its resets preserving it far beyond any other plane, and protecting it from harm. But, well, they asked, and this is a reset-related task – better get to work.
Better keep the lights on – one lonely lighthouse in the sea of nothingness.
Waiting for the lights around it to come back on.
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Flicker on.