Chapter 737 - A Mortal Concept

Time.

The word was a ubiquitous constant, and for every creature in existence.  For the unthinking beasts, it was as simple as “time to eat” or “time to sleep.”  But for sapient entities, it garnered much more meaning.  It marked the passing of days, lending weight to any event.  A one-year anniversary was a joyous occasion, but one celebrating fifty years was something else entirely. 

So, what did it mean that Zeke suddenly didn’t care about it? 

He was cognizant of its passage, but it didn’t really mean anything to him.  One more year didn’t change his sense of loneliness.  A decade didn’t affect him at all.  Even a century was just a word.  And yet, the part of him that still thought of himself as human, the piece that remembered his old life, was irrevocably tied to the concept of time. 

In some ways, it was maddening.  He would never grow old.  His body would never expire.  And even if it did, he was more than capable of rebuilding himself from the ground up.  Functionally, Zeke was immortal. 

The pressure of that knowledge, simple as it was, bore down on him like the entire universe had been concentrated into the tip of a dagger.  And that stiletto blade was currently digging into him in an effort to carve out his heart. 

For all of human existence, people had dreamed of eternal life.  The idea of immortality had driven tens of thousands of stories to their inevitable conclusion.  Either the protagonist failed in achieving their goal, perhaps to learn some lesson about living in the present.  Or they were forced to confront the reality of their achievement.  Living forever just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

But for Zeke, it was as necessary as it was unwanted.

He didn’t fear death.  Not anymore.  What scared him was the idea that, despite all his years of work, he would somehow fail in his chosen task.  He couldn’t countenance that, so he used his immortality to his advantage.  Year after year, decade after decade, he manipulated the threads. 

His previous understanding proved rudimentary in nature, though it wasn’t until nearly three decades after Talia’s departure that he realized just how simplistic his views really were.  The threads were the building blocks of reality, but they were more than that as well.  Each one represented a concept.  Wood.  Flesh.  Metal.  Or an infinite number of other concrete ideas. 

Those drove the physical representations.  But some concepts were ephemeral.  Like truth.  When he spoke, the sounds that came from his mouth were just more threads.  Some were vibrations.  Others concerned the words themselves.  And still others represented the meaning.  Subtext.  Nature.  A thousand other things that were so easy to understand but difficult to fully grasp. 

Zeke studied them all.

He could not allow himself to shortchange the process.  Doing so wouldn’t serve his purposes.  Perhaps he could go out and kill Shar Maelaine, but with what was coming next, he needed to understand everything, and in such an intimate way that he could rival the Creator himself. 

So, he worked, and time passed.

Year by year.  Century by century.  Zeke lost context for what any of it really meant.  He didn’t eat.  He didn’t sleep.  There was no outside stimuli, and he never paused to rest.  With each moment, he learned a little more, and not just about the nature of reality.  He learned about himself, and in a subtle way that was hard to explain.

He also understood the Creator. 

How long had he been up there, toiling away as he defended their reality?  He was alone too.  Likely, he’d started much the same as Zeke had, just trying to learn.  Or maybe he’d responded to the threat posed by the adversary assailing them from without.  That was how the Framework had been born.

Zeke could feel it. 

Those threads that represented the Framework were far more tightly bound than any other, and they stretched off into another dimension that Zeke could not even perceive.  Yet, he could almost feel it, like the shadow of a cloud passing overhead.  Ever present, but ephemeral. 

For most people, it would probably be slightly confusing.  There were reality threads, Framework threads, and he was certain that there was something in between the threads that he couldn’t quite sense but knew was there. 

But a few centuries later, he felt like he had a good handle on it.  The rest of his time was spent practicing his manipulation. 

He started with simple creation, focusing on the tiniest details.  If one little thread was off, he tore the construct apart and started over.  Trial and error were good, if inefficient, teachers, but Zeke was nothing if not a dedicated student.  Eventually, he reached the point where he could create small, inanimate objects quickly and perfectly. 

So, he moved on to larger constructs, which came with a host of problems all their own.  At a certain size, they wanted to collapse in on themselves, so Zeke found that he was forced to think like an engineer, though instead of exact measurements and raw math, he was dealing with approximations and ephemeral frequences.

When he realized that his method wasn’t working, he went back to the proverbial drawing board and spent two full centuries honing his senses.  Then, learning to apply the gained knowledge to the constructs took another hundred years.  He managed it, though.  After countless frustrations, false starts, and erroneous paths, he figured it all out.

Still, it was a long time before he managed to create anything of any size, and his first few successes were so unstable that they lasted only a few minutes before falling apart. 

Zeke didn’t let that dissuade him, though.  In fact, just knowing he was on the right track pushed him even harder until, at last, he was spinning mountain-sized objects into existence.  He kept practicing until he could do it just as quickly as he could create the smaller objects. 

By the time he felt comfortable with that, nearly a millennia had passed since he’d seen another soul.  Somewhere in the distance, he’d felt the ripples of other people’s passage through space, but they were light years away.  Much too far to affect anything. 

Zeke didn’t let it interrupt him.

However, Talia did visit him a handful of times.  Each instance came with increased distance, but she dutifully conveyed the state of their ongoing war against Shar Maelaine’s forces.  From everything she told him, they were losing.  Very, very slowly, but the so-called Sun Goddess possessed a far more numerous army.  The results were all but written in stone.

The only thing keeping Zeke’s forces afloat was the prodigious breeding rate and superior training of the kobolds.  Soldier for soldier, they were unmatched – at least when comparing level-to-level.  The problem was that Shar Maelaine had been building her pipeline of ascension for eons.  And now, she’d revved that machine to full power. 

There had been victories and defeats, but very little movement. 

During one such visit, Talia tried to impress upon him the need for him to join the fight.  “With you,” she’d said.  “We’ll win.  There is no question.  Countless people could be saved.”

Zeke had nodded, acknowledged that she was right, but reiterated that he needed to remain in place.  However, he couldn’t escape the accusatory glare she leveled in his direction.  That hurt more than the knowledge of so many dead kobolds.  After all, her support had always been all but unconditional.  But it looked like Talia was beginning to reach her limit.

Which was probably for the best.

Hero worship was never a good thing, and it was even worse in a partner.  She’d gotten better over the years, but her infatuation with him was anything but healthy. 

The next time someone visited, it was Pudge, who never looked at him with disappointment.  His support was a given.  The same with Tucker, who came a few decades later. 

After that, they cycled the duty between them. 

And in the meantime, Zeke continued his work with the threads. 

Once he’d mastered creating inanimate objects, large and small, he moved on to something vastly more complex – living creatures.

He used his own body as a template for his first attempts, but that proved entirely useless.  He wasn’t made of the same stuff as everyone else.  So, he was forced to occupy himself with other thread manipulation exercises until one of his friends made contact.  Thankfully, it was only a year later that Pudge stopped by, and Zeke requested a test subject that could survive in space.

Pudge only nodded and said that he would be back in a few weeks. 

In what felt like the blink of an eye, the bearkin returned with a large, transluscent worm-like creature.  Zeke thanked him, then got to work. 

As it turned out, the most frustrating part of it was holding the creature in place, so Zeke manipulated the threads to create a cage to contain it.  Then, he got to work studying the threads that comprised it. 

And he found that living creatures were far more complex than he could have imagined.    

The first few attempts, which each took years to build, lacked any animating force.  They were just hunks of meat that quickly froze in the vacuum of space.  Zeke unraveled them in frustration, then restarted. 

Over and over, he got the same results. 

Centuries passed, and he made no progress.  He recognized that his frustration was working against him.  It reminded him of his years on Earth, which still seemed oddly more real to him than his more recent memories.  More than once during his baseball career, such as it was, he’d fallen into horrific slumps.  And his solution to that was to just work harder.  To take longer batting practice sessions.  To try to work the problem into resolving itself.

That never worked, though.

Inevitably, the slump would always deepen until, at last, he took a step back and reevaluated the situation.  Sometimes, he needed to spend a couple of days away from the batting cages and just recentering his mind.  He didn’t think of it in those terms, but that was precisely what he did.

And he needed to do that again.

So, he settled down, closed his eyes, and just let his mind go blank.  No errant thoughts.  No manipulation of the threads.  He became as inert as a rock.  And rather than remain that way for a few days, his reset took decades.  Almost an entire century. 

But in the end, it worked.

When he went back to his training and started to construct a copy of the worm, he saw precisely what was missing.  It wasn’t some mystical thing, either.  No unseeable source of life.  It was just a missed thread, smaller than all the others, but woven through everything else with such deft precision that it was almost invisible, even to his practiced eye.

That was the breakthrough he needed, and over the next couple of centuries, he slowly worked his way up to the ability to create a viable organism.  When he was finished, he just stared at the product.  The worm looked no different from the now long-dead version he’d used as a template.  It felt the same as well, wriggling around in the cage he’d erected around it.

Zeke wasn’t certain what to think about that.

Was that all life really was?  Just a collection of strings?  What about consciousness?  Spirit?  What about the soul?

He destroyed the worm by unraveling its threads.  Then, he started building more complex creatures.  He didn’t use a template.  No examples.  Rather, he just used his knowledge of threads, gained over the course of thousands of years, to inform his choices.

And he failed miserably.

The first creation was just a lump of pulsating meat.  The second wasn’t much better, save for the piercing screams it emitted.  That they could carry through space was troubling enough, but the implications – that it was in agonizing pain – sent Zeke into a scramble to end its suffering. 

Over and over, he created, destroyed, then created again. 

Millennia passed.  Slowly, his friends’ visits grew more infrequent.  Talia stopped coming altogether.  Pudge looked progressively more tired.  Tucker grew older. 

By all rights, Zeke should have expected the next visit, which came on the heels of his first true success in creating a living thing from scratch.  It resembled a water bear, though much simpler.  But it was viable.  It was alive.  And it wasn’t in constant pain.

Zeke was so excited that he didn’t even feel the vessel bearing down on him. 

By the time he did sense it, the ship was right on top of him.  And Pudge stood at the helm.

“You need to come home,” the bearkin said, his gravelly voice exhausted. 

“What?  Why?”

“You have a funeral to attend,” Pudge said.  “Tucker has died.”