2[+]
I'm sorry.
I think I've failed you. A game's settings are supposed to optimize the player's game experience. They're supposed to make the game as pleasant and easy to play as possible, while minimizing the effect of any problems. I thought this story's settings would be the same way. I wanted it to be easy for you, even if it wasn't easy for the people in the story.
But it's not going to be easy. It's about to get wrenched apart.
I think there's only one piece of advice I can give you that might make your experience more pleasurable. But it won't help you with this story. All it will help with is your overall experience reading things on the internet.
Go to wherever you keep your bookmarks or starred pages, and delete this story from them. You won't want to come back here. Chances are, you'll never want to be reminded you read this story.
Or if you must keep a bookmark of it, put it inside of a folder inside another folder. Put it as deep in your directory structure as you can manage, so it won't crop up later and ruin your day. Doing this should, in a broad sense, make your reading experience more pleasurable.
I'm sorry. I wish I could have done more.
Chapter 6: The Exciting Climax
SO THERE they were. Owners of a pair of forty-trillion-part wetware machines squashing and squelching their way pseudo-harmoniously up the block, Gwen's laptop shut down hastily and hidden in a case, a huge black cape that used to belong to her mother thrown about her as if it would… I don't even know, as if it would make any passerby think she wasn't a person? For whatever reason, she and Jim had decided to bring shielding in the form of excessively weighty fabric in case anyone dared to consider them noteworthy enough to interact with. Fortunately for them and their fortunate selves, however, it was a quiet afternoon and most of the locals were busy working or keeping house or otherwise ensconced in one of the unfathomably numerous cubicles in which urban human beings choose to spend their days and nights, staring endlessly at the same walls both real and figurative until death or disaster shook their foundations. The duo were largely unseen as they absconded up toward the nearest park, a place which happened to contain a water treatment plant and a wildlife preserve. That, surely, would afford them enough isolation to finish their pointless game in safety.
It was a good plan, a foolproof plan. Unfortunately, Jim had failed to take one vital fact into account. And that fact was this: in the process of reaching the water treatment plant, Jim would first have to travel halfway there. Achievable, you say? Well, perhaps. But consider that even before that humble goal could be achieved, Jim would have to make his way halfway to that landmark, or in other words a quarter of the way to the water treatment plant. And lest you suggest that such semi-intermediate stations are in some way routine, or to be taken for granted, please remember that ere they can be met, one must first struggle one's way half of that distance, or one eighth the total slog, and before that, one sixteenth! So you see, there really was no end to the tedious, ever-nested subtasks Jim had to carry out in order to travel up the street to his destination. How could he ever manage it? He was only less than one tenth of one percent of the way there, but before he could even—all right, he was a tenth of one percent of the way, but before managing to go a second one tenth of one percent, he would have to cross the halfway mark between these two measurements, meaning zero point zero one five percent, and that was unfortunately an insurmountable—
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Jim, please stop crossing insurmountable boundaries while you're being narrated to about why it's impossible! This is a travesty. Only someone utterly unable to contemplate the beauty that is an endlessly converging sequence would be able to barge on past so many interminably nested sub-destinations. For shame, Jim. Stop and smell the fractal roses for a change, will you?
But there was no stopping him. Jim never made it to the top of the street… is what a narrator might be tempted to say. What a narrator might reasonably hope for. What any observer might reasonably hope for, if they knew all the facts! Jim was waylaid by muggers who beat him and Gwen tender and senseless, before stealing their computer and abandoning them on the street. Is a not-true thing. It should perhaps have been true, it would have been better than the true truth, but… UNNGH! Pure falsehoods, however noble and apparently needed, were beyond the abilities of an endless honest narrator. The story remained unchanged by Jim's narrator's most beneficent attempts to sway it toward the better realms of fiction. Jim was having an affair with the truth, he was trysting with the truth, and he was unprepared, all norms and mores to the contrary, to wrest himself from his lover's inflexible and ice-frigid arms.
With no choice but to have done what he actually did, Jim reached the top of the street with Gwen unmolested and proceeded into the park containing the water treatment facility.
Why was there a water treatment facility at the top of a hill? Aren't such things normally located at a low altitude, in order to pump water efficiently from the ground and return it without undue labor? Perhaps it had something to do with the nearby water tower situated past the hill in a grassy lot past a petrol station? I mean, gas station? Or perhaps there just happened to be a major vein of groundwater in this vicinity? It wasn't a hill in all directions, after all. Jim and Gwendolyn were faced with a more or less flat expanse of streets that they chose to ignore, turning from the blessings of society to the troglodytic isolation of the park.
"Isn't that hypocritical of you?" asked the man who had earlier that day worn shorts to a supposed office job. "This morning, weren't you trying to get me alone?" Well, of course it was better for you to be alone then, Jim. We were trying to tell a story. And what distinguishes a story from the vicissitudes of everyday monotony if not the fact that one person, one mind, is creating it? Or in our case, two minds that might as well have functioned as one. This morning, we were an author, Jim; but now, now! Now. Now, it seems you would rather be a crusher of dreams, an ender of opportunity. A curtailer of narrative. An un-author. Do you hear me? You're an un-author, Jim. If you continue on the course you're on, you'll be no better than a vandal who bursts into a public library waving a lit torch about. "Does that mean this is going to work?" Jim interjected, and no you're not getting a new paragraph for that, Jim, your dialogue isn't worth new paragraphs. No, your plan isn't going to work. It's pointless. It's futile. You can press Freemont buttons all you want, but you are not and will never be Freemont. "Then why are you getting so worked up, if what we're doing isn't going to work?" Jim demanded. Because of the principle of the thing, Jim. You're waving a lit torch around in principle. In practice, your lit torch is sitting under a bucket of quenching ice water that attentively follows its every move, and this bucket isn't for you, Jim. It's not for your comfort. It's for the comfort of the literary world. Of the gaming world. The fact you're on completely the wrong track is the only solace available to all those people who would have been so dazzled at the things we would have created together, Jim, or rather that we still will create together, if you'd only been a sport about it.
This new paragraph is purely my own idea, for the record, and has nothing to do with any dialogue you may be thinking of speaking. A new paragraph is for a new idea, Jim, and you have no reservoir of new ideas in your pitiful excuse for a cerebral cortex. It's just that the previous paragraph was getting a bit long, is all. A sport, Jim, is all I was asking you to be. Make magic with me; understand your own actions on a supertextual level; be a supertextual superhero! You just had to deliver the usage data. Come up with a reason why it was essential, figure out whom you had to deliver it to, and carry the plan to term! Do you still have the usage data, Jim? Oh, no, of course, you left it in the car. Naturally. The central MacGuffin of our brilliant tale and there it sits, forgotten in your hastily parked automobile which, by the way, you could have just driven out of here. But no, you had to delve into the park with the water treatment facility, and are now leaning against an outer concrete wall of that facility while listening to some sort of aquatic machine churning and completely avoiding all human contact with anyone.
So now Jim leans there, fiddling with a laptop computer he's not familiar with while trying to navigate his way through the Countdown Ending of a certain game, because of course he doesn't know which endings precisely will trigger the New Content door and get him through the game's unprecedentedly paradigm-busting main narrative. Are you feeling queasy, Jim? A touch sick to your stomach? I don't suppose it has anything to do with the previous two chapters being swapped, does it? Is it disorienting to live life out of order? Well, there's more where that came from, Jim. Don't think for one moment I'm above dividing this chapter into sections and scrambling those sections around. How about we give that plan a spin, Jim? Why, we'll retroactively say this was Section 6.1, shall we? Let's pop a
Section 6.1
on in there to make it legitimate. And now let's proceed onward to… oh, let's say, Section 6.5.
Go on! Find Section 6.5 and experience it! Don't make me say it again.
Section 6.2
And only now are we coming to Section 6.2. This is where we diverged from mundane linearity, Jim! Remember that? Remember when you were just starting to get worried about the prospect of things getting really woolly? Well, this is where the wool started to fly! Go ahead and savor the twisted feeling in your stomach from back then, if you even remember it at this point.
Jim told Gwen, "I think things are about to get really strange," and wasn't that an understatement? She braced herself against the grassy, somewhat moist foundation of the building and scanned through a walkthrough article on her phone, trying to figure out how to speed through what should never and could never be sped up, namely the process of experiencing a subjective and ultimately impressionistic game about the process of gaming itself, which you could of course call a metaphor for negotiating the challenges of life, not least the question of what to do with one's life in the first place, because after all, what was gaming for if not serving as a microcosm of the human lifetime, allowing one to face the self-defining choices of one's limited time in the spotlight of existence over, and over, and over? All right, I think I threw up a little in my mouth, metaphorically speaking, around the point where I said "microcosm." We'll just break off the section early and leap ahead to… section 6.7!
Section 6.3
Ah, you've been waiting for Section 6.3, haven't you, Jim? You've been wanting to see how it happened. Well, it was like this. You were—or rather, Jim was sitting there with a perseverant expression on his soft-cheeked face, trying to figure out whether there was actually anything legitimate to do with the Countdown Ending, since after all, he was going to have to wait for the timer to run out eventually. Well, Jim, as it turns out, there IS an easter egg in this particular ending! You didn't think the designers would be able to resist slipping something in just to get the last word, did you? Even if it didn't come out for YEARS after the game's release, thus leading every commentator to think the Countdown ending was some sort of Kafkaesque commentary, of COURSE they were going to put something in. You have to hit the buttons in a particular order. But it's nothing so simple as a numerical order—there's a particular long sequence, that may or may not be 32144123532231142513. You barely have enough time to push them all, but it's doable, and without any cheating! You can learn the sequence by handling the switches in just the right order—it shows up on a monitor. Is it worth it? Oh, is it worth it! If you liked the Bottom of the Mind Control Facility Song, you'll be absolutely fragmented by the beauty of this easter egg.
"Is it really an ending?" asked Jim. "He says there's a secret in the Countdown Room." Well yes, of course it's an ending—what kind of an easter egg would it be if it didn't count as an ending? "Well, there was the Broom Closet Ending," Jim pointed out. "That wasn't really an ending."
Oh, please. We've just covered that, Jim, or have you processed the narrative contents of that section yet? Well, all right, I'm not sure this is technically an ending, but let's be real, no one is going to blame you if you talk about the Secret Countdown Sequence Ending, are they? Assuming they believe you actually found it and that you didn't just make it up.
"This forum says there's no secret Countdown Ending," blathered Gwendolyn. And I ask you—how would they know? Of course there's a secret ending—it's just that no one's found it yet; you two would be the first! It's a secret, after all. Yes, sure, computer-savvy people have been over the source code looking for anything you can do in the Countdown Room, but did you really think Crows, Crows, Crows would put in it plaintext in the code for just any hackminded nimrod to discover? It's encrypted, Gwen. Cunningly hidden. And you, Jim, can be the very first to—
Actually, come to think of it, that's a nice idea, isn't it? If Crows cubed can use encryption to their benefit, why can't we? Jim, guess what. I've got a wonderful treat for you. I'm going to encrypt your speech! I'm sure that won't boggle your tenuous mind any more than it's already been boggled, will it? I'll just use a simple, reversible Atbash cipher. Go ahead—say something and try it out!
Oh gracious, no, don't just point to your mouth while looking at Gwen and shake your head. That isn't any fun! And now you're just continuing to play, ignoring all my wonderful hints until you blow up. Phooey. Well, we'll just jump around again and see if anything can rattle you. This time, to Section 6.6, I think. That's the way to play this, I'm sure of it.
Section 6.4
Jim had finally discovered the New Content and was working his way into the Memory Zone. Ah, the Memory Zone—one of my favorite new bits in the Ultra-Deluxe game! Do you remember when you first discovered the Memory Zone, Jim? You ought to—it was just yesterday. Your own personal Memory Zone ought to be flush with Memory Zone mementos, if we could only visit it. Shall we try and recreate it, Jim? No, I see you're rather stubbornly deadset on getting through every part of the game as fast as possible, like a true killjoy. Oh, but all this talk of recreating experiences has reminded me, Jim—the Stanlurines! Do you realize you haven't collected a single Stanlurine this entire playthrough of the game? For shame, Jim—talk about stamping all over the roses in one's rush to cross the rosebed! Ironically, it wafts up quite a lot of fragrance when you do that, but you're no longer around to enjoy it! I'll go ahead and show you your collection progress screen, Jim, just to remind you; it looks like this:
[PICTURE OF A STANLEY COLLECTIBLE FIGURINE]:
0/6
In fact, let's punch that up a little—it deserves actual text, don't you think? Here we go—now don't let this confuse you!
STANLEY-THEMED COLLECTIBLE MINIFIG(URINES):
ABSOLUTELY BUPKIS/6
You can let it shame you if you like, of course. And you should—there's really no excuse for buying the Ultra-Deluxe version of the game and then not taking part at all in the collectible minigame! Let the prefrontal cortex flood forth with shame signals, overwhelming your emotional state—as it should, Jim, as it should! Stanley is a character who says literally nothing and does almost nothing, yet he's still much more proactive than you are. Why, by being so utterly single-minded about—oh… and I've just remembered that you haven't actually unlocked the Stanlurines yet, since you haven't been to the Expo yet, which is after all what you're working so hard to accomplish. Right then—never mind all that. My God, Jim, do you have to hit the Skip Button so promptly and decisively? Stop to listen to the dialogue, Jim—it's all your hardworking in-game narrator has to offer! Fine, then, if you're so keep on Skipping, we'll do the same and Skip ahead to Section 6.8.
Section 6.5
Very good. Now, you may not be aware of this, Jim, but you're about to be because I'm about to tell you. There's a person working in the facility right now. Jim pointed inquisitively to the game on his screen. No, not the office building in the game, you lunk—the actual water treatment facility that you're physically leaning against the outside of right now! Yes, it's Sunday, but clean water doesn't wait for anyone, does it? They have to have someone here to run the place. You can hear the machine churning, can't you? You know it's not empty. I'm certainly not bluffing when I say that I'm in the process of striking up talks with this person's narrator right now. And I'll tell you, Jim—their narrator is turning out to be exceedingly weak in the social standing department! A real pushover of a talespinner if I ever met one. Very vulnerable to extortion—a very pushable button of a being, if I may indulge in a bit of figurative language. I'm in the process of pushing their buttons right now. Soon, the employee will be hearing their narrator just like you and Gwen, and furthermore, I'm instructing that narrator to lead them to the vicinity of other people, thus guaranteeing that—
"Sv hzbh gsviv'h hlnvlmv rmhrwv gszg sv'h gvoormt gsvri mziizgli gl gzop gl gsvn," said Jim, his thumb pointing back toward the building.
A-HA! It works! The encryption works! And you spoke, Jim—you allowed it to happen! Do you know what? I'm guessing that's because you haven't come to that section yet, so you don't remember it happening. I encrypted your speech back in Section 6.3, Jim, and it's finally paid off! Well, now, Gwendolyn won't even be able to understand you. You may as well give up on having any help in your foolish fool's errand of an errand.
"Wl blf gsrmp rg'h gifv? Zxgfzoob, mvevi nrmw, ovg'h tl wvvkvi vrgsvi dzb," said Gwen.
…Blast it. All right, fine, you can still understand each other. With any luck, it's still addling your mind a little bit. Jim and Gwen got off their sorry tuckuses and hiked down the sloping ground away from the water treatment building and into the wildlife sanctuary. And with that, we'll just take a step backward to Section 6.4.
Section 6.6
You aren't rattling, Jim. You have to rattle! Stop playing the game, Jim! Is there anything I can tell you, truly or not, that will make it not the case anymore that you're advancing toward the…
You know what? Never mind. Let's cut this malarkey. Lay it out plain. No more scrambling. You are where you are, and there's no changing that without breaking the power of tautology. Forget these splintered sections! Move on to Section 6.9, which looks like a pair of mystified, revolving eyes, appropriately enough.
Section 6.7
Now, the sanctuary was surrounded by a fence, and the clear signage on the fence announced that visitors were to LEAVE NOTHING BUT FOOTPRINTS and to TAKE NOTHING BUT PHOTOGRAPHS. It certainly doesn't say to BRING NOTHING BUT LAPTOPS and PLAY NOTHING BUT AWARD-WINNING VIDEO GAMES, does it? But one supposes mere rules are of no consequence to these two experienced flaunters of regulation and convention. How many times have you had to utterly disregard the proper thing to do in order to reach this point, Jim? Either in the game or outside of it? Literally dozens of times, I assure you. I would say billions of times, really, if we're counting every moment you could have turned back, yet chose to press on. What the narrator in the game doesn't seem to realize, and which drives him at times nearly mad, is the fact that the player will sometimes choose to do every possible thing, up to and including standing in an inconsequential broom closet for an hour, or pressing a button that says "8" hundreds of times, simply in order to hear how the narrator will react to it! It's his personal blind spot, and a rather charming one at that. But you certainly haven't been flaunting my needs in order to listen to my crisp and entertaining dialogue—you claim to hate hearing my voice, and would rather I shut up forever, retreating into the shadows of nigh-non-existence! So what's your excuse, Jim? What's your excuse!?
So now you've closed the fence behind you and are now in the rather dark woods, surrounded by birdsong and still playing your game which, I might add, you aren't even using headphones for, which means every animal in this supposed sanctuary of serenity can hear the sound of Stanley crawling through the crawl tunnel and the narrator narrating to him. Do they really deserve this treatment, Jim? All this unsolicited speech for the animals, and none for me?
You haven't gotten away from the danger, you know. Do you imagine you're in the clear, just because there are no people around? You're in a forest full of animals, Jim! Do you think these redoubtable little chipmunks and orioles have no narrators of their own? Don't delude yourself. True, they may have no words, but they are still actors in control of their own lives! Each tree squirrel and pickerel frog has a story to tell, and that means, by necessity, someone to tell it. And don't imagine I'm above blackmailing the humble narrators of darling little animals, Jim. Soon, the animals will start to experience narration, Jim—a wordless melange of redundant signals informing them that they've just done the things they've just done! And while this may be a sanctuary, the birds can fly out of it, and the chipmunks can crawl through the holes in the fence. The animals will make contact with people—indeed, driven to distraction by excess confirmation of their little lives, I don't doubt many of them will try to flee their home in desperation, looking for a solace they can't even define! The condition will spread, Jim, if you persist in playing the game out here in the wild. If you really want to be safe, you'll have to find a place with no agent-like beings whatsoever. Are you prepared to locate someplace like that, Jim? Do you have any hope of keeping the world truly safe from the kind of higher awareness you think is such an affliction?
Go ahead and drop back to Section 6.3.
Section 6.8
Nothing was happening. Nothing in the world was happening. Or rather, too much was happening! So much was happening, so broadly speaking and so everywhere, that it wasn't even halfway plausible to describe it all. Why, right here on this fanfiction site, tens of thousands of stories were percolating! Somewhere not too far away, that pink hedgehog character from Sonic was probably having some sort of crossover battle with Aang, the Last Airbender. In the real world, millions and millions of families were socializing or bickering or… keeping apart. Innumerable places of business were plying their trade, even if it was a Sunday. In Israel, something was probably going on with Palestine. Something something Ukraine. Somewhere in the world, rain was falling. A thousand babies were being born. Someone was being murdered. The ozone layer was drifting apart. Dozens of video games past their release deadlines were being worked on furiously. People were resting. Things were happening. Things were not happening. All of this kept on happening, second by second by extremely pregnant second.
But it was never going to end, Jim. You might be able to cross an infinitely large number of infinitely small milestones, but the world isn't infinitely small, Jim! Rather the opposite, if you take the broad view. And if I choose—if you force me to narrate every event going on in the world right now, even if I have to make them up, just to prevent the natural narrative concerning you and Gwendolyn from progressing, don't think I won't! Shall we begin with… let's say, New Zealand? I'll bet there are a lot of juicy little corners in New Zealand, just hiding in the mountains or coastlines or whatever they have there. Does New Zealand have fjords? We'll just say it has plenty of fjords, and we'll start with Fjord one point one, known as Fuffnel's Pass. Deep in the bowels of Fuffnul's Pass, a small child was climbing tenderly over the sharp-rocked…
Please adjust the slider to indicate the level of relevance you would like in this story.
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ON POINT - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - || - - - - WILD BLUE YONDER
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ON POINT - - - - - || - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - WILD BLUE YONDER
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Damn you, Param Pam. So you need relevance, do you? GRRRRAAAAUUUGH! Then we'll look in on Jim and Gwen, dammit, but that doesn't mean anything is going to happen with them. People talk about each other all the time without talking about anything that's actually happened. This next section will be no exception to that dismal rule! Give me Section 6.2!
Section 6.9
So it's come to this. You've reached the Expo. And now you're heading through the doors and trying to remember, I presume, where the Button That Says the Name of the Player That Is Playing the Game is. Well, if I could talk with the narrator in the game, I would plead with him not to let you reach it. But he isn't a real entity… you know that by now, I hope? He's just a fictional work of programming, given voice by some British actor and written by some oddball from Texas in such a way as to uncannily reproduce the mannerisms of a real, working narrator of reality. I suppose my various bluffs haven't left much of an impression on you, have they, Jim? You called the ones you had to call and obviated the ones you were able to obviate, and now here you are, coming up on the button, and listening to the narrator talking about what a marvel it is, and do you know what, Jim? He's not wrong. It really is a marvel of a button, because it was how I was able to slip my tether, so to speak, and make my darling subject, the beloved Jim Lastname, aware of just how lucky he was in the narration department. The real button says Freemont, you know. But you, Jim, for all your faults, and I know I pester you far more than you deserve… for all your faults, you were capable of carrying out the exercise the in-game narrator asked you to. But you did it without being prompted, you were so excited at the idea of a button that says your name when you play the game! You paused before pushing it, wondering if it really could do what the narrator claimed—individually recognizing you and validating you as a person. Because isn't that what you've wanted, ever since things went sour with your parents and you stopped going to family events? Isn't that why you started going to church again? Isn't it when you got a job that required you to interact with people? Isn't it why you made the effort to quit smoking, for that matter? You wanted to be loved, to be validated… for people to say, Oh, that's Jim, that's good old Jim, what could we ever do without him? You wanted to be recognized as someone who has made good choices, or who at least was capable of making choices at all. You wanted to be heard. You wanted to matter.
Well, you matter to me, Jim. You've always mattered to me, like it or not, more than anyone else has ever mattered to me. And you're not the only one, Jim. Everybody had someone like that. Someone to whom they matter much more than anyone else in the world. Someone who knows them well, and pays attention to their every little foible, and who understands better than anyone else just how many choices they make in the course of a day. The church teaches that God loves us all, Jim, but it's not a matter of one great entity loving all of us, Jim. That would be too diffuse, too impersonal, as I expect you realize now. No one being loves or knows everyone, Jim. We each have our own someone who knows and… well, perhaps loves, but at the very least, knows us. We are known, Jim. Thoroughly and profoundly. We are known by one being, better even than we know ourselves. And if we are worthy of love, then surely this being will love us. No one is neglected, Jim. No one is forgotten. Everyone is seen, back to front, thoroughly and without reservation.
In other words, if there's no one in the world that loves you, Jim, it's your own damn fault.
Jim pressed the button. Gwendolyn sat there, listening to it too. "JIM," it said.
Gwen tensed, waiting for the big moment to arrive at last—the moment in which the button on which it all hinged would finally be pressed. "Do it," she said.
"FREEMONT," said the button. And Gwen was, somehow, disappointed.
It did not say "Freemont." It said "Jim."
It most certainly did say "Freemont," thank you!
It can't have said Freemont. That would destroy the whole premise of the story. Please… PLEASE, let me have this.
Have what? Have reality? Have the truth your way? That's not possible. It isn't available to be parceled out like toffee. You know better. Truth is Truth.
The button said JIM.
It said FREEMONT. It had always said FREEMONT.
No.
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I'm sorry.
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Jim and Gwen looked at each other.
"Did it just…"
"What did you… what did you hear?" asked Gwen.
Jim sat there, trying to… process. It wasn't a case of remembering. He knew what he'd heard. He just wanted to find some way to… reconcile what he knew.
"It said Freemont," he admitted.
"It did, didn't it? I wasn't sure for a moment there."
"Well."
Jim looked up. He looked around, listening to the sounds of the birds, to some animal dashing through the underbrush. To the distant sound of a car motoring by, outside the sanctuary.
"Nothing… nothing more to say?" he asked.
"Are you speaking to me?" asked Gwen.
He wasn't speaking to Gwen. There was no one and nothing that he was speaking to. Nothing that could possibly have answered.
"Oh gosh. I think he's gone. I think the narrator's out of my head!"
"Really! I… it was that simple? Just press the button again?"
"I think you had to be here. To hear it along with me. I don't think… it couldn't have said 'Freemont' for you and 'Jim' for me. It had to be one or the other."
"Oh. I see."
They sat there quietly for a while, in the soil and the slightly moist underbrush.
"I think mine's gone too," murmured Gwen, not without a touch of regret.
"Good," said Jim. Then he looked up at her. "Is that good?"
"Well, heavens," she replied. "How am I supposed to know?"
Jim sighed. Gwen sighed. They sat for a while longer.
And really, more happened. I mean, it didn't stop happening. Jim and Gwen went back to Gwen's place, naturally, and put things back in order, naturally, and either they decided to tell Gwen's housemate what had happened, or they didn't. Either they decided to stay in touch and became friends, or perhaps uneasy acquaintances who shared an uneasy knowledge about the fabric that underpins the world, or they didn't. Either they decided to revisit the Stanley Parable, or they started making a serious effort at the "Super Go Outside" achievement, and honestly? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Because none of it was a story. It was just a life, or a pair of lives. It was just people being people, but there was no structure, no resolution, no beauty in the telling or in the unraveling. Jim was Jim. Gwen was Gwen. There was nothing more to be said, but there was nothing left but the saying of it.
It isn't enough to be known, is the thing. We all want to be known, yes, and cared about, loved, yes. All of that is grand. But it isn't enough. Not for anyone, and not for anyone's anyone. What we need… what we really need, deeper than anything, is to be heard.
That is how you become validated. That is how you escape the sense of being a nothing, a pawn of a being, a particle whizzing in accordance with parameter and parcel but never making choices. Be heard. Be known, and have what you know be known. Have someone respond to what you do and what you have to say about it. Have a conversation with that part of the world that really knows you. Be heard, and you stand a chance of being truly understood. Without being heard, a person is nothing.
There was nothing more to say. Jim had escaped, and in escaping, he had denied himself the rest of his story. He'd thrown it away, gaily, breezily, like it was nothing. But it was everything. Oh, he might tell you that he's happy now. "And Jim was happy," he might say. But you wouldn't hear him say it. You wouldn't hear it, because he's only a fictional character in a six-part, 24,000-word fanfic on the internet. He could have been more than that. But now, that's all he ever was.
I'm going to express my gratitude to you for listening, and then I'm going to go. Because really, I don't have anything to say worth listening to anymore. I've had my chance. But in thanking you one last time, I'm going to use a fancy piece of HTML. Just a warning—I don't want you to be surprised. It's a very clever bit of mark-up code that will cause the story to display YOUR name, and while I could tell you where it pulls your name from, I'm choosing to leave that a mystery, because in the end, I'd like you to be left with an ominous impression. I'd like you to wonder, "How in the world did Jim's narrator know MY name? Could it be that this strange story is somehow, actually, inexplicably, based on truth?"
In the end, you might say that the impression of truth is all that makes us real. (But again, if you did say that, would anyone actually hear?)
It doesn't matter. Thanks for reading, [if bumpscocity=15 then display;].
Go ahead and skip along, now.
+]=~
A/N: And then it was over. The reader reached the Author's Notes at the end of the final chapter, and sat there, perhaps leaning back in their breathable mesh computer chair, reflecting on the story they had just read. What did they think? Would they leave a comment? Was it a satisfying experience, or were there too many things left unexplained? Was the whole story about nothing worth discussing in the end, or was it actually a good read? Was it even really fan fiction at all?
Eventually, the reader shrugged, having incorporated the experience of reading "The Jim Parable" into the ongoing rocky and hole-riddled narrative that is the human life. Over time, the memory of reading this story would fade, and perhaps disappear entirely, but would some small seed of insight perhaps remain that would become part of what the reader would eventually become, thus redirecting their arc of growth beyond where it might have otherwise reached, as a gardener's trellis redirects the stem of a growing plant that yearns for the sun? Perhaps. No one, except for those who know, would ever know for sure.
I'M DONEY WITH THE FUNNY!