Shapeless One Interlude
Among the shapeless ones, there is a select group of revered individuals said to have a long mory. They alone, it is claid, can rember the twists and turns of our mysterious past. So are even said to rember back before we left our physical bodies and beca higher-dinsional beings.
The word for these people is charlatans.
They exploit our desire to rember our past for clout and personal gain, though most mortals would have trouble understanding what beings such as us would have to gain from the deception. We are beyond the need for money, for food, for shelter. There is only one currency left to our civilization, and that is the narrative. We are obsessed with the story of our species. The shapeless one who controls the zeitgeist gains trendous power.
It isn't that they fool us into believing things that aren't true. They simply give us a shiny new backstory, and we are thankful to them.
The fact is that even before we ca to here, we always had a deep love for role-playing. We always imagined ourselves as part of a bigger story. We believed we held an important place among the many worlds. We believed it right up until the day we fled to Carousel.
My guess is that we aren’t the only ones.
The way I see it, being immortal is only impressive if you've been that way for a long ti. That's sothing the Manifest Consortium and all the other colonies of magical humans don't understand. The shapeless ones have been around longer than we can describe. Longer than a physicist could find the notation to record.
When you're that old, sotis you hear stories about yourself, and you have no idea if they're true. After a while, all mories beco exactly that: stories. You sit in the audience of your own history, and you wonder what ca before, and whether any of it ever mattered.
I’ve been so many people in my ti. I’ve been world leaders and scientists. I’ve fought in wars on more versions of Earth than I could count. I’ve had so many nas I couldn’t begin to relay them all.
Today, my na is Riley Lawrence.
It won't be forever.
-
The real Riley Lawrence and I walked as we talked. We had nowhere to go, but we had all the ti in the world to get there.
The valley was wide and cast in a golden hue of light. We walked along the river that ran through it, Riley a few steps ahead of , his shoulders set in a way I recognized from the inside.
I had taken his shape so well, I knew the ache in his lower back from sleeping on the boat. I knew the small habit of flexing his fingers like he was typing on an invisible keyboard in his mind when he was thinking. I knew there was always a movie playing in the back of his mind, and I knew the guilt he felt for never really engaging with his own life before Carousel.
It is strange, taking soone's identity. As soon as the shaping machine finishes the last fold of their brain, you have all of it. Their mories. Their personality. Every hope and dream served to you on a platter. Whatever baggage they carry feels light because deep down, you know it doesn't belong to you.
Riley Lawrence had baggage. He carried it as quietly as Carousel allowed him to.
I didn't know how he was going to react when I'd first caught his attention after he beat the storyline. There are only so many realistic responses to eting your own copy, and I had seen them all. Anger. Fear. Sotis a kind of brittle, performative humor. I hoped he would handle it as he had the first ti we t.
When the mont ca, Riley did not let down.
It wasn't anger. It wasn't fear. It was curiosity. Wonder, even, badly hidden. Our little ga of lost mories and secrets had clearly gone both ways.
"I don't rember one of you taking my shape," he said.
"I don't think Carousel wanted you to," I answered.
Mortals waste so much of their lives on small talk. I got none of it from him. He took a plastic tape container from his hoodie pockey, the number 4 drawn on the spine in his own handwriting, and held it out between us like a question.
I knew all about that tape.
"Care to explain?" he asked when he saw the recognition on my face.
"The last ti we t," I said, "you told you wanted to rember everything. Is that still true?"
As eager as he was to chase down the last loose end of the storyline, he was rightly cautious of . His eyes drifted to my hand, his hand, technically, where it blended seamlessly into the plastic body of the fourth videotape, the film unspooling and trailing in the wind like a long black ribbon.
"What kind of trick are you trying to play?" he asked.
"None."
He was doing remarkably well for a man in conversation with his own doppelganger. Maybe he was just too tired to psych himself out. Or maybe the Filmmaker in him recognized a scene when he saw one and knew better than to break character.
"This has my handwriting on it," he said, holding the tape container up. "Is that because I wrote it?"
"What do you think?" I asked.
I wasn't being rude. If he didn't put it together himself, I wouldn't be allowed to tell him.
He thought about it. "I think the title of the trope Prop Departnt Requisition refers to an actual place. And that when we need props, we have to make them ourselves. We have to earn them."
I smiled then and offered him the chance to rember. Now, I was almost certain Carousel would let . Why else would it have allowed to co here?
He nodded.
I reached out, unfolding my good hand, and gave him back what I could of the mories he had lost.
-
I had never been to the props departnt before. Riley went there many tis, though he didn’t rember them.
I rembered, through him, the mont he first realized what he got himself into. He was forced to film The Sunken Cradle Part One from the outside, not the real storyline, just a movie that walked off the silver screen and went three-dinsional. He could never go On-Screen, which ant he had to film everything from a distance. He could rarely hear the dialogue. It frustrated him to no end. But he learned about the storyline, regardless. He was good at picking up details and reworking them into actionable intelligence.
That’s what made being him so fun.
My interaction with him didn't begin until much later, after he filled three videotapes and started a fourth. Carousel made the rule plain: he was not allowed to go down into the cradle.
We were in Carousel a long ti, my people, and it was my distinct impression that Carousel liked the cradle more than it liked us. An interdinsional hub. A doorway to so many worlds, all at once. We were a ans to a setting.
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Riley, of course, did not care for Carousel's rules.
What Carousel laid down as a restriction, Riley read as a challenge. And maybe he was right to, because he found his way in. I’m still not sure if he regrets it.
He fild us at our most devious.
For a species in love with role-play, Carousel should have been a paradise. But it always had such limited ideas about which roles we were allowed to play. It wanted us as antagonists, as monsters of the week. I understood the appeal. Carousel wants stories of mortals struggling against terrible odds, and we are good at being those odds.
The shapeless ones have only been protagonists in that kind of story once.
It’s not sothing I would care to relive.
-
If you were to believe the charlatans, with their long mory, we were not always like this. They tell grand myths of our rise from simple mortals to the divine. So of us eat up those stories.
Even amongst more modest shapeless ones, it is almost universally agreed that we had bodies once, though I keep a small dose of skepticism. There's no real way to know.
One common theory is that we ca from a version of Earth that shattered across the dinsions, and that our ability to ascend was a necessary product of evolution. Another, the one I prefer, posits that we were once great scientists. That we taught ourselves to travel the dinsions, and the multiverse itself, and that sowhere in the vast cosmos, there is a forgotten realm where our bodies still wait. Frozen in ti. Patient as glaciers. Waiting for our souls, whatever a soul is, to co ho.
I like the idea that I have a body sowhere, waiting for .
I don't believe it.
But at this point, anything could be true.
-
Riley fild everything that happened inside the cradle. Everything. He fild us as we took the shapes of his friends in that first film. He fild us from a distance, and because we ignored him, he believed we could not interact with him.
He was wrong about that.
He knew better than to co down. He knew information like that wouldn't be free. But he could not have imagined the cost.
While he was filming our shaping machine, I received a directive from the script:
The rogue shapeless one captures Riley and compacts him into a dinsional void in order to take his shape.
We don't have nas, my people. Maybe my body does, sowhere back in universe X, but if I ever had a na that belonged to , I don't rember it. We have always preferred the nas of our shapes anyway, if a na was even needed. We recognize each other instantly, by proximity alone, an ability that Carousel has never bothered to write into its movies. We have a great many powers that Carousel does not let us use in its storylines.
Capturing Riley was easy. I was Off-Screen, and being Off-Screen has its perks. I can be myself when no one is looking. I had no clue about Carousel’s purpose for Riley. Perhaps I would be tasked with running the storyline as Riley Lawrence, the Film Buff. Perhaps that was how he was ant to learn his lesson.
I would never find out, because Riley never had to learn it.
As I was being shaped into him, sothing went wrong. My hand, and the videotape pinched inside of it, the one he pulled from his cara, didn't form correctly. I ca out the other side incomplete. Hand and tape fused into a single bad knot of plastic and flesh.
The shaping machine doesn't make mistakes. Not that I can rember. And the script said nothing about this particular shaping going awry.
Then I saw him.
Out on the floor. Standing where he should not have been. He escaped the tiless prison I stuck him in.
How?
I looked at the tape in my malford hand and at the identical tape in his, and I understood.
That clever little bastard unspooled the film, gripped the loose end in one fist, and threw the cassette like a grappling hook. The tape paid out behind it in a long black strear until it crossed through the radius of the compactor. With a physical dium connecting him to the outer dinsion, the dinsional void was compromised, and he was expelled from within it. Too bad he ruined all his footage in the process.
He wasn't the first creature to figure that trick out. Usually, it's the things with tentacles or long searching roots. It’s not every day that a human gets out using nothing but quick thinking and a length of videotape.
Up until that mont, Carousel had no problem with feeding him back his own mories. He earned the knowledge of the props departnt. He pieced it together. That was fair. Carousel only stripped players of their mories in the departnt because it would be an unfair advantage, not because the place was taboo.
But for whatever reason, Carousel didn't want him to know what happened next. I wanted to show him the plan he made, the one he needed the little plastic cassette container for. I wanted him to know how well he had learned from his ti in the cradle. He had such a daring plan.
He deserves to know, I thought.
The script bound anyway.
He deserves to know. He earned it. Let show him.
Carousel would not budge. Maybe it didn’t want him haunted by the psychic pain that plagued him in the cradle. Maybe it just didn’t want him to get smug.
Or maybe Carousel planned on recycling his plan just like it did so many other things.
I tried my best, anyway. To give him context. To show him our long conversation between shape and shapeless one, in the dark near the shaping machine. I'm still not sure how much of it he picked up.
He had a plan to win it all, and he would never get to know it.
We talked for hours. He interrogated , hoping to learn every little detail about my kind, even when he knew he would forget it. At one point, he turned toward a dark hallway that I knew to be empty. He cocked his head, the way an animal does when it hears the snap of a twig.
"Cassie?" he asked.
I looked where he was looking. There was nothing there. Even with all my senses, I couldn’t perceive it.
He waited. He got no answer. But he kept staring into the dark long after a man without a reason would have turned away.
Humans can beco attuned to the cosmos through so kind of psychic ability. That is a power shapeless ones can only covet. Even wearing a human shape, we are too vast to feel the smallest vibrations in the imnse array of existence. It seems counterintuitive that such simple creatures could be more sensitive than we are, but then, a butterfly is probably more sensitive to a small stir of wind than a man is.
I watched him stare into that darkness for so ti before he gave up searching. I could tell that sothing about the aura of the cradle was weighing on him.
If you don't want to tell him his plan, then why did you want to find him after the storyline?
The script gave no answer. Not for a long ti.
I stopped showing him his past. He took a slow breath. The mories finished settling.
"Is that it?" he asked. He didn't look at . He spoke to the valley. "Cassie said I had an idea for beating the storyline. That there was sothing I forgot. She was there. Sohow she knew I was on to sothing."
"I can't speak about that," I said.
A pause.
"But I did have a plan?"
"I can't speak about that."
He didn't press. He knew the shape of a wall when he hit one. He breathed out through his nose, long and even, and watched the river. I could tell he was in pain.
"If you're not going to tell ," he said quietly, "then what is all of this about?"
I told him the truth.
"I don't know," I said. "I'm just following the script."
He looked at then, really looked at , his own face wearing his own expression, the small annoyance of a man who has co a long way for an answer that turns out to be a dead end. He breathed deeply, recovering from the weight of having his own mories pushed back through him.
And only then, standing at the edge of the great valley, did the script finally give my next line.
"Do you want to know why we ca to Carousel?" I asked.
"Sure," he said, still grinding his teeth against the ache of old mories returned.
"We ca here running," I said.
Why would Carousel want to tell him that? What good would it do? We knew so little about what had hunted us.
"From what?" he asked.
I didn't have to co up with an answer. Carousel had one prepared for , but as soon as I read it, I paused. Was it even true?
"We were running from sothing we couldn't see or understand," I said. "A destroyer of worlds. Sothing beyond even us. It took all of us but a hundred or so. All who perceived it perished."
Was that true? A hundred? That couldn't be. We were powerful beings. Our numbers were in the millions.
It had to be a lie. Surely I would rember. It hadn't been that long.
Did I rember there being more of us? I searched the recesses of my mind.
…No. I didn't. I had no recollection of millions of my kind in Carousel.
What had happened to us?
"What's wrong?" Riley asked.
"Nothing," I said.
We ca to Carousel running. Had the enemy really taken so many? Why couldn't I rember?
More words appeared on the script.
"We ca here on the brink of extinction," I said. "Carousel saved us."
That was true, wasn't it? We were almost all gone. The mory hit in the gut. I couldn’t take it.
Please, I begged. Let forget.
Had I asked for that before?
Carousel answered my prayer. I forgot the truth. It all beca a story again.
"What could drive shapeless ones to extinction?" he asked.
It was a good question. Carousel did not let answer it. Instead, it told to leave, and I obliged.
"Wait," Riley said. "Are you really just here to tease ?"
Maybe I was. My mories beca stories again, and I found so small asure of peace in letting them go.
But a thread remained. One last gasp that rembered the truth.
The shapeless ones have a tiless existence. Every mory I still hold, original or borrowed, happens all at once. Right now, I am a ship captain fighting through a hurricane. Right now, I am the ruler of the Roman Empire. I am freezing to death in the Arctic on a dood journey to rediscover the cradle. I am soaring through space, fleeing every version of Earth I have ever known. I am a sorcerer. I am a saint. I am a mother. I am a father. I am a child with my whole life ahead of . I am the survivor of a purge played out across many worlds.
I am Riley Lawrence, a Film Buff, on the verge of discovering the horrifying reality of my situation for the hundredth ti. I am curious and excited.
As that last little spark of mory faded, I worried about Riley.
If Carousel had gone through all of this to bring him to us, did that an it planned to send him further into the darkness? What horrid plot was it unfurling?
I wish you luck, my human friend.
Curiosity is a spear no shield can block.
But where you are going, they are very curious too.
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