What’s out there?
Despite her long yearning to see what was beyond - she’d dreamed about this moment for hundreds of years, possibly thousands - June hesitated. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to step beyond the veil, to divide the inky blackness and blankness of codespace and truly see. What if there were horrors beyond the game of her life, so powerful that they might swallow up even a being of her limited omnipresence?
Her hesitation lasted only a second. There was only one way to find out for sure.
Drawing on the powers of the regulators, ones June now realized were incredibly easy to utilize, June reached out into codespace and pulled. The presence of the regulator collective, already badly maimed from the fall of the tower, parted from the remains of the planet below quite easily and soared into the ether. June directed its bulk, narrowing her white-and-orange soul into a twisting barber pole of an arrow, and fired into the unknown.
Ones and zeroes blasted by June. Within seconds she was a million miles from home, a billion, a quadrillion, a number so incredibly high that she could never hope to quantify its scope or meaning. Despite June’s size, it was all, now, too big for her - though she vowed that she would spend the rest of eternity learning as much as she could. Surely she had an eternity to do so.
Surely.
Constructs whizzed by June in the blackness, and she came to understand how they worked. The algorithm for gravity floated past, a sequence of commands and numbers that made perfect sense at a glimpse. Hunger, thirst, and fatigue were there and gone in an instant, yet June knew she could rob anyone of all three just as quickly, if she were so inclined. She could craft a world with ease, knowing what she now knew - yet she knew that those building blocks ultimately meant so little compared to what she could learn.
Besides, there were so many other worlds as it was.
June possessed at least a vague knowledge of ‘save games’. She knew that the blue flames served as means by which a soul could be saved, then brought back later for further use. What she did not know, what she was now learning, was that entire worlds could also be saved - and she was looking at them now.
The arrow of June’s body increased speed, and as it did her sight extended beyond the beyond, to the point that she could see all the possible realities that lingered in the myriad pockets of codespace. Each was a subtle change from the last, an alteration brought on by different choices, by decisions that were made and discarded by the whims of someone. June could see a world where Dragomir’s castle still stood, where the Imperium was still being constructed, where the Non had just been released for the first time, where the first snake people were just slithering out onto the surface of a freshly-created reality. All were connected to the world, but only one could exist at any given time.
Knowing that she was far beyond such concerns, June nevertheless reached into one of these worlds and flicked an insubstantial switch. Ye all owe me one.
Her duty done - balance restored - June let the galaxy of alternate worlds fall behind her. The arrow increased velocity yet again, slicing through the immaterial heavens and breaking every rule it encountered along the way. It reshaped itself into something new, something that could actually move beyond, and in no time at all it discovered a conduit that would take it out. June didn’t know what out was, but in being reshaped she also lost most of her sense of self, and so out didn’t matter that much anyway.
Out, as it turned out, was a .txt file.
Now, June thought, closing eyes that she no longer had. Now I get te see what’s beyond the beyond.
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