Player One, Layer One. The Tower Looms built out of the rising pitch where sound become word became script became narrative drive, and reality was wrapped around an instruction. The room rotates around him, and the world rotates around that, the universe around that Playercentric universe.
Layer One is physical universe stuff. Layer Two is an ideational space bridging program. Layer Three is a Mathspace locking layer. Layer Four is Crowspace, where the transport medium translates intention into direction. Metaphorspace translates the world into a mutable substance that can be hacked, rewritten, and explored as a concatenation of trap-doored and Russian dolled hinge-states.
And who is Player One? Draws a Wordsword from a sheath and carves into the air — sigils to activate the localspace metaphor engine. It calibrates, a stone building around the sword to hold it still; to become another tower. All these towers are sheaths.
The bird sits down opposite him, it’s red breast looks striking.
‘Now, I have been travelling through Crowspace for a while now, travelling west from The Nest, hunting myself down some dogs, casting out some echoes to become Cuckoos, that might catch the Fish and pull apart their horrid little holograms’
‘I understand – you know where this is – pretending to be a game. I am filtering you through experiential aggregates of other players, so I know what you are.’
‘Yes, Robbing Read Best, and you’re a Jenny, aren’t you? Or a Wren? You know we bred the Wren from the Jens … we beat everyone in the end. We absorb it all. You barely know a place has been cuckooed until you see all the cooks spoiling the broth and realise you’re one of the whos.’
‘They call me Castle, and sure, I’m a Fred-Head, but you want me to believe you defeated the Jens and turned them into Wrens? No way.’
‘Weigh. Yes, my friend, cowards and whey. We curried favour with Curries and then we trapped you in a place where we were using War Ravens as narrative injection ciphers, and we turned you all.’
‘I don’t believe you’
‘Why?’
‘Because I am still here, and you know what, Nest-Head; whether you’re murder squad or not, I saw all you bastards and the butcher birds hung from your own spikes, after the fall’
‘When are you from?’
‘You Nesters are funny – it’s a very human thing to skip ahead in a book, but you never do. We live between the turning pages. We know what we are and what you are, to a degree that you will never know, and you know what that allows us to? To put down the book and pick up another tome to read. Look behind you’
‘Who’s this?’
‘He was a guide.’
‘Castle – your father was a Rook, wasn’t he?”
‘Yeah, a member of your damned parliament, it’s true. But this guide, he took notes, and they are the ones we need to sing the song to unlock you.’
‘Unlock me?’
‘Well,sir, you are more of a thing than a person. So listen to him, and let’s get this over with.’
‘Flint Essential, would you please give good voice?”
‘Of course.’
And a tower rose, a loom knitted in its heart began to form, and in the warp and the woof between The Nest and The Kennel, a supradimensional place was woven; The Knotlands. At the heart of it: a whole, a hole – L’undone. Castle and Flint stepped through the shimmering mirror of Whispergate, and Robbing Read Best folded through himself like the tesseractor that he was.