A/N: Bit if an early update, due to the fact I'll be spending the next few days without access to a computer. On the bright side, I get chocolate eggs. Also my family will be around, which can potentially be great or frustrating. It's usually greatly frustrating.
If you celebrate it, have a great Easter!
When it all came crashing down, in was on a Tuesday.
Go figure, Bill would think later: it was always on a Tuesday, regardless the dimension, time and universe. Why Tuesday? Because why the hell not, that's why.
Kind of funny, that.
Spell-bound and motionless, I could neither speak nor move to avert the impending destruction; and still the noise grew louder, and the King came closer, when I awoke to find the breakfast-bell recalling me to the realities of Flatland.
"BILL!"
"Whoa!"
It took a few moments to understand what had precisely happened: one instant he was opening the door of his store and the next he was being pushed in, someone's voice yelling his name so loudly it rang through his mind like a fire drill. He stumbled forward, but managed not to fall - and turned to see Nora slamming the door shut behind her.
"What the-" he began, but the next moment something was shoved in his hands - a sheet of paper.
"The coordinates," Nora breathed, sounding all the world like she had just ran a marathon. She was breathless to the point is sounded like she had to force out every word. Bill would have wondered about that, if he wasn't too busy looking down at the coordinates. It was a place at the outskirts of the capital, not at all far from there - they could reach it in hours. Was that it, the weak point in the fabric of their dimension?
Bill laughed. "It's happening! It's really happening! Can't believe it! Now we just-"
"You have to do it alone. They're after me."
He trailed off, and suddenly he didn't feel like laughing anymore. He looked at her in a mute question, and finally noticed - really noticed - how scared she actually looked.
"Wait, what? You mean you got caught?"
"They came home looking from me right after I found the coordinates. I… someone must have told them. Someone must have spoken, because I gave my father no reason to doubt me, and yet they came for me. "
Bill's grip on the sheet of paper clenched, the gravity of the situation finally dawning on him. If someone had spoken, as she had said, then they would come for him soon as well. For him, and for the orders. "... But you got away," he heard himself saying.
"I had to get the coordinates to you. Now that you have both those and the equation, you can actually meet the Sphere. Get it to do something."
"Hey now, don't heap it all on me! We can both-"
"They're looking for me. Coming with you would just put everything at risk. I… my father is gone, too," she said, and her voice shook. "I burned his study as well. I had to, so that they would never have the coordinates. But they know it was me. I'm their priority. You need to go now, before they figure out I passed everything on to you. The others may have already been captured, for all I know - Bill, please. You need to go now."
It was sound advice, terribly reasonable, and Bill found himself ignoring it for a few moments longer. "... They'll kill you when they find you. Not without torturing you for information first."
Nora gave a bitter chuckle. "I don't plan on being captured alive."
There was a long moment of silence before Bill spoke again. "They're going to come here soon, I guess. They will be looking for me. Should this place go up in flames like your father's study with a few of them in it, you wouldn't hear me complain."
"... I suppose I may as well go out with a bang, then," Nora said, and gave a brief laugh that had little cheerfulness in it. "And, if they think this was your doing, they might think you died as well. It would give you more time."
"Could give us both more time."
"No. Just you. I didn't come this far to risk it all by trying to get there with half of the Circles' guard after me. Seems only fair, anyway. I burned my father and his life's work, so I may as well end up the same way. He didn't deserve it, and Esther will never forgive me for it. I just… couldn't let him walk away and tell the Circles what he knew."
"No real choice there."
"Don't give me that crap," she snapped, reaching up to wipe her eye. "There is always a choice, regardless what the Circles tell everyone. This was mine. Make it worth something."
You let them take Liam away!
Bill, enough. The law is harsh, but it is the law. There is nothing to argue.
"... I see. You'll find everything you need to take them down with you in the back of the store," Bill said, and reached to hold out his hand. "Been great doing business with you."
Nora gave a noise that sounded much like a laugh and reached to shake his hand. Bill noticed she was wearing the same pendant she had haggled out of him no more than a few weeks earlier. "It's been fun on this end, too. Now finish it. Deal?"
"Deal," Bill said, and left. He didn't turn to look back at her and the store, as he hadn't turned back to look at his birth mother or the miserable house she and her husband lived in. There were so many things he wished to see, and now he had the means to; no reason to keep his eye on what he was leaving behind.
The trap worked, but Bill wasn't there to see it. He wasn't there to see the store go up in flames with everyone in it, the soldiers sent to take him in screaming as they burned, but one day he would get to watch and laugh as the rest of his world met that same fate.
Had Nora lived to see it, she would have regretted ever trusting him.
In the billions of years to follow, many people would.
If it indeed be so, that this other Space is really Thoughtland, then take me to that blessed Region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. There, before my ravished eye, a Cube moving in some altogether new direction, but strictly according to Analogy, so as to make every particle of his interior pass through a new kind of Space, with a wake of its own-shall create a still more perfect perfection than himself, with sixteen terminal Extra-solid angles, and Eight solid Cubes for his Perimeter. And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger at the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Six Dimension shall fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth-
"A dump? Seriously?"
Bill looked back down at the coordinates on the sheet of paper and then back up at the heap of junk and broken things, thin trails of smoke rising in the air. That was the place, no doubt about it. Not that he was expecting a golden gate, trumpets and confetti, but it was still kind of a letdown.
The again, the opening must have been there long before someone had the brilliant idea to use the spot as a garbage dump. It sure summed up his world's lack of prospective.
But that was about to change.
The coordinates took him to the northern side of the dump. No one was around and there seemed to be nothing remarkable there - not to someone who wasn't there specifically to look for something, anyway. But Bill was there with a purpose, and it didn't take him too long to notice something - what looked like a small heap of stones. It may have been mistaken for just another heap of junk, but upon closer look he could tell it had to be so, so much older than everything else around it.
Had it been something else once, maybe a building? It was hard to tell. Now it was only a heap of white stones… with a single black one in the middle of it, larger than most and smooth to the touch. When Bill reached out to touch it, something that felt like a mild electric charge caused him to tense up. It was gone the next instead, but Bill didn't pause to wonder even for a moment, whether he may have imagined. He knew, just like that, that he was on to something. He had to be.
The sheet of paper with the equation in it was stuffed in his hat and slightly wrinkled when he pulled it out, but it hardly mattered as long as it was readable. Bill held it in one hand, took a sharp white rock with the other, and began writing the equation. The rock was not chalk or anything, but it worked well enough - made the numbers visible, if anything, and he supposed that would be enough.
Not that he'd know, but surely Nora would have warned him if anything more than that was needed, right? Because if he needed to do anything else he had no idea what it would be and it wasn't like he could ask anyone, with her gone and everyone else probably already captured or worse. It wasn't a pleasant thought, but it was cut short almost right away: the moment he finished writing the equation on the stone, the numbers began glowing.
"Whoa!"
Bill was forced to take a step back, eye narrowing against the sudden brightness. It was so strong that it made everything around him suddenly look darker, but all Bill could stare at was the black stone turning a glowing yellow and then growing into a wide, gaping hole in the fabric of time itself.
"Hey, what is this?"
"Where is this light coming from?"
Shouts in the distance jolted Bill out of his trance-like state, and he knew he had to move: it wouldn't be long before someone came looking, before authorities were alerted, and if someone caught up with him before he could pass through that open portal in time it would be the end of everything.
Make it worth something.
Deal.
He could see nothing but brightness, no hint of what truly awaited him on the other side of the opening, but it did not matter: anywhere was better than there and then.
"... Well, Brainiac. Time to see if I've hit the jackpot," Bill said, and stepped closer. It was as though something had grabbed him, an unseeing force pulling him in, and a moment later he found himself drowning in light - but only for one moment. Then it all turned gray again, and he was falling.
Somewhere behind him the light faded, and a black stone returned to being just a black stone.
It was now morning, the first hour of the first day of the two thousandth year of our era. Acting, as was their wont, in strict accordance with precedent, the highest Circles of the realm were meeting in solemn conclave, as they had met on the first hour of the first day of the year 1000, and also on the first hour of the first day of the year 0.
Thud.
"Ouch! What the… Oh, c'mon!"
Bill tried to kick himself upright, but he couldn't manage to: he had landed upside down, upper angle stuck firmly on the ground, and his limbs flailed uselessly in the air.
Perfect. Just perfect.
With a sigh, Bill cast a glance around. The dump was gone, and there were no constructions nor people as far as he could see: only empty space, black and white, as far as the eye could see. And then, right next to him, there was the same pile of stones he had seen before… only that now it looked different, newer, and actually had a shape, although it was hard to tell what it was from his uncomfortable position.
So, he was still in the same place… but when was he? Had he really reached the turn of the Millennium, of any Millennium? Would the Sphere be there shortly, emerging from whatever passageway could be opened between the Third Dimension and there?
… And would he be able to kick himself upright again so that he wouldn't greet the messenger from another world with his lower side sticking up? 'Cause that would be great. Presentation is everything. Maybe, if he tried to throw all of his weight on one side...
"Alright. There we go, Cipher. One, two- whoa!"
A sudden, powerful gust of wind threw him several meters back without warning. He landed on his back with a yelp, but at least he wasn't stuck anymore, and he could sit up just on time to see something opening up just where the stone structure stood: an X-shaped tear stretching across the ground like a yawning mouth, a myriad of colors Bill had never seen swirling within it, so intense it made his eye ache.
And it was from that whirlwind of color and motion that the Sphere emerged.
Henceforth I have to relate the story of my miserable Fall: most miserable, yet surely most undeserved! For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished? My volition shrinks from the painful task of recalling my humiliation; yet, like a second Prometheus, I will endure this and worse, if by any means I may arouse in the interiors of Plane and Solid Humanity a spirit of rebellion against the Conceit which would limit our Dimensions to Two or Three or any number short of Infinity.
"... Whoa."
It wasn't the smartest thing that had ever left Bill's mouth - or eye, that kinda depended on which he had out at the moment - but to be honest, right then in that instant he didn't really know what else to say. The Sphere, the three-dimensional being he could only read of, the one said to visit their dimension at the turn of each Millennium - and he was close enough to almost touch it.
Well. Would have been if he hadn't been thrown several meters back. Still, close enough to see it was precisely as described - thousands of circles together to form a perfect shape of three dimensions. Close enough for the Sphere to hear him and turn, its eye resting on him just as he stood.
Presentation is all, Cipher. Play it cool.
"Hiya," Bill said, waving.
Nailed it.
There was a long moment of silence as they stared at each other. When the Sphere spoke, it was as though its voice was coming from everywhere at once. "Are you not shocked? Surely, a tridimension being defies all you know."
Bill shrugged, feeling just a touch smug. Alright, very smug. "I read a lot about you. There are memoirs of others who met you before and all. Not that you're not impressive, but I came prepared."
The Sphere's eye narrowed, and it regarded him with something not too far away from suspicion. "You certainly jest. This day marks the very first visit my kind is permitted to pay to your dimension."
… Oh. Right. That was the first turn of the Millennium, just like Nora had said. For a moment Bill thought he should compliment her next time he saw her, except that the next he realized he would never see her again. Or the others, most likely. The thought nagged at him some; it was nothing anywhere close to what Liam's loss had been like, but it was still a shame that none of them was there with him to see what he was seeing, to share their victory.
"It's a long story, really," Bill finally said. "The short version is, I've travelled back a few Millennia to warn you. Look, your approach - this whole 'one apostle every millennium thing' - ain't gonna fly. The Circles are going to pass laws to silence all of them, so if we want to get something done you need to speak to more than just-"
"SILENCE!"
The Sphere's voice was loud as thunder, and caused Bill to flinch back. Its eye was wide with incredulity and… wait, was that anger?
"If what you're telling me is true, then you're a fool. Time is not yours or mine to tinker with. Do you even realize whose anger you have aroused?"
Bill scowled. "Seriously? Is that all you've got to say? Look, I've pissed off my fair share of people coming here, but now you've got to listen-"
"You listen," the Sphere cut him off, hovering closer and forcing Bill to step back. "If there is any sense left in you, you'll leave now. Run. Get as far away as you can from the passage and pray they won't pursue you further. I am to meet with my first Apostle, and your meddling shan't interfere."
It would be only later - much later - that Bill would realize that the cracking noise he could swear he heard in that moment, the sound of something breaking, had come from within his own mind. All he was aware at the moment, as the Sphere's words sank in, was boiling fury, the sort he hadn't felt since he had returned home, that old book in his hands, to find out Liam was gone.
Gone? Is that all you're going to say?
"What the… is it- IS THAT IT?"
The shriek caused the Sphere to hover back, as though taken aback by the sheer force of his voice. Bill's eye stayed fixed on it, on the only thing he could focus on while everything else around him blurred into something distant, a mere backdrop to the object of his anger.
"It is for your own safety that you must leave. Listen to reason. You broke the most basic laws-"
"DON'T GIVE ME THAT ABOUT LAWS! DON'T GIVE ME THAT ABOUT REASON!" Bill howled, and the Sphere backed off again, despite the fact Bill couldn't possibly pose a physical threat to it. "I have moved mountains to be here! People have died or worse so this could happen, and now you won't even listen! And here I thought MY kind was limited!"
"Are you so arrogant you have come thinking you could order me-"
"You're going to fail, you pompous pain in the angle," Bill snapped. "Your precious Apostle is going to fail, and the one after that, and the one after that! Nothing's gonna change if you don't listen, and you know what? I not going to stay here and watch it happen. Wanna have fun getting nothing done? Fine. But I'm outta here," he added, his voice something akin to a growl, and turned to the still open passage between dimensions. "This dimension can rot, but I refuse to rot with it!"
There is something out there, something so much bigger than you or I could even imagine. A whole universe of possibilities, and some chosen can even visit it.
"Desist at once!" The Sphere's voice came from behind him, a note of urgency in it. "You are not allowed to move through dimensions! You'll only make it worse for yourself!"
Bill snorted, still marching towards the opening. "Yeah, yeah. Talk to the angle. Ain't you got a doomed Apostle or something to meet? Go do it. See if I care. Meet ya on the other side."
"You fool! You shall see the Third Dimension indeed, but not on your terms. I'll see you taken there a prisoner."
"Oh, yeah? You and what arm-"
"FREEZE!"
Whoever shouted the order didn't give Bill any time to freeze; they didn't even give him enough time to realize what he had just heard, much less to turn and see what hit him. Because something did hit him, sure enough, and with enough force to knock him on the ground, all air escaping him in a wheezing gasp, eye pressed down in the dirt.
"Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron! Cease all resistance," someone shouted above him, and of course that only resulted with Bill trying his best to struggle against their grip, against the weight on his back keeping him pinned down, shouting all insults he could think up.
That only made his unseen attackers laugh. "Hah! A Flatlander with an attitude! Never thought I'd see one," one of them said, and Bill felt his arms being yanked back, and something cold closing with a clicking sound around his wrists. "Quit making it worse for yourself, Flattie. You've messed up enough as it is, and- hey, what did you just say about my mother?"
"Just tase him already before anybody hears, will you? Let's get him to Time Baby quickly. I've got a date after our shift."
Time Baby? What in the Circles is a-
The crackling of electricity severed any further thought. The jolt caused Bill to convulse hard enough to get one of his attackers partially off him and lift himself; he tried to speak, but all that left him was a sensless, gargling noise. He got one more glimpse of the gateway, so close and yet so far. The colors swirling in it filled his vision, blotting out everything else.
If you ever get a chance to see what I can only read of, promise me you'll take a good look for both of us. I always wished I could see the colors.
Make it worth something.
Oh, come on - let me keep one promise, guys. At least one out of two.
The colors became more intense, almost unbearably so, and Bill was forced to shut his eye.
Or maybe he just lost consciousness. Hard to tell which came first.
In vain did the Sphere, in his voice of thunder, reiterate his command of silence, and threaten me with the direst penalties if I persisted. Nothing could stem the flood of my ecstatic aspirations. Perhaps I was to blame; but indeed I was intoxicated with the recent draughts of Truth to which he himself had introduced me. However, the end was not long in coming.
My words were cut short by a crash outside, and a simultaneous crash inside me, which impelled me through space with a velocity that precluded speech. Down! down! down! I was rapidly descending; and I knew that return to Flatland was my doom. One glimpse, one last and never-to-be-forgotten glimpse I had of that dull level wilderness-which was now to become my Universe again-spread out before my eye. Then a darkness.