Solipsism: Prologue (Patreon)

I’d not planned to die the way I did, blindsided by a truck and broken apart as the life was smashed out of me. It had been a surprise, a loss. A tragedy. I’d been young, my whole life ahead of me and the world as my oyster. And it was all because that fucking woman I’d been crossing the road next to had unexpectedly resisted and thrown off my balance when I tried to shove her out of my way to run from the vehicle’s path. 

In my last moments of consciousness, I chalked the affair up to another instance of women stepping over me to get where they needed to be. Then, to my surprise, I experienced more moments of consciousness instead of nothing.

Around me, there was a room. I thought there was a room at least. It was…Certainly not outside, but it didn’t really have any of the required features rooms usually came with. No walls, that I could see, no windows or doors, I wasn’t sure if there was even a ceiling. I was just…There, suspended on nothing, alone and surrounded by endless planes of white so clear that it almost stung my eyes to see. 

“Do not be afraid-” A voice rang out, interrupted only as I started screaming and sprinting in the exact opposite direction to its origin. 

I’d only gotten a few paces when I saw a figure ahead of me, a woman, I thought, tall and wrapped from head to toe in…Veils. Like some shrouded corpse from centuries in the past. The voice rang out again, coming from her. 

“As I said, do not be-” I was running again, the other direction now. This time I got even less far before I found her standing ahead of me again, cutting off my flight by simply emerging in its path. Her voice came a third time, more sharply.

“Escape is impossible for you at this time.” She hissed, but I barely even heard it. I was running all over again. This time, she didn’t appear again. Not at first, that was.

My heart was pounding, chest heaving and legs aching by the time I finally stopped my sprint. I turned to look behind me, sure she was closing in, but found nothing. Stupidly, I actually let a stab of relief pierce me at that. Then I turned back and found the veiled woman standing ahead.

“Are you finished with your attempts at fleeing?” She asked, patient again. It seemed she knew all too well how tired I was, and how unable of managing another sprint. A lifetime of videogames and pizza tended to do that to a guy. 

“Yes.” I spat, barely managing to force the words out in-between desperate gasps. The air tasted sour and acidic, but I couldn’t help but guzzle it down to cool my sizzling lungs.

“Good. Then allow me to explain your current predicament. You are dead.”

I looked up at her, spitting some acrid sludge from my mouth.

“Fuck off.”

The veiled lady tilted her head, as if perplexed at me. 

“Do you not recall your death?”

“No, I-” I paused midway through responding, racking my brains and suddenly getting an unpleasant sinking feeling in my gut. Flashes of memory. Headlights, a struggling woman, a wet road. Screeching tyres and…And death.

“You do remember.” The veiled woman noted, as if it were nothing more than some idle observation. “Good, that will save time.”

“How am I still alive?” I gasped, feeling suddenly like my legs were turning to water. Nothing made sense, nothing mattered. What was the point of anything if I was a literal dead man walking?

“You are not.” She replied, still patient and calm. “And yet you are not, as you have noticed, entirely destroyed. Your consciousness survived the destruction of your body- a rare occurrence which has given both of us an additional opportunity.”

“What fucking opportunity?!” I snarled, finding, with dawning horror, that tears were welling in my eyes. It was embarrassing to cry in front of a stranger, humiliating. 

But what did that matter? I was fucking dead, I could piss myself for all the damage it would do. A corpse had no need for a reputation. 

“There are more worlds than just your own.” The veiled woman continued, not even acknowledging my tears. I wasn’t sure whether that made things better or worse, I wasn’t sure if I’d have felt anything even if I did. 

“And what, do I get to have a life in one of them?”

She didn’t respond at once, which was perhaps the worst possible answer I could’ve gotten.

“Fuck you.” I snapped. “Seriously? That’s the opportunity? Leave my life behind and start a new one in some new place I’ve never even been? Abandon-”

“-Abandon what, exactly?” The veiled woman cut in. “What would it be that you were forced to leave behind. As I understand it, you had no friends to speak of, no close family, no permanent employment at all. You had brought no ambitions to fruition, and generally not done much of anything to invest in the life you claim to be so desperate to cling onto.”

“Shut up.” I replied, exerting every screed of my will to keep my voice from escaping me as a strangled sob. She had a point of course, she had several points. The bitch. 

“I apologize if I have given you offence.” The veiled woman continued. “But I cannot stress enough that this truly is an opportunity for you, especially now that your mind has opened up.”

That one actually did pierce the grim fog of my misery, earning a frown and a stare from me. 

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

She didn’t answer at first, taking her time.

“There is something different about your mind than normal, something that leaves it more…Potent than is common amongst humanity. In your case, this potential has begun to be realised. It is why your consciousness survived the death of its body, and that is only the beginning.”

God, she was speaking like some LARPer. And not a good one. It was hard to make sense of it all, but I made myself focus even despite the upset of…Well, everything.

“Be more clear.” I growled. “What exactly are you saying I can do now?”

And more importantly, why did it matter? 

“That is to be seen, but it is clear you wield power most will never even dream of. Even in worlds with physical laws that are less…Strict.”

That sat with me for a moment, I considered it. Turned her words around in my head, scrutinised them, then finally found a smile spreading across my face.

“Oh, I’m dying.” I nodded. It all made perfect sense. I’d gotten the life smashed out of me by that truck, and now I was lying in some gutter, body mangled and brain slowly shutting down. All this was just the hallucinatory death rattle of a slowly withering intellect, the product of screaming synapses and dying neurons. 

Not a pleasant thought, but then I’d already lasted longer than a dying brain typically got. Time seemed to be nice and compressed, and if I couldn’t rely on my sense of it to know when I’d die then…

Well, what else was new? I’d never known how long I had before, anyway. I would’ve guessed another fifty years before the fucking truck interjected itself.

“It is not a productive train of thought,” the veiled woman began, “To consider yourself a dead man and the world around you nothing but imagination.”

I shrugged. “That’s a shame, because it’s also the truth. Anything else you’d like to add?”

The woman paused before responding again, and I took a moment of satisfaction at having thrown her for such a wide loop. Then again, considering she was a figment of my imagination, maybe that wasn’t such an impressive accomplishment. 

“You must make a choice.” She said at last. “To move on and continue your life in another world, or to…Remain.”

She glanced around her, and I actually felt a chill run through me. The sight made me take things just a hair more seriously. If I was hallucinating all this, then maybe this was my subconscious telling me something. Telling me what?

I doubted I had the ability to just wake up and stop dying, that wasn’t really the sort of thing that remained an option when one got smashed by a truck hard enough to begin thinking one was a wizard. This wasn’t a movie, I wouldn’t be un-killing myself just by wishing for it. So what did my choice matter?

Well, quite a lot actually. I’d hallucinated this woman in a good amount of detail; enough to hear the quiver in her voice, to see the individual fibers of her clothing. If I could hallucinate another world just as well, then I’d be well served doing so.

And if I chose not to now, I might never get another choice to start again. Hallucinations didn’t exactly leap to obey the person inflicted with them. The thought of living out the rest of my dwindling consciousness in this blank, banal nothing-scape was…

It was worse than just dying outright.

“What would this entail?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why, as long as the answer wasn’t near-endless monotony it was better than whatever I was looking at here. The veiled woman sounded pleased as she replied all the same.

“There are worlds in the cosmos that need…Help. That are unbalanced, and require a correcting hand to resolve their inequality.”

My eyes almost rolled out of my skull.

“You want me to be some epic hero?”

“No.” She replied, my sardonic response bouncing off her like rain on a tiled roof. “This is beyond petty human notions of victim and victimised. You will enter a land where the cosmic forces of Will and Deference themselves are unbalanced, and you will correct this.”

Well, that was a new one. I swallowed, chewing on it until it became clear that I really didn’t have much to do with the information. 

“Would this world happen to be some vaguely European-inspired mediaeval fantasy-like land?” I asked her after a moment. To my surprise, she shook her head. I waited for more information, perhaps an assurance that it would have indoor plumbing, but it never came.

Well, I couldn’t exactly complain about my own death rattling delirium so I just moved on. 

“I’ll do it.” I said at last, the words falling straight out of my mouth and landing heavily at my feet. I got the sense of a smile from the veiled woman, though couldn’t see anything of her face which might let me verify the impression. She turned, then, walking slowly away and seeming to fade into the void more with each new step. 

She was gone, and I was alone. Just me and the void. Not terribly comforting, given my recent concerns, and I felt a spasm of fear work its way up my throat at the realisation. Before I could so much as tremble, though, the void started to give way. 

I was falling, suddenly. But there was no wind in my ears and no sense of direction to it. It was like being suspended in water, except there was no tension on my skin to alert me of a fluid’s embrace. 

This must be how Schroedinger’s Cat felt. I thought to myself, just a moment before finding out how a crashing pilot felt. There was ground beneath me in an instant, perhaps a mile away. And growing closer far more quickly than I would have preferred. 

I felt the wind now, and I felt a great deal more of it than I’d have liked. What was terminal velocity again? Fifty metres per second. 

So I had about half a minute before turning into the world’s stickiest carpet.