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  “Sure. I'll try.”

  As nine o'clock arrived, the other Observers filed into the room, bringing with them a sullen silence. They sat around the table with arms folded or reclined to watch the ceiling or hunched over in apathetic study of their own hands. Greg cleared his throat. “Shall we begin?”

  Drake pushed to his feet. “Screw that. I got something to say. We need to do something about Erik.”

  “Oh, do we now?” Erik bared his teeth in a predator's smile. “Pray tell, tit-sucker. What you got planned?”

  “You put that fucking head on my night stand.”

  Erik raised his hands in mock surprise. “A head? On your night stand? Oh my lucky stars. I am just beside myself. Who would do such a thing? My guess is Twelve. All we know about that guy is he's deceptive as fuck.”

  “Everyone knows it was you,” Drake said. “You better watch yourself, Erik, we're not happy with you.”

  “Oh, cupcake, you hurt my feelings. I can't believe you don't like my presents. Why, you didn't even mention the hand.” Erik held his wrist up to his mouth so his fingers projected out before his face. “I put a fucking hand inside the mouth to wave hello. Better than flowers, I thought.”

  Erik's smile continued to meet Drake's glare, growing more intense as his opponent's ire morphed into discomfort. Drake sat with a huff, crossing his arms and turning his gaze away.

  Greg spoke quickly. “So who wants to go first?”

  “You go,” Griff said. “This was your idea.”

  “This is the Creator's idea.” Greg fidgeted in his seat. “I only suggested adding some structure. Should we go in alphabetical order?”

  In response, Drake fixed a glare on Greg.

  “Fine. Then someone else decide the order of presentation. I'm tired of being the responsible party.”

  Griff grunted. “You're not any kind of party.”

  Natalia stood. With all eyes on her, she glided to the cupboard like a gray-haired ghost and withdrew paper, pencil, and an envelope. Her knobby hands folded the sheet of paper into regular sections and tore it on the lines with rapid precision. She scribbled numbers down onto twelve scraps, folded each in half, and swept them into the envelope.

  Without a word, she went around the table, holding the envelope for each of them to draw a number. As Hess drew, he noticed Natalia had trapped a slip of paper between her fingers and the side of the envelope. It was a clumsy bit of sleight of hand, but he didn't think anyone else noticed. Even had he cared to point out her deception, he had drawn number eleven.

  After Natalia returned to her seat, she folded her hands in her lap and nodded to Greg in a gesture that made clear she intended to do no more. The attention of everyone drifted back to Greg. He shrugged. “Who has number one?” Griff tossed his scrap of paper onto the table.

  Greg continued to count off the numbers. Mel was second, Drake third, Ingrid fourth, then Elza, Erik, Greg, Kerzon, San, Jerome, Hess, and finally Natalia. “Then that is our order of presentation. Are you ready to speak, Griff? Or do you need a short break to prepare?”

  “Don't matter either way.”

  “Then everyone please give Griff your full attention.”

  Chapter 4 – Hess

  Griff sat with hands folded on the table before him, brows shading shifty eyes that scanned back and forth as if reading from invisible note cards. For over two minutes, Griff kept them waiting in silence. When he finally spoke, he did so in a deliberative monotone, pausing often in mid-sentence to select his words.

  “I don't know that my opinion on existence is particularly deep or . . . insightful or . . . worthy or anything like that. Most of you are smarter than I ever claimed to be. So maybe my ideas are like Observation one-oh-one and the rest of y'all got doctorates in Observation-ology. I'll try not to . . . belabor the points too much, but I can't go too quick on account of . . . me never thinking I would have to explain my thoughts . . . and having to go first and so on and so forth.”

  Griff licked his lips, glared at the patch of table in front of him, and continued in a softer voice. “Thing is, all the while I've been watching the people and the world and all that, I've been thinking in the back of my head 'all this hullabaloo is fake,' you know? I mean, worlds pop into being thinking they've always been. Same with us, right? How do we know we actually lived a hundred forty-five Iterations? Maybe this resort is the first real world and we just think we have histories like the people.”

  Griff rapped his knuckles on the table. “And what is this? Really, what is stuff made out of? Creator took nothing and turned it into something. You ever really think about that? Call it matter or particles or strings or whatever you want, but I think it's still nothing. Little pieces of nothing the Creator tricked into thinking they were something.

  “Or maybe this is all a grand play happening inside the Creator's mind and there isn't any stuff to speak of, just the idea of stuff that we all treat like the real deal cause we don't know any better. Whole worlds come and go, but none of them were ever really here, if you know what I'm saying.”

  For a minute, Griff went silent, brow scrunched in deep thought. When he continued, his voice came louder, deeper. “There's . . . ramifications . . . to ideas like that. Everything is made from nothing and everything goes back to nothing when we're done with it. Even us. Maybe even the Creator, for all we know. All of us are little pieces of nothing waiting to unravel.

  “Think about it. If matter's made out of nothing, then maybe nothing matters. I mean, every world ends up the same as every other, collapsing back into . . . non-existence. They all start the same way, too, as nothing whipped up into the appearance of something.

  “Really think about all of this. Every world is . . . fundamentally . . . identical. Start as nothing, end as nothing. Made out of nothing. Any differences are illusion.”

  Griff shook his head. “Now if you've followed me this far, then you see the big problem . . . the conundrum. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to figure my way out of this maze.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, if you buy that everything is nothing and every world is pretty much the same, then you got to ask yourself: why are we observing anything?

  “Think about it, guys. Really think about it. Matter's nothing and nothing matters. And our whole purpose is what? To care about nothing? Maybe our purpose is nothing. We are nothing, right? Maybe the Creator is a lie that something exists. Just this concept floating in emptiness that thinks, and thinking makes these illusions happen.”

  Griff shrugged his shoulders. “However it all works, the fact is that, in the end, everything ends and is forgotten, us included. Nothing we ever observed or did actually mattered. Maybe I'm not a very good Observer, cause quite frankly I never worked too hard at it. I never sought out anything that wasn't right in front of me or ran little experiments like the rest of y'all. I just watched things happen and . . . doubted the significance.

  “So . . . that's my take on existence.”

  No one spoke until Greg cleared his throat. “Thank you, Griff. I appreciate your willingness to not only go first, but to so unreservedly state your opinion. Does anyone care to start the discussion?”

  “I would,” Hess said. All eyes turned to him. “If you believe nothing matters, then why join the conspiracy against me twice? You helped bury me alive in Iteration one forty three, then tried to do the same in one forty four. It doesn't seem like you buy into your own philosophy.”

  Erik chuckled. “Looks like Griff don't like the smell of his own shit.”

  “Well?” Hess demanded. “Don't you have anything to say?”

  “I was bored,” Griff said. “Going after you was something to occupy the time. I never cared about Ingrid's reasons. Your misbehavior was an opportunity to do something.”

  Hess leaned forward. “Then I'll have a little fun at your expense. As someone much smarter than you, let me educate you a little. Your insightful idea is called nihilism. It's a concept that depressive personalities routinely invent to
justify their existential grief.”

  “When I mentioned people smarter than me, I wasn't talking about you, Hess.” Griff's eyes darted to Erik. “You neither. Both of you run around the worlds obsessed with doing things. You might as well be people.”

  Greg pointed imperiously at Hess. “This is not a forum for you to service your grudges. You are being asked to maintain your decorum for a single week. If civility proves too difficult for you, then perhaps you should remain silent in these meetings.”

  “What about me, Greggie?” Erik exposed his teeth in a smile-like expression. “You wanna read me my rights? Lay down the law a little? Come on, big boy, pull out your cock so we can measure how much of a man you are. You had a tiny little pecker back in Iteration five. You let me play with it before I brought a cheese grater to bed. Remember that? You cried like a baby while I ground your nub off again and again.”

  Erik held a hand to his mouth as he chortled. “I decided I wouldn't stop till you quit with the begging. Itty bitty Greggie didn't know the rules, so his tiny tinkler got trimmed for hours. You ever figure out why I did it, shit licker? Did you ever work out why I quit with the humping and moved on to the kinky shit?”

  Greg shrank back into his seat, shame and fear warring on his face.

  “Let me enlighten ya a bit, Greggie. Sex never did it for me with the people. Didn't do it for me with an Observer, either. But then I had the idea to make the genital play interesting. And sure as shit, mutilating your tiddly bits was great fun. Things only got better when I made the condition of your release that you had to eat some feces.

  “I convinced you to show so much enthusiasm for your foray into fecophelia that over the years I found myself wondering if your convincing act had some basis in reality. I'm dying to know your thoughts, Greggie. Did I turn you onto a new food group? Or are you just that fucking terrified of moi?”

  “Easy now,” Drake said. “There's eleven of us and only one of you. If things get crazy, you're going down. We don't have to worry about you coming after us in future Iterations.”

  “Drake, did you just grow a pair? Should we throw you a fucking party or something? Or are you just posturing like a twat because you think you're safe from me?”

  “It's over, Erik,” Drake said.

  “The fuck it is!” Erik shot to his feet. “You cowards voted to kill us, but at this moment I'm as alive as ever. And I'm pissed as hell that shitheads like you are dragging me down with you. The Creator has all of us gathered together under a white flag and I respect the rules of the Big Boss. But if you break the truce, you're going to discover a level of violence you can't conceive. Your imagination can't go to the place I live.”

  “Your scary imagination doesn't matter if we lock you up.”

  Erik jerked his thumb in the direction of Hess. “Then my boy breaks me out and we go to work on the lot of you. Remember, me and Hess are BFF's now – Best Fucking Friends. And if you try messing with Hess, then the wrath of Elza comes down on you.”

  A piercing whistle from the other end of the table interrupted Erik. San pulled her fingers from her mouth. “Nobody is going to break the peace. So why don't all of you turn the hostility down a few notches? I think everyone here knows that nobody would follow Drake on a shopping trip, let alone into a fight. The most oblivious Observer imaginable couldn't help but notice that you've emasculated Greg . . . again.

  “But we're on duty at the moment. The Creator wants our opinions to cross pollinate. So we need to have heated discussions without the threat of taking the arguments physical. I think we're all more or less loyal to the Creator. We can agree on that, can't we?”

  Erik, every eye glued to him, chewed her words for a minute before turning to face Griff. “Making something from nothing is a fucking miracle. Existence isn't meaningless nothing. It is meaning-filled everything. Every spec of matter contains its own rules for interacting with other specs. Those specifications are meaning. Physics is meaning.

  “The fact that everything ends makes what we observe infinitely more precious. Actions happen in a single moment of time and are lost forever if one of us isn't there to record it. Uncountable trillions of actions happen every second. This isn't some game of deterministic cause and effect, cupcake. We're talking a probabilistic model where the Creator Itself can't predict the outcome of a given universe. Existence is wonder and awe and terrible beauty.

  “If you truly doubt that, then spend the rest of this week in my room. I will definitively, viscerally prove that actions positively radiate meaning.”

  Griff folded his arms. “I'm talking about the long view, not how a body feels in a moment.”

  “There's your mistake. You got a false dichotomy. Eternity ain't nothing but a shit ton of moments crammed together. When your brain rebels and says otherwise, that's a limitation of your psychology.”

  “Actually,” Elza said, “infinite numbers are not the same as mundane quantities, even if we assume time is quantized to reduce eternity from an uncountable infinity to a countable infinity. But the mathematical treatment of an infinite set is still different.”

  Erik spread his hands. “Seriously, Elza? Everyone here is thinking WTF right now. I mean, are you a fucking robot whose purpose is to give technical definitions to people who don't give a shit? What does mathematical treatments of infinity have to do with the topic of Griff being a self-hating delusional asshole?”

  “I'll try to explain using little words.” Elza spoke with cold precision. “Infinity is fundamentally different from normal quantities. As creatures whose experiences are based on non-infinite spans of time, all of us lack the mental capacity to intuitively understand eternity. An educated individual could talk about eternity in the abstract using mathematical terminology, but neither of you are qualified to be part of such a discussion.”

  “In summary, everyone but you's an idiot?” Erik squinted at her. “Then tell us the answer, oh great and wise Elza. Does everything mean nothing or something mean everything?”

  “Griff's argument is riddled with unfounded assumptions,” Elza said. “First, we don't know what exists between worlds. Divine knowledge seems to imply that there is no physical matter, but that doesn't prove a literal void. The fact that every world has so much in common suggests to me that there exists some fundamental order that limits what can be created.

  “But even if matter possesses no true corporeal component – whatever that means – that does not imply anything about the meaning of existence. Neither does the fact that everything might be forgotten. Griff assumes that memory is a prerequisite for meaning without ever providing a convincing rationale for that belief. All of this metaphysical chest beating falls apart upon rational examination.

  “Not that you need to bother. The whole thing dissolves as soon as you try to define meaning. You could replace it with any number of synonyms and still not have a working definition. Significance? Importance? Interpretation? Meaning is a hazy concept, but I think if you boil it down to its bare essentials, what you have is social utility. The significance of anything could be considered an opinion.

  “You could very easily get sucked into a moral relativism issue here, but fortunately for us we work for the Creator and She provides an absolute for us to measure against. So I would venture that by virtue of the fact that the worlds keep coming, they have meaning.”

  When it was clear that Elza was done, Erik returned to his seat. Everyone sat in silence until Greg cleared his throat. “While polite debate is welcome, I don't necessarily think this is supposed to be an exercise in proving opposing viewpoints wrong. There are twelve Observers and there are going to be twelve equally valid opinions. No one should be attacked for contributing a unique perspective.”

  No one responded to Greg, so he turned to face Mel. “Let's adjourn for a fifteen minute break before you begin.”

  Chapter 5 – Griff / Iteration 1

  “Stupid people,” he grumbled as he squeezed deeper into the dense vegetation. The susu
rrations of nervous whispers from behind spurred him to redouble his flight through the brambles. This was what he got for climbing a tree to search for eggs.

  Ironically, the people's reaction to seeing a man's crushed skull reassemble itself had been to crush it again. Then again. And again. They had been arguing over whether fire or burial in a deep grave would provide a permanent fix to their problem when he escaped. In the hours since then, Griff had snuck eastward, pushing and crawling his way through thick jungle growth bordering the river.

  So far snakes, crocodiles, stinging insects, and poisonous plants had only slowed his pursuers. They sought him with dogged persistence, determined to rid the world of an immortal man. Why do they care so much, he wondered. They hadn't seemed angry the three times they killed him. If anything, they had been terrified by what was happening.

  Maybe they do this because they're afraid of me? I am like a snake that has been on their sleeping mat. They must kill me to feel safe again. Stupid people.

  Griff pushed against a stiff screen of green growth and plunged through it to land head first in the slow-moving river. He started to scramble back out of the water, but impaled his back on a row of sharpened sticks hammered into the shore. With a muffled groan of frustration, Griff pulled himself free. He spat out water the flavor of feet as he studied the river.

  The still brown liquid obscured everything beneath its surface except the stench of decay. Both banks were lined with spears preventing anyone unlucky enough to be in the water from escaping. After a moment's hesitation, Griff began wading downstream.

  His destination was the Lake of Death, and the river would get him there faster than the jungle. The only question was how many times it would kill him on his journey. Some forty years before, shortly after the world jumped into motion, Griff had been swept out to sea while on a fishing expedition. In a terrifying ordeal, he had drowned to death a dozen times before washing ashore. Memories of ineffectual flailing and desperate gasping still haunted him in restless dreams.