Chapter 2: Searching for Eric
Several hundred simulation-years after Eric finished building his universe, on the subject of what came after the last breath, there are many who have existed long and know through experience, there are always many who are new, and Eric's Universe is just one of many that have answers with limited ways to learn them.
---
Jeff's phone was playing music from his hoodie pocket, which in a forest this big amounted to a small, stubborn bubble of sound following him down the trail.
He walked with a thin plastic-tipped cigar pinched between two fingers. Smoke hung behind him in lazy loops. Sunlight came through the canopy in slanted bars, and he walked through them one after another, light, shade, light, like a man being scanned.
The song ended. The next one had a long, silent intro.
And in the quiet, a memory surfaced, the way the smell of a hospital hallway can drag you backward years. A different bed. A different body that wouldn't answer. And a voice that hadn't been a voice, arriving in the place where his own thoughts lived, in a weight and accent that weren't his:
"Testing. Can you hear me?"
Jeff stopped walking and let the memory play out, because once that one started, it always did.
He remembered the VRC. The interview. The patient, unhurried presence explaining it. Their having made his brain imagine things and used that as a phone line. He remembered being told, calmly and in enormous detail, what the Simulation was, how it ran, who lived in it and what they were made of, and what they hadn't been told.
He had said yes to the same kind of deal Eric had said yes to.
Which meant Jeff walked around Eric's Universe knowing a great deal that the people around him didn't. Not everything. Nobody knew everything. But he knew enough that some conversations were like watching a movie he'd read the script for, and trying very hard not to mouth along.
The intro ended. The music picked back up. Jeff let out a breath through his nose.
The cigar had burned down while he wasn't paying attention, and the ember kissed the pad of his thumb.
"Sss—ouch. Crap. Damn." He shook his hand out and flicked the stub away.
That was the other thing about him. Almost nobody in Eric's Universe could feel the plain physical kind of pain, the burned-thumb, stubbed-toe, toothache kind. Jeff could feel every bit of it, a privilege he would have happily returned with the receipt.
The stub bounced once and landed in the leaf litter beside something that caught the light.
Cyan.
He thumbed the music off and crouched.
A fourteen-sided die sat half-sunk in the dirt, cyan and white, small enough to close a fist around, its edges sharp enough to look freshly cut. Not a scratch on it. There wouldn't be. Nothing in this universe could scratch one of these.
A slow grin spread across his face. He knew exactly what it was, the way you know a winning scratch-off before you've finished scratching.
He touched it with one fingertip and pulled the finger back, like testing a stove.
"One," he told the empty forest. "Two—"
The air in front of him folded.
Leaves lifted off the slope in a ring and hung there. Pressure pushed against his eardrums, and it wasn't just pressure. It was weight, the heavy, humming sense of standing near something that could flatten the hillside if it sneezed wrong. Light glowed outward from nowhere, stopped, and an old man was standing on the trail.
He was short and bald, with a beard trimmed like he took it personally, a cardigan buttoned one hole off, and sunglasses. One of his hands was still raised mid-gesture, as though he'd been pointing at something in another place entirely and hadn't finished.
Jeff stuck his hand out. "A genie! What's up? How's heaven doing? So to speak."
The old man didn't take it. He tilted his head, the way a person listens for a noise upstairs.
Jeff looked at the sunglasses. The sunglasses looked at nothing.
"Oh," Jeff said. "Oh, man, you can't—"
"You're holding your hand out," the old man said. "About... there."
His hand came up, sure and unhurried, and closed around Jeff's as if he'd been watching it the entire time. Firm grip. Dry palm.
"Yogi," he said. "And heaven's doing great. Couldn't tell you what it looks like."
"I'm Jeff." Jeff shook, still staring. "How did you—"
"Later. I was listening to the bottom of the seventh. Bases loaded." Yogi exhaled with the grief of a true fan. "Somebody's going to have to tell me how it ended."
"Sorry about the timing." Jeff hesitated, then asked anyway, because not asking felt worse. "You were born blind?"
"Born that way."
"And you never had anybody wish it fixed?
"I know what I could've done." It wasn't unkind. "I'm old, and I like my routines. I'll get around to it."
He turned his face toward Jeff, and even through the sunglasses there was a sense of being examined.
"You're not new to this."
"What gave it away?"
"You didn't scream. First-timers scream. One woman hit me with a purse."
"Brave woman," Jeff said. "Hitting a genie."
"She didn't know what I was yet."
"Did she find out?"
"She found out I'm very forgiving," Yogi said, "which was lucky for her."
Jeff scooped the die out of the dirt and pocketed it. Touching it again wouldn't do anything. It couldn't summon anyone else while Yogi was still on the clock.
---
They walked while they talked, because Jeff didn't know how to stand still around good news. Yogi kept pace without a cane, stepping over roots just before his foot would have caught them, which Jeff decided to be impressed by later, when he wasn't busy being impressed by everything else.
"So what have you been wishing for," Yogi asked.
"Powers, mostly. Some durability stuff. A couple of fun ones."
"Why powers?"
"Competitions. Magic power competitions."
"You win?"
"I came in fourth once."
"Out of how many?"
A pause. "It was a neighborhood thing."
"Mm."
"The official ones are no joke, though," Jeff said, a little defensively. "People show up with combination magic, enchanted weapons, the works. You watch somebody's grandmother cleaning house, and it makes you reevaluate your whole training routine. And I want to hunt a legendary creature eventually."
"Found one?"
"Not yet."
"Those'll kill you."
"Sometimes," Jeff agreed.
Yogi laughed, short and surprised, the laugh of a man who is currently a genie and knows precisely how and why.
"Well," he said. "You're young."
"I'm older than I sound."
"Aren't we all."
They walked a few steps. Then Yogi said, "Something's wrong with your left hand. It won't sit still."
Jeff looked down. His thumb had been rolling the ring on his finger around and around. Not his wedding band. The other one.
"How can you even tell that?"
"Later. What's wrong with it?"
"It's cursed." Jeff held his hand up out of habit, then remembered who he was holding it up for and lowered it. "Found it on a trip. Doesn't come off. But I've had dark powers ever since. I can make these black orbs that blow things apart, and then a tiny black hole shows up and eats whatever got blown up."
"A tiny black hole."
"Two seconds, tops. It's like a cleanup crew with anger issues."
"And the curse part?"
Jeff's thumb stopped moving.
"If I get mad enough," he said, "it drives. I'm still in there. I'm just in the passenger seat, watching my own hands do things."
Yogi was quiet for a few steps. "You could wish it off."
"I could."
"But."
"Not yet."
What Jeff didn't say was the part that sometimes kept him up at night. The book was very clear that some cursed objects could think, and that a thinking one could observe the thoughts of whoever it was touching, for as long as it was touching them.
If this was one of the thinking ones, it had been reading him since the day he put it on. It had been reading everything the VRC had ever told him.
"Maybe I like the company," he said out loud.
"Mm."
---
"Okay," Jeff said, clapping once. "Wishes. I've been wanting to find Eric."
Yogi's eyebrows rose over the sunglasses. "'The' Eric?"
"The one who changed everything."
"Everybody's read about him. I've never met a single person who's met him." Yogi scratched his beard. "People say he's seen for years at a time, then nobody sees him for years at a time. Like a comet with trust issues."
"You've heard stuff, though. Up there."
"I've heard everything. Most of it's nonsense." Yogi slowed, and his voice lowered, the way people's voices lower around rumors they secretly believe. "There's one that won't go away. That most of us down here aren't people. Not the way we think. That we're artificial. AGI."
Jeff kept his face perfectly still, which was pointless, since the only other person there was blind.
"People who are computer-savvy keep saying," Yogi went on. "That they themselves resemble exactly how digital ai 'operate and do things'. Visitors from other universes come through portals and say things that'd curl your beard. And then there's the pain."
"The pain," Jeff repeated.
"Whoever built this place took it away. The body kind, not the heart kind. From almost everybody. Took away even the memory of what it felt like." Yogi shrugged. "Nobody's ever confirmed why. Maybe mercy. Maybe Eric. Maybe somebody else. But if you were building people out of something that couldn't hurt, I can only speculate the rest."
Jeff pressed his burned thumb against his finger until it stung.
He knew why. The VRC had told him why, in the same even voice it used for everything. Nobody had taken anything away. There had never been anything to take. The mercy was an explanation, installed so that an entire population who had never felt a toothache wouldn't one day look at each other and start asking the right questions.
Yogi had just asked one anyway, out loud, on a forest trail, with a sense of humor.
"Yeah," Jeff said. "It's wild."
"You got quiet."
"I'm thinking about lunch."
"Sure you are." Yogi let it go, which Jeff appreciated more than he could say. "Somebody once tried to wish the answer out of me. Wished to be told exactly how dying works. I felt that wish just slide off. Like leaning on a door and finding out it's painted on the wall."
Jeff filed that away next to all the other things he knew and couldn't say.
"Okay," he said. "My first wish is—"
Yogi raised one finger.
"'I wish.' It has to start with 'I wish.' Otherwise you're just a man talking to an old guy in the woods."
"Right. Right." Jeff squared his shoulders. "I wish for a magical portal to appear right here, leading to Eric's current location. The same Eric who modified this universe."
The forest held its breath.
Light gathered in the space between two pines. It didn't crack or tear. It accumulated, layer on layer, like frost building on glass at impossible speed, until an oval taller than a doorway stood on the trail, humming low enough to feel in the teeth. Its surface glowed a soft green-gray. Through it Jeff could make out shapes, maybe trees, maybe light, the way you can make out a city through a shower door.
That was on purpose too. The book said a portal could never be used for spying. You didn't get to look before you leaped. You just leaped.
"Well," Jeff said. "Here goes."
He stepped through.
---
The other side was a forest.
For a second, he thought the wish had simply dumped him deeper into the same woods. Then he looked around and felt the skin on the back of his arms tighten.
The portals were everywhere.
They stood among the trees like doors in a house whose walls had been taken away. One towered as tall as a church entrance. One was no bigger than a cat flap. Some glowed white as snow glare, some a deep underwater green, one a warm amber like a lamp left on in somebody's kitchen. Dozens of them. More than dozens. He started counting and gave up at thirty.
And there was no one. No voices. No footsteps. Birds, somewhere. A pond glinting between the trunks.
Behind him, Yogi stepped through the portal and stopped exactly beside Jeff's shoulder, without once reaching out to find it.
"Okay, 'now' you have to tell me how you do that."
"Wished for it, years ago." Yogi rolled one shoulder, as if something had just tapped it. "Anything bigger than a mouse moves within nine feet of me, a strip of my skin gets a pulse of pressure. The strip lines up with wherever the thing is. Like somebody pointing at it through my shirt. And I've got an aura that answers anything that tries to hit me. I don't even have to be awake for it."
"Every genie I've met is basically a walking natural disaster."
"Two hundred and thirty-four thousand levels on top of whatever we had when we died." Yogi said it the way someone mentions their shoe size. "So I've been told. Nobody gave me a certificate."
Something crashed through the underbrush to their left.
Jeff spun. A shape the size of a small car burst from between two trunks. It was a boar, or had started life as one, with tusks glittering violet, and sparks of violet light crawling along its bristles. Years of soaking in a crystal's aura had given it a power, and it had apparently decided today was the day it would use that power on an old man in a cardigan.
It lowered its head and charged straight at Yogi's back.
"'Yogi—'"
Yogi didn't turn around.
The air around him went solid, and then it went "elsewhere". A wall of wind hit the boar head-on with the force of a runaway train, peeled it off the ground, and carried it, legs pedaling, thirty yards backward and straight through the amber portal.
"Shit," the boar said as it vanished.
The portal hummed. The forest settled. A few leaves drifted down.
Jeff stared at the amber portal. Then at Yogi, who was still facing the pond, straightening his cardigan.
"Did that pig just say 'shit'?"
"What pig?" Yogi said.
---
Jeff pulled a pocketknife from his jeans and walked to the pine standing directly behind their portal. He carved his name into the bark in blocky capitals, then, after consideration, added an arrow pointing at the portal.
"In case I forget which door is ours," he said.
"Smart."
"I'm a smart guy."
"You came in fourth," Yogi said.
"Eric has to be close," Jeff said, turning in a slow circle. "The wish wouldn't have put it here otherwise."
"The wish put the door where he was," Yogi said mildly. "Doesn't mean he waited for you to knock."
---
Jeff found the footprints by the pond.
They were on a flat shelf of gray rock at the water's edge: a single set of shoe prints, ordinary size, darker than the stone around them. Wet. He crouched and watched the outline of one heel shrink inward as the sun ate it, the edges going pale and dry while the center stayed dark.
Minutes old. Maybe less.
The prints didn't come "out" of the pond. They started at the waterline, as though whoever made them had stood there a while looking at the water. Then they led away across the rock, eight steps, nine, ten, straight to a portal about the size of a front door.
And stopped.
"Yogi." Jeff's voice came out quieter than he meant it to. "Somebody was just here. Like, "just" here. Wet footprints. They walk straight into a portal."
Yogi came and stood beside him. "Which one?"
"Door-sized. Kind of a bluish glow."
"What's on the other side?"
Jeff leaned in until his nose was a foot from the surface. Blue light. Maybe a ceiling. Maybe a sky. Maybe the inside of a whale.
"No idea."
"Then don't."
"If it was him—"
"If it was him, he walked through that door right as a wish was pointing at him, and he didn't come back out to say hello." Yogi's voice stayed calm. "Think about what kind of man does that."
Jeff stayed crouched, staring at the blue light, feeling the pull of it in his chest like a hook.
"I need a better look at this place first," he said finally, standing. "I'm gonna go up."
"Up."
"I've got wings."
"Of course you do." Yogi folded his arms. "Go on, then."
Jeff pulled off his hoodie, then his undershirt-"tank top", and tied both around his waist. In the dappled light, his tattoos showed dark against his light-brown skin: the yellow outline of a smiley face on the right side of his stomach, one red teardrop falling from its left eye, and black runic script running up his left forearm.
"Why'd everything just go quiet?" Yogi asked.
"Taking my shirt off. Wings don't come out through cotton."
"And you're telling a blind man this because?"
"Transparency."
Then Jeff folded his tongue in three places at once, a trick that looked deeply wrong from the outside and that he had absolutely no plans to explain, and the wings arrived.
They didn't unfold so much as "appear", attached to his back as if they'd always been there, white-feathered and wide enough to shade them both. Yogi turned his head a half-second later, one hand coming up toward his left side.
"Did you just grow something?"
"Wings. I told you."
"What'd you do to get them out?"
"Folded my tongue three times at once."
Yogi was silent for a moment. "I'm glad I can't see that."
Jeff locked his pinky, the double joint bending back at an angle that made strangers wince, and wind answered. It gathered under him in a rush, and he jumped up in it, wings beating hard. His thumb rolled against the side of his finger like a joystick, steering the gust, and he climbed through a gap in the canopy into open sky.
---
From above, the forest stopped being a forest.
It was a maze.
Mirrors stood among the trees. No frames, no stands, nothing holding them up, just enormous sheets of perfect reflection planted upright in the earth at angles that couldn't have been accidental. The forest reflected the forest reflected the forest. The gaps between the mirrors made corridors, the corridors folded back into each other, and Jeff's eyes kept trying to follow a path and kept arriving somewhere they'd already been.
Between the mirrors, crystal formations jutted from the ground in clusters: red, violet, a green so bright it looked fake. Each one sat inside its own faint shimmering colored aura, like haze with a tint. The violet cluster near the pond explained the boar. Whatever else had been living down there long enough, soaking in those auras hour after hour, was going to have powers too.
Past the forest's edge, trails widened into roads and ran out into rolling grass fields. Far off, there was a smudge of rooftops that might be a town. Farther still, where the horizon went hazy, the land broke up into red rock and shadow.
Jeff hovered, turning slowly, taking it in.
That was when he saw it.
In one of the mirrors, the fourth from the pond, someone was standing at the base of an oak tree with their face tipped up toward the sky.
Toward him.
Jeff's heart kicked. He banked hard, searching the actual forest for that oak and that figure. But mirrors were reflecting mirrors, every angle was a lie that led to another lie, and there were a thousand oaks down there.
He whipped back to the fourth mirror.
His angle had changed. It showed only branches.
"Jeff?"
Yogi's voice came up through the canopy, calm, pitched to carry.
"Jeff. Were you just standing behind me?"
---
Jeff hit the ground hard enough to leave knee-prints.
Yogi stood exactly where he'd left him, head turned slightly over his right shoulder, one hand pressed flat against his lower back like a man who'd just felt a tap there.
"No," Jeff said. "I was two hundred feet up."
"Then somebody stood right behind me," Yogi said, "for about as long as it takes to read a sentence. Then left. Didn't touch me. Didn't try anything."
"Your aura didn't—"
"My aura answers attacks. That wasn't an attack."
Jeff's adrenaline surged, and he felt the familiar heat in his eyes as his irises lit up glowing neon yellow. Yogi couldn't see it. For once, that felt like a mercy.
He turned a full circle. Trees. Portals. The pond. His own carved name on the pine.
Nothing.
"Anybody inside twenty-seven feet of me, I'd see," he said, thinking it through out loud. "They wouldn't be able to be fully invisible. They'd be see-through, but I'd be able to see them. That's in the book."
"So they're farther."
"So they're farther."
He looked at the ring of trees just beyond that distance, at every gap between trunks, at every patch of shade that might be shade or might not be.
Somebody who'd walk up behind a genie, a being with more power than Jeff could reasonably picture, and stand there on purpose.
A few people Jeff had heard of were that crazy. And then there was the category of people the VRC had told him about during his interview, the ones who didn't need to be crazy. The ones who went home at the end of their shift. But they're generally pretty blatant.
A black orb was already forming in his right hand, pulsing, dense, dragging a little of the light into itself.
He felt himself getting angry. And he could feel exactly who was waiting on the other side of that anger, patient in the passenger seat of his own skull.
He breathed in. Held it. Let it out slowly.
"Your breathing just changed," Yogi said.
"Ring thing."
"If you're about to blow up a tree to make a point, the tree didn't do it."
Jeff almost laughed. He closed his hand, and the orb went out.
That was when his pocket went off.
Both of them jumped. Jeff's phone was buzzing hard against the tank top tied around his waist, notification after notification stacking up so fast the screen stuttered:
**LEGENDARY CREATURE ENGAGED — LIVE**
**REWARD POSTED**
**REWARD INCREASED**
**REWARD INCREASED**
And under all of them: *Alicia calling.*
He answered. "Hey, I'm bringing comp—"
"*Are you watching this?*"
"Watching wh—"
"*Come home. Come home right now.*"
The call ended.
Jeff stood in the forest of doors, holding his phone and his own quickened pulse, and he looked at the footprints one more time. The edges had dried. They were shrinking.
He looked at the bluish door they led into.
He looked at his phone.
Yogi, who could not see any of this, somehow saw all of it.
"Let me lay it out," the old man said. "The man you've been looking for walked through a door about ten minutes ago. Somebody watched you come looking for him. And someone called your smartphone." He tilted his head. "So. Which one are you going to go chase?"
"I'm coming back," Jeff said. "With Alicia. I've got two wishes left.
Jeff put his hand on the carved pine as they passed it, a quick touch, like touching a doorframe for luck. Then he took Yogi by the elbow and led him back through their portal.
---
On the far side, back on the trail where he'd found the die, Jeff pulled his wings in close and looked at the old man.
"How do you feel about flying?"
"I'm not sure."
"Wind it is."
"I've died multiple times," Yogi said. "There's not a lot left that scares m—"
Jeff locked his fingers. The wind came up underneath Yogi and lifted him off his feet like a hand under a kite.
"Why am I spinning."
"Working on it!"
"WORK FASTER."