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Chapter 4

You come to. You hadn’t exactly passed out—it was just that your mind was elsewhere for a moment, wandering, although you can’t remember exactly where. Your eyes now focus on the teeth of a man. He is speaking to you, but you are not listening to what he’s saying. You haven’t for a while. His voice is raspy—that much gets through, but not content, not meaning, only sound.

And the sight of slightly copperish teeth through a smiling mouth.

There’s a plant behind his desk. It’s so green. Or maybe it’s just that the lights are so bright. Just so bright.

The distant rumble continues to reach your conscious mind, unprocessed, mere physical stimuli, as you contemplate the greenness of the plant in wonder, almost like a child.

“Are you okay?” The man asks, smiling as if he already knew the answer.

Your eyes focus on his desk. It’s so large, so bright. Yes, just so bright. And so vivid. It’s as if the images were just being downloaded into your senses, without the distortion and the limitations of your physical receptors. You reach out for the desk to touch it, and you feel your insides flood with long-lost emotions and childhood memories as you absorb the texture of the wood.

“Well?”

You don’t answer. Instead, you look at him right in the eyes. His irides seem to be a color you’ve never seen before. They burn with the intensity of a thousand suns, contain the sensuality of a thousand moons, and just for a moment, you glimpse also the pain of a thousand births. And then the pain is gone, and you feel his look start to consume you. You feel yourself sink further into the chair.

The smile grows larger. The lights are so bright…

“Follow me, please.”

He stands up and you follow suit like an automaton. He then walks across the room and opens the door for you. You walk through, following your feet.

The corridor outside the office looks impossibly endless at first glance, but the more you look at it, the smaller it seems to grow, although it’s not moving at all. There are lamps on the walls facing upward, shaping light into an unlikely fan painted onto the rugged khaki surface. The corridor is much darker than the office, yet it’s every bit as vivid and inviting. Your eyes open wide and only now do you notice you had been squinting all along.

The man walks past you, carelessly bumping you with his arm as he squeezes through the space between you and the wall. Had the corridor always been that narrow? You can’t quite tell. But your attention is drawn to the fact that you almost didn’t feel the collision between his arm and yours. Your hand immediately rubs the place to check for feeling. You do feel your arm, and your arm does feel your hand.

You now watch the man stride forward with a confident gait and realize you’ve been lagging behind. Your feet start moving again, without asking for your permission.

The man’s voice reaches your ears as if through a tunnel.

“We thought you deserved to know what’s going on in here, since your collaboration is what makes this whole thing possible.”

You feel the man smile, although you cannot see his face. You just feel it in an indescribable fashion that’s both overwhelming and intimidating.

The man turns left at an intersection of corridors.

“You see, once I was a young man with a dream. I was very much into books—fascinated by them. Fiction, science, poetry… Okay, maybe not poetry. Poetry is for sissies. You heard that George? Sissies!” He shouts into a door marked as 37-F. A sigh can be heard on the other side.

The man clears his throat.

“Like I was saying, mostly science and fiction. And science fiction, of course. I was really intrigued by how these… worlds were created and destroyed inside my mind by the mere whim of someone else—someone who didn’t even need to be alive to do so. All it took was just words, you see?”

He turns around and faces you, eyes ablaze.

“They created worlds using words. Worlds, do you understand that?”

You stare at him in silence. You can’t speak—your mouth seems to be immersed in some sort of death-like slumber. And even if you could speak, you wouldn’t know what to say.

The man turns his back to you once more and resumes walking.

“And words are cheap, you know? Cheaper than having children or molding matter into new forms, or even creating matter. And, believe me, we’ve tried those. Oh, we have tried.”

He scoffs and shakes his head. You are now walking down what seem to be endless flights of stairs. Curiously, your legs do not feel tired, not in the least.

“But how do these worlds work? What rules apply to them? All universes must have limitations, for limitations are what define what they limit. If there was no darkness, light would be meaningless and matter could not be observed. If sound travelled unrestricted, every single sound that ever occurred would continue occurring everywhere forever. If you wrote the alphabet into a blank page, you would have every work ever written, every single answer to every single question in the combinations, but they mean nothing because you have not put them to use through limitation.”

You finally reach a much narrower and poorly lit corridor. You follow the man into a precarious-looking freight elevator. He presses a big, red button and the elevator shakes violently and then starts going down very slowly, with a worrying rattling noise.

“Although there was only so much I could learn from just reading the books I had, there were some conclusions they did help me reach. But each conclusion led to more and more questions. One thing I noticed was that it only took a statement to create a world, but once the world started being limited—described—the creator’s freedom was also subject to restrictions. Once the author wrote that, say, a character had blue eyes, that character could no longer have any other eye color, right?”

You nod.

“Wrong! He could! Unless a reader read that sentence. And that was a key finding in my research—a world can be created through words, but it will only collapse into existence once inside a reader’s mind.”

One of the bunch of thick black cables running down the walls suddenly buzzes loudly and showers you both with sparks. The sparks feel warm like the morning sun in your face. You wonder whether they are as harmless as the feeling.

“This answered many other questions I had regarding work-reader dynamics. In a book where the main character dies, although his death is written from the very beginning, he will only die once the reader reads that he dies. This allowed for multiple states of the same character in multiple readers observing different parts of the plot. This also explained why each reader could have a different mental representation of the same character without conflict—so long as their representations match the descriptions, they are valid, and they can only be overridden by further canon information.”

The freight elevator comes to a rattling halt. And you both start walking again. This time, however, you lead the way, as if you knew where you were heading. The man’s voice reverberates behind you.

“And this is another crucial rule of literary universes—canon. A reader must have canon input for the universe in his mind to update properly. It’s a validation process—another limitation that makes its existence possible. The strength of this mechanism can be observed in the phenomenon known as “spoiler.” If a person gives you a glimpse of the future of that universe, it will not fully update the universe in your mind but only give you a sense of helplessness and inevitability. The burden of fate. But the character will not be dead, not until actual canon input occurs. The universe will not successfully update without canon input. And updates are irreversible, unless they are properly justified by the canon source, which leads us to the second most important question. What is the degree of control an author has over his or her work?”

The corridor has now become too dark for you to keep walking, so you stop. The man bumps into you as if he were not paying attention to your movements at all.

“Oh, sorry about this. The lights don’t work here, so we’ll have to make do with my flashlight.”

He turns on a little flashlight, and a beam of light violently vanquishes the tar-like darkness ahead. You follow the beam with your eyes as it rests briefly on the sign of each of the doors to the sides.

“This way,” he says, walking towards one of them. A password is hastily punched into a keypad and a beep grants you both access to yet another pitch-black corridor.

“My early research on this subject,” he continues, as if the conversation hadn’t been interrupted at all, “indicated that there was a certain correlation between the amount of detail a work had and the amount of control the author possessed over the universe he’d created. As I said before, much as the alphabet written on a blank sheet of paper doesn’t mean much on its own, a word written on a sheet of paper implies some letters were left out. And the amount of words you write seems to be inversely proportional to the amount of freedom you have when picking the next one. That means, the longer an author works on a universe, the more independent the universe becomes, and the less he gets to choose what happens next. And they can only stretch that rule so much before being criticized by the reader for overriding the laws of the universe they created. Once they’ve made sense for long enough, they can no longer choose not to make sense, and it’s only what makes sense that can happen. They can only push towards an outcome through the details, or plan way ahead and try to disguise it, but they can no longer genuinely decide what’s going to happen to their characters.”

You notice the flashlight has been turned off for a while, and you’re only following a disembodied voice. You continue to do so in silence.

“But this is only what I got from reading. Testing needed to be done. I was done with science fiction…”

There is a short pause.

“It was time to do fiction science.”

You make out a dim shape in the distance—some sort of white rectangle. You seem to be moving towards it.

“But first I needed a laboratory, and I had no money and no way of making money. Mostly because I spent most of my time reading and theorizing about all this instead of doing other stuff like… say… going to college. But science is not about some stupid college degree and some homelessness-preventing day job, no, science is about innovation. If I couldn’t have my lab out in the real world, I would make myself a lab from scratch!”

The rectangle approaches. You now understand it’s the outline of a door.

“And that’s exactly what I did. I narrated a universe into existence with a laboratory in it to test the dynamics of it firsthand. But just a lab wasn’t enough—I needed a subject. I needed a name for it and also a name for my project, so I thought, what exactly do we study here? We study the fabric of this universe, we try to understand how it works and what it’s made out of by creating and destroying, by deconstructing, by experimenting, and by observing our test subject. So, behold…”

The man opens the door, blinding you for a moment. Your eyes quickly adjust to the brightness, and you see a supermassive structure brimming with scientists holding clipboards, walking up and down catwalks, and staring at inscrutable things through large glass panes.

“The Bob Observation Bureau, or BOB, for short.”

The name sounds strangely familiar, as if you had heard about it before. Or read about it, perhaps. You are suddenly ridden with an intense feeling of anxiety. There’s something wrong with this whole thing, although you can’t quite tell what it is. Yes, there is something very wrong.

The scientists suddenly stop walking. They all stop looking at the glass panes. Their clipboard-holding arms go limp. They all turn to you in perfect synchronicity. You start back, startled.

“Easy there, my friend.” The man smiles again, and your whole body becomes paralyzed, as if giant invisible hands had suddenly gotten a grip of you and were holding you firmly in place. You’re petrified—a jammed automaton.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, you know?”

The silence is absolute. It hurts your ears. You fight against the montionlessness of your legs to no avail. They seem to have been welded to the ground. The scientists keep staring at you with blank expressions. The man keeps smiling.

“We brought you here for you to understand. And for this place to collapse into existence, of course. We need to keep the research somewhere safe from the outside world, and your presence here has provided us with the perfect place for that. And with plenty of capable personnel.”

He nods towards the human statues wearing lab coats.

“So, thank you. Your contribution has been of vital importance to our research. I apologize for the conditions of your visit. You must understand that it was too risky to bring you here under the ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ style. It had to be linear narration, or else you would have posed too much of a threat, as…”

As the man keeps talking, you manage to move your left foot back. The invisible force immediately diminishes, and your right foot now moves back, too. The man breaks off. One of the scientists speaks with a monotonous voice.

“Sir, we are approaching the Deus Ex Machina Tolerance Threshold. The subject will become completely unbound in a few sentences.”

“Spawn it,” says the man without taking his eyes off you. He sounds a bit nervous now, although he tried to hide it. The force is almost gone. You begin to walk backwards with great effort.

“In the drawer to your left, sir.”

He reaches for the desk and quickly extracts a gun.

The force is gone.

You run.

You hear three shots being fired. They are deafening.

“Guards!” He shouts.

Two huge thugs in bulletproof vests appear from the two corridors in the three-way junction ahead. You instinctively let yourself drop and manage to slide through the polished surface of the floor right past them. They turn around. They are wearing balaclavas, so you can’t see their faces, but their anonymous looks intimidate you all the more. Another round is fired. The monotonous voice of the scientist reaches your ears from the distance.

“DEMTT reached. Descriptions are now an imminent threat to the impenetrability of the facility. Subject must be terminated immediately.”

“Shut up! I know!” The angry man’s voice is moving closer to you rapidly.

You take left, but see three more guards with semi-automatic rifles in front of you, so you quickly turn around and move in the opposite direction. There are several doors to your left in that corridor. You roll into one of the offices under a hail of bullets. You sit on the floor breathing heavily and scout the office for an exit. You notice a large glass pane across the room.

“DO NOT LET THE SUBJECT SEE THE REFLECTION!”

The glass is shattered almost instantly, and you make the split-second decision to jump through the opening into what seems to be an interrogation room. The gunfire begins roaring again.

One of the bullets hits your ankle.

You look around, gasping for breath, and see a table, a door, and a set of monitors.

“THE MONITORS!” The man shouts. They immediately go black, and you use the brief distraction to charge at the door shoulder-first, ignoring the intense pain on your leg.

You limp across a huge, dark office, bumping against desks and computers, the brief flashes coming from the tip of the guns behind you being the only source of light. The man’s voice resonates over the gunfire.

“There is no point in escaping! There’s nothing else here! Not for you, anyway! Just hand yourself over so you can get back to your universe!”

There’s a door to your right and a very small air duct right in front of you. You figure the duct is your best shot, so you dive into it, hoping you fit through. And luckily you do fit through. Once inside, you crawl desperately, half-expecting to get shot from behind, but the guards suddenly go silent, as if they had just disappeared. You don’t feel or hear anyone following you inside the rattling duct.

What you do hear, however, is the whole thing suddenly come crashing down under your weight. The noise leaves your ears ringing.

You black out for a moment, but quickly regain consciousness on the floor of a small maintenance room, surrounded by galvanized steel debris.

Your vision is blurry, but not enough for you not to see the door open in front of you, and the man from the lab walk into the room, triumphantly. He glances at you and then looks up, holding his finger to an earpiece on his right ear. His left hand is still holding the gun.

“Yes, good job, over and out,” he says and aims the gun at you, looking at you straight in the eyes.

The pain is just too great for you to move at all.

His other hand is replaced by his side.

“Good job, indeed,” he says, cocking the pistol.

“Let’s not bring you here ever ag…”

There’s a loud roar.

The pain is gone.

You are now looking at words on your computer screen.

You are alive.

///DO NOT FORGET to like and/or reblog (preferably both) to keep Bob alive. If you don’t, I stop writing and Bob DIES. I do mean that. I killed YOU in this chapter, amongst other things, to send a message of how ready I would be to kill Bob if you don't keep him alive with love, feedback, and/or support.

I apologize for the lack of Bob in the past few weeks. This chapter took some extra work, and it's been a busy couple of weeks. But Bob should go back to its regular schedule now. Should. Might. Hopefully.

I hope you enjoyed this enough to spread the word.

I would also like to apologize for the lack of actual Bob in this chapter. I wrote this while there was ongoing research being done about a rumor I heard that too much Bob could cause death under certain conditions, and I didn't want to risk my dear readers' lives. But, fortunately, it turned out to be just an urban myth. So, now we can go back to having huge amounts of Bob, as usual. MYTH BUSTED!

Stay tuned!///

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