The Simulacrum

"Why am I sitting between these two?" I asked, my question entirely genuine.

While the table was (mostly) round, we somehow ended up dividing into two sides. At the other end, the four familiar Emergents were clustered together, with Carmine sitting directly opposite of me, Oriole and Obsidius on her right, and Fulgor on her left. In contrast, I was sandwiched between the two Venerated Emergents, though their behaviour was anything but worthy of veneration right now.

"Hey, little Benjamin? Do you need a chair pad? Or maybe some cushions? Oh, oh! How about one of those cute baby-chairs?"

"Cease your prattling, before I change my mind and consume you whole!"

"Aww! Little-wittle Benjamin is angwy! He must have lost his favorite teddy bear!"

"Why, you—!"

Running out of patience, I snapped at them with a plain and direct, "Cut it out, you two!" and they both obliged, if grudgingly.

With that over and done with, I turned to face Carmine, only to find her pointing at me.

"That," she said in a flat tone. "That's why you're sitting between them."

As much as I would've liked to argue with that, I couldn't, so I uttered an equally flat, "Fair," before pointedly clearing my throat. "Let's put that aside for now, shall we? I think we have a lot to discuss."

"We do," Carmine agreed with a slight incline of her head. "But first, status report."

"R-Right!" Obsidius stammered and made a few vague motions with his hand, as if trying to space-monk mind-trick the table in front of us. "The scenario is over, but… the Simulacrum session is still ongoing?"

"Obviously," the Crowned Coalescence scoffed, but nobody reacted.

"A-Also…" Obsidius made a few more wavy gestures and finally settled down. "The Simulacrum itself is stable, but… unresponsive."

"Also obviously," the burning star-man scoffed again, this time gesturing towards me.

I turned my head to face him and told him, "If you have nothing to add to the conversation, you may exercise your right to remain silent."

"Hah! Look at that! Even after all I've done, I'm getting the cold shoulder treatment like this!" He shook his head and folded his arms with a theatrical sigh. "Kids these days…"

"Decent segue," I noted with a shallow nod. "We can start by you explaining what you've done."

"Oh? It's my turn already?" He cocked his head to the side and looked over at the white-haired kid sitting at my other side. "Can't we talk about how Benjamin nearly ruined everything first? It would be much more entertaining."

"We're not here to be entertained," the woman at the other end of the table noted with audible distaste in her voice, her hair growing a more vibrant shade of red as her patience was starting to run low. "We would all appreciate it if you took this seriously, for once in your existence."

"Come on, Carmine. Don't be like that."

"Don't 'Carmine' me!" she snapped back at him, her vermillion waters rising like a tsunami. "You disappeared without a trace, doing who knows what all this time, and then when you finally show up, you can't even be bothered to explain yourself? Do you have any idea how much headache you caused us this time?"

"To be fair…" the Crowned Coalescence argued back, yet he was holding his three-fingered hands up in surrender, "… weren't it you guys who tried to prank me first? Technically, everything happened because of that, so…"

"We thought we killed you!" she hissed at him, taking him aback for a moment.

"Oh, please! Like that would ever happen! Nobody really thought I was dead, right?"

His question was met with a wall of silence, eventually broken by Fulgor stifling a groan and saying, "Everyone thought that. That's why the Venerated Benjamin came here to investigate."

"Oh, whatever. You guys just made a mountain out of a molehill. You prank me, I prank you back, what's the difference?"

"This wasn't a prank! You just…!"

And so on and so forth. A whole lot of tension that's been building for a while, released all at once as Carmine vehemently berated the Crowned Coalescence, with occasional background support from the others. That said, this was clearly a two-man act, and looking at these two arguing like this really brought a deadbeat dad and his estranged wife to mind.

I shook the image out of my head and focused on something else. Or rather, someone else.

"Anything to add to that?" I asked Benjamin, who's been unusually well-behaved so far.

"Their conflict has nothing to do with me," he told me frankly, followed by a short pause while he stuck a finger in his mouth to inspect his teeth. Finding them satisfactory, he turned to me and added, "I came here to discover whether ************ was cast back into the Noise or not." As usual, he refused to use the Crowned Coalescence's new name and preferred to just spray a torrent of disjointed concepts and images at me. Maybe it was a generational thing?

"Well, there he is," I said, gesturing at the being still locked in an argument with an increasingly irate ocean of ruby, but then something came to mind, and I let my hand down. "Actually, you knew that he was here for a while now, so why didn't you just go away?"

Benjamin was in the process of observing his fancy shoe buckles, so he didn't respond right away. When he finally did, he off-handedly told me, "Once I discovered that he was hiding inside the Artificial Domain housing the Simulacrum, it was imperative to capture and extract him before he could cause any lasting damage or interfere with the emergence of the Submerged Ones."

"… And then you went into the Simulacrum and tried to literally eat the scenario."

"Yes," he responded like it was self-evident, all the while inspecting his suspenders.

"And you don't see any major contradictions or hints of hypocrisy in that?"

He finally looked me in the eye, and after a long beat, casually explained, "I already told you. I was trying to prevent a singularity."

"By eating the scenario."

"Yes."

"And me."

"Also yes."

"And now we're just having a casual talk after all that," I pointed out, and he nodded along.

"Yes, we do." He acted like it was completely self-explanatory and he proceeded to start tugging on his suspenders again. "I failed, and the singularity already happened. Further hostilities are pointless and inefficient."

"… You tried to ambush and bite me the moment I returned here."

"That was a long time ago. Things have changed."

"It was literally less than five minutes, and… and never mind."

I managed to hold myself back and cut off the topic before we could get into yet another bout of bloody time-block baloney. It was pointless to argue about that with the Emergents here; it was like trying to argue with idiots. They would just drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

"This Definition might not be as onerous as I first thought," Benjamin stated out of the blue, his fingers coming and tugging at his shiny white hair. "It certainly makes communication more efficient."

He… wasn't entirely wrong about that. Compared to the time of our scuffle inside the Simulacrum, he was considerably more articulate. Soft-spoken, even. Was it because we weren't communicating through our Defined bodies, but more 'directly', I wondered. Or maybe he just had a harder time talking because his mouth was full at the time. With both me and the literal scenery, but I digress.

Meanwhile, the argument between the crowned star and the crimson oceans was getting out of hand, and I was flagged down by Oriole.

"Sol? Help, please?"

The request came in the form of the high-pitched chirping of a whole flock of newborn chicks, and so I pulled my attention away from Benjamin and faced her.

"I told you guys, Leonard will do, and…" My gaze landed on the Crowned Coalescence next, and I asked, "What's your general opinion on pompadours?"

That made him pause and cock his head to the side again.

"Erm… Why do you ask?"

"Because I'm starting to wonder how you would look with one. Like, a comically large one."

"Whoa, whoa!" He sat up straight and raised his hands. "Let's not be hasty."

"Depends. Can we have a proper discussion without it devolving into a shouting match?"

My question made him glance at Carmine (which was, once again, mostly just an inference on my end, considering he had no facial features) and eventually resulted in a defeated sigh.

"Fine, fine. I'll be the bigger man and admit that we all could've avoided a lot of complications if I showed some signs of life earlier on. My bad." He paused for a long beat, then asked, in a slightly lower voice, "Happy?"

"No," Carmine answered flatly, but then she glanced at me for some reason and then her expression eased up with an added, "But it's a start."

The Crowned Coalescence responded with a happy-go-lucky, "Yep! So? What do you guys want to know?"

The ruby ocean responded with a succinct, "Everything," prompting the star-man to stifle a laugh.

"Well, it all started with the initial expansion of space-time about—" Low on patience, I extended a phantom limb (which was still invisible even here, for reasons that were beyond my understanding right now) and I lightly smacked him in the back of the head. He froze up and muttered, "Kids these days…" again before clearing his throat and starting from the beginning.

"Okay, let's skip the first thirteen-or-so billion years. So, I was just minding my business, as usual, when a little bird told me you guys were making another scenario, and it was designed to make sure I couldn't mess with it. You know me, I love a good challenge, so I came in, and there was a bang, and a kaboom, and a ker-chunk, and then I took the wrong exit and somehow fell into the Simulacrum while it was already running. So, as a responsible Venerated Emergent, I pulled the handbrake, threw myself in reverse, and tried to pull out, but then disaster struck! I missed the junction, and I somehow ended up falling out of the Simulacrum and right into the Artificial Domain!"

"So far, as expected," Benjamin noted with mild disinterest, way more absorbed in the elasticity of his socks than the conversation.

"Maybe, but then there was a twist!" the Crowned Coalescence declared with a theatrical flare. No, not 'flair'; he literally started glowing for dramatic effect. "The Artificial Doman is huge. You know that, right? Of course you do. Getting out of it without accidentally breaking anything was way too difficult, so I started moving about veeery slowly and veeery deliberately, and as I was feeling my way around like a blind bull in a china shop, I found something peculiar. Drumroll, please…"

He was waiting for us to do something, and while I didn't doubt that any of the quartet at the other end of the table could've made the mostly-bright debatably-room produce a drumroll sound effect, nobody wanted to land on the bad side of the woman impatiently tapping her finger on the table. At last, the star-man gave up with a huff.

"You guys are no fun. Fine. I'll do it myself." He cleared his throat and then started… making noises. With the mouth that he didn't have. "Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-TAMM!" At its crescendo, he threw his hands to the side, pointing at…

"Me?" I blurted out, and after a brief pause, he let his hands down.

"Kind of. It's a bit more complicated than that, so let's start at the beginning. What I found was more of a nascent consciousness. At first, I thought it was just a Submerged One in the process of Emerging, but the more I looked, the weirder it felt, and then I finally got it! It was the core of the Artificial Domain itself! You know how, when a Submerged One emerges, they get pushed out of the Simulacrum, through the Artificial Domain? I figure that whenever that happened, they left a tiiiny bit of an impression there, and over a looong time, those slowly added up. Nobody discovered it beforehand, because everyone was too afraid of breaking something to go inside and take a look around, but it must've been there for aeons!"

"How does that relate to me?" I asked, and the Crowned Coalescence waved his hand at me.

"Patience, kid. I'm getting there. You see, my first reaction was 'Oh, crap!'. My second reaction was, 'Wait! If the Artificial Domain Defines itself, it's going to cause a whole lot of trouble! Maybe I should get rid of it?'. But then, on third thought, I was like, 'Waaait a minute. This could be huge!' and it gave me a great idea! So, guys? Do you know what a Seed Amalgam is?"

I blurted out an instant, "No?"

I mean, how was I supposed to know? On the other hand, Carmine's hair suddenly turned a dull orange, her red eyes wide like saucers.

"You didn't…"

"What?" Obsidius asked, looking confused.

"Hush! This is the best part!" Oriole chided him and put a bag of popcorn in front of him.

"You," Benjamin chimed in, pointing at the girl. "Share it with me. I wish to test this Definition's senses."

While the three kids (by a certain point of view) were busy with that, Fulgor squinted at Carmine, then at the Crowned Coalescence, and finally at me.

"Now that I think about it, that makes a whole lot of sense. Why didn't I think of this before?"

"Would someone explain what the heck you're talking about?"

My interjection was answered by Benjamin of all people, his mouth full of popcorn.

"A spurious practice. The younger generation's attempt at replicating biological reproduction. Must be an influence of their Definition." He swallowed, then continued in the same breath. "Two Emergents forcefully sever a part of their Domains and merge it together before placing it inside the Simulacrum, in hopes that it would act as a seed and Define itself with the help of a scenario. Some claimed to have succeeded, but there's no clear evidence for the efficacy of the procedure."

"Wait…" I cut in with one hand raised high. "Let me see if I get this straight. You had one of these… What did you call it?"

Carmine whispered, "Seed Amalgam," while staring at me, making me even more convinced of my hunch.

"Yeah." For the first time, the Crowned Coalescence sounded a little sheepish. "We never got around to putting it into the Simulacrum, so I kept it. Like, a memento of the good old times."

Fulgor suddenly buried his face in his hand and muttered, "I can't believe you made a Seed Amalgam with him. I thought you were more sensible than this."

"It was… a long time ago…" Carmine protested, and the atmosphere turned decidedly awkward. Not for long, though, because the burning star-man let out a low chuckle and opened his arms wide.

"It's a good thing we did, because that was exactly what the nascent consciousness I found needed. As soon as I introduced the Seed Amalgam, it latched onto it! I carefully guided it to the Simulacrum, and the moment it made contact with your scenario, it… I mean, he, immediately Defined himself on the spot! It was crazy!"

"Stop, stop. Let me digest this…" I cut in, my hand raised once again. "So you used this seed thing to act as a core for the Artificial Domain, and then I… Defined myself into myself?"

"That's the gist of it," he said with a shrug. "It all went swimmingly, but then it turned out that since you were inside a scenario, the framework of the Simulacrum treated you as a Submerged One and didn't let you get out until it was over, so we—"

"Stop, again!" I cut in, and for a change of pace, I forcefully planted my hands on the table this time. "You're trying to gloss over this, but if what you're saying is true, that would make me…"

My voice trailed off, my eyes shifting between the Crowned Coalescence, maintaining a forced nonchalance that wasn't fooling anyone, and Carmine, who looked like her whole world was rocked and she couldn't decide if she should be outraged, elated, or just plain old dumbfounded.

As for me, I was still wresting with the realization that the happy-go-lucky star-man sitting next to me didn't just give off a deadbeat dad vibe, he was literally (or at the very least metaphorically) my deadbeat dad. Because this whole situation wasn't odd and confusing enough, right?