Chapter 26. Where the Worlds Go
"Ask me where the worlds go," the Footnote said. "Because they don't die."
I sat down on the cold floor of a tunnel under a dead city, across from a caretaker that had erased its own name to keep from forgetting a thing worse than its name, and I asked.
"Where do they go?"
The Footnote picked up its broken pen again. It didn't write. It just held it, the way Halloran used to hold his fire when he wasn't sure he wanted it lit.
"You've been told a story," it said. "The Editor told you the polished half of it, because the Editor only ever tells the truth, and the polished half is true. The Root is a prisoner. The System is the cage. The leash on your class exists so no Copyist ever frees the thing in the middle. All true. All designed to make you believe you're standing at the only fork that matters — free the monster, or keep it caged. Flood, or leash." The crossed-out face turned toward me. "They are very good at forks. You've noticed."
"I've noticed."
"So here's the part under the part." It set the pen down. "The Root isn't a monster they caged to protect the worlds. The Root is what a world becomes when the System finishes eating it. Every world it processes — yours, mine, Ada's, the hundred before — gets harvested down to a single point of pure, licensed, sorted power, and that point gets carried to the center, and added. The Root isn't one prisoner, Leo. The Root is all of them. Every dead world, pressed together, still awake, still in there, growing. That's what's under the light in the shard. That's what turned its attention toward you at the mall. Not a beast."
The tunnel was very quiet. Somewhere above us, the Redactor net leaned lower.
"An audience," the Footnote said. "A hundred eaten worlds, caged in the middle of the newest one, watching the only kind of person who could ever reach them. Waiting."
I found my voice. It took a while. "Waiting for what?"
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"For a Copyist to copy the Root. Which the Editor calls 'freeing the flood,' and which is true, and which is also — " the pen tapped the concrete, once — "the only way any of them ever get to stop being a battery in a cage. The System doesn't eat worlds to imprison a monster. It eats worlds to build one, one harvest at a time, and it leashes your class so the battery it's building never gets switched on before it's finished. You're not the key to a prison, boy. You're the key to a bomb they're still assembling. And they'll keep eating worlds — keep the body count running, keep making Adas and mall-people into un-mourned smudges — until it's built to spec."
"Then why leash Copyists at all?" My mind was racing now, off the ledger, the way it does. "If copying the Root sets off the bomb, and they want the bomb, why spend a hundred Integrations making sure no Copyist ever—"
The Footnote's crossed-out face did something I'd only seen it do once. For an instant, every buried word almost surfaced.
"Because there's a difference," it said softly, "between a bomb going off for them — at the center, on their schedule, aimed where they aim it — and a bomb going off in the hands of some stubborn one-percent nobody who reached it early, off the ledger, unleashed, and pointed it somewhere they didn't choose." It leaned in. "They don't leash your class to keep the Root caged forever, Leo. They leash it to make sure that when the Root is finally switched on, the Editor's hand is the one on the switch. And you — you're the first Copyist in a hundred worlds who might reach the switch first."
Above us, all at once, the Redactor net stopped leaning.
It dropped.
Because somewhere in a tunnel under a dead city, a footnote too small to cite had just told the largest discrepancy in the ledger the one thing worth crossing a hundred survivors off the page to prevent him from hearing — and up in the light, the thing that wrote the Editors made a decision it had put off for three worlds.
Leo. My System, fast and frightened, right against my skull. Custody's void. They're not deferring anymore. The whole net just went active at once and it's comingdown here.The Footnote stood, brushing concrete dust from a coat that had been grey since before my grandmother was born, and for the first time it smiled, and its crossed-out face was almost, almost readable.
"Good," it said. "I've been a footnote for a hundred years, boy. I'd forgotten how it feels to be cited." It pressed its broken pen into my hand — off the ledger, unrevocable, warm. "You wanted a fourth door. It was never at the center. It was always going to be the switch, and whose hand's on it. Now get up. We have a great deal of running to do, and I have exactly one hundred years of things to tell you, and about ninety seconds to start."