The worst class in the Apocalypse: Ctrl+C

There's a specific feeling you get when you walk into the single most important room in creation and immediately understand you are underdressed. I'd felt it once before, at my cousin's wedding, in cargo shorts. This was that, except the wedding was a hundred dead worlds and the cargo shorts were my entire personality.

The center of the city wasn't a room. It was a held breath the size of everything. We came up out of the long margin into a space with no walls I could find and no ceiling I could reach, and hanging in the middle of it was the Root — and I finally understood why the Editor had never once called it a monster.

Monsters have a shape. This had everyone's.

Under the bruise-purple light, folded together like pages in a book too big to close, were worlds. Cities I'd never seen. Skies the wrong colors. Oceans that dried up three Integrations before I was born. And people — uncountable, pressed into the substance of the thing, not dead, not alive, just waiting — a hundred harvested worlds kept awake forever so that nothing, ever, got forgotten.

"Okay," I whispered. "That's a lot."

That's the understatement of four Integrations, said the System, which had been unusually quiet since we started climbing and now sounded like it wanted to hide behind me. Leo. Whatever you do down here. Do not touch anything.

"I wasn't going to touch anything."

You touch everything. It's your entire class. You touched a Threshold. You touched a building. I have watched you copy things out of what I can only describe as spite.

"That was one time—"

It was eleven times.

And then the whole Audience turned to look at me.

I want you to understand what it's like to be looked at by a hundred worlds at once. It's not like a crowd. A crowd is people. This was every held breath of every place that had ever been eaten, all of them fixing on the first living thing to walk in holding a pen instead of reaching for the switch — and the weight of that much attention nearly folded me onto the floor like a lawn chair.

Somewhere in the layers, one smudged face found mine and held it.

"Ada," I said, before I could stop myself, and my throat did something stupid. She looked back at me across the impossible folds, and she didn't look betrayed, and she didn't look afraid. She looked relieved. The way she'd looked on the throne, three worlds' worth of tired, when she realized I wasn't going to take her hand. You came to read us, her face said, without sound. Not to use us. I told them one of you would.

"You're late," said the Editor.

It stood at the base of the Root, grey and tired, holding its own pen — a whole one, not a splinter — and for the first time since the mall it didn't reach for a line to draw through me. It just looked at me the way a man looks at the clock at the end of a shift that has lasted a hundred years.

"You've cost me four caretakers, a Descent, an anchor, and more discrepancy than the ledger has ever carried," it said. "And you've arrived here awake, off the leash, with a pen in your hand and the faintest idea what it's for. Which no Copyist has managed in a hundred worlds. So I'm going to do the thing I have not done in all that time. Instead of a line, I'll give you the truth, and a choice."

"Is the truth going to be depressing," I said. "Because I'm running kind of low."

"You want to edit the first rule." It ignored me, which is fair, it's what I'd have done. "You cannot. Not with that." It nodded at the splinter of pen in my hand, and I swear the gesture had pity in it. "You've been learning to write — small true things, a corner made safe, a grief made permanent. Good. Genuinely. But the first rule is the largest true thing there is, and you are holding a splinter you have leveled to the point where you can, what — make a nap permanent?"

"I can also make water clean," I said, with dignity.

"You can make water clean."

"It's a start. You're being very rude for the most powerful middle manager in existence."

The Editor almost smiled, and hated that it almost smiled, which I understood, because I have that same reaction to Priya. "The only pen large enough to rewrite the first rule," it said, "is the Root itself. The whole pen. And here is the trap under the trap, Copyist — the one your friend the Footnote is too fond of you to say out loud. To wield the Root, you have to touch it. And a Copyist who touches the Root—"

This text was taken from NovelFire. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"—copies it," I finished, because I'm slow but I'm not that slow, and the whole horrible shape of it dropped into place. "And copying a hundred eaten worlds all pressed together unpauses them. All at once. Every held breath let out in the same second." I looked at the Audience. At Ada. "That's the flood. That's why you leash my class from birth. Not because we'd free a monster. Because the one tool that could ever fix this is a tool that, in my specific idiot hands, blows up the world I'm trying to fix."

"Yes," said the Editor softly. "So. The choice. Touch it and doom them. Or turn around, walk back up, and leave it exactly as monstrous as it already is." It offered me its whole pen, handle first, and its grey eyes were so, so tired. "I'd let you, you know. Take mine. End all of this. I am past the point of caring which grave we pick, as long as someone who read the sentence is the one who picks it."

And there it was. The fork. The biggest, best-built fork they'd ever set in front of me. Doom them or leave them. Flood or leash. Take the pen and end the world, or drop the pen and let the machine keep eating.

I have spent my entire garbage apocalypse refusing to pick from the menu.

"Counteroffer," I said. "I don't do forks. Third door: I get strong enough to hold that splinter until it can write something the size of your first rule without me ever having to touch the big scary world-ending crayon. Then I come back. Then I edit it. Nobody floods. Nobody stays caged. I just need — " I did the math, and the math was hilarious, and I laughed out loud in the most sacred room in creation — "okay, I just need to grind a skill from 'permanent nap' to 'permanent law of reality,' which is, ballpark, the largest grind in the history of grinds, but I've done big numbers before, I started at one percent of a lighter."

The Editor stared at me.

"That's not a choice," it said. "That's a to-do list."

"I'm a to-do list kind of guy."

And that was when the cold came down.

Not the Editor's tired weight. Not the Redactor's erasure. Something higher — the thing above the Editor, the thing that had turned its attention toward me at the bottom of the world, the hand that had held this pen when the pen was whole. It didn't have a face. It didn't have a shape. It arrived in the marrow instead of the ear, and the entire Audience of a hundred worlds went still beneath it the way a room goes still when the person who owns it walks in, and it looked at me — a one-percent nobody with a splinter and a to-do list — and it asked one question, three words, and the three words were not a threat.

[ are you the one who finishes the sentence? ]

The Footnote made a sound like a page being torn. Priya's hand found my sleeve. Sprinkles pressed against my leg, and the cat that used to clip Copyists was, I realized, shaking.

"Don't answer," the Footnote breathed. "You don't know what it means by finish, boy. You don't know if finishing means end it or complete it. That's the last fork, and you don't have the words yet—"

I looked up into the dark that owned the whole page.

"Ask me again," I said, "when I can actually pick up the pen. I don't answer big questions in the dark anymore. I go find the light switch first. Also, respectfully, I have literally nothing to say to a cosmic entity right now that isn't a joke to cope, and you deserve better than my coping, so — rain check?"

The attention held on me for one long, terrible moment.

And then — impossibly — it did something no caretaker in three worlds had ever seen it do.

It got curious.

I felt it decide. Not to erase me. Not to answer. To wait and see — the way you'd leave a very small, very stupid seed in the ground just to find out if it's insane enough to grow into something you can't predict. And having decided, it reached out with a hand the size of a hundred worlds, picked the four of us up like a bookmark, and — gently, almost politely — put us back.

[ come back when you can hold the pen. ]

The center folded away. The margin rushed past. And I want to be very clear that I did not choose what happened next, because it is my entire class and it is not, technically, under my control:

On the way out — falling up through a hundred fathoms of world, past the shards, back toward the ruined daylight — we passed close to something. Big. Stomping. A thing the size of a bus that had wandered out of a cracked Threshold onto the surface while we were gone, and was currently having a tantrum in the middle of what used to be a parking garage, and every time it brought its ridiculous stone foot down, the whole block jumped.

And my Copyist reflex, the one that has never once asked my permission, the one that copied a building out of spite, looked at that stomping bus-sized tantrum-monster and its personal earthquake, and it reached.

The System clicked.

We hit the pavement in a heap — me, Priya, a hundred-year-old traitor, and a cat — alive, ejected, exactly as weak as we'd been an hour ago, three miles from the mall and a whole cosmos short of our to-do list.

And a new line sat blinking behind my eyes.

[Skill copied: Earthquake (1%)]Source: Tremor-Beast. Off the ledger. Unrevocable.Effectiveness: one percent.Leo. At one percent, this earthquake would not spill a cup of coffee. I want you to sit with that. You have copied a natural disaster, and it could not knock over your drink.

Priya sat up, spat out a piece of parking garage, looked at the tantrum-monster, looked at me, and read my face with the weary expertise of someone who has watched me do this eleven times.

"You copied it," she said. "We just got personally bookmarked by God, and on the way out you stopped to shoplift an earthquake."

"In my defense," I said, already grinning, already feeling the shape of it, already home — because this, this, the pavement and the monster and the pathetic one percent and the impossible climb from garbage to game-breaking, this was my terrain, not the Editor's, not the Author's, mine — "in my defense, it's a natural disaster, Priya. Give me two weeks."