You take ?
Yeah . Reading is taking , isn ’ t it . Whether it ’ s words in a page , or judgements you make of a person . You swallow them , you turn them into a solid , single thing ; words on a page , memories in a mind . Judgements of a cover . He was smiling – why was he smiling like that ? And for a moment , she really was trapped by that face of his . That he , he looked like her , didn ’ t he ? She wanted to shoot a glance behind , to that black mirror , and see for herself . Necker cubes , he said then , as if hearing her impulse . And Reimannian space , yes ? Yes , yes , she said . Whatever that meant … I think there ’ s something that ’ s been missed . About space and its geometry . Closed timelike curves , for instance , might allow us to think more about , say , a line through space . Our worldline is a kind of helic structure , right ? Looping and returning but moving through space and time . The Necker cube – to perceive it is to think outside of our three-dimensional space . We can see both shapes at once . Meaning that , at least in a fourth dimension , if we could see space and its constituents , we could see where the worldline once was . All of its previous events . It ’ s possible to think backward . To retrack a mind to a previous iteration .
What if , he proposed , we could make them think they were an earlier version of themselves , a better version ?
Why was this so troubling to her ? Heart beat faster , she struggled to sit still . It was just a theory – but , somewhere deep in that mind , she knew it could work . What the implications were . A person ’ s natural evolutions , lessons learned and stories told , gone . She searched for safety in the room : none could be found , the walls are so bare they ’ re like toothless grinning mouths . If you could excuse me , she said . No , take your time . She turned around finally to see the window . The blackness outside a moat with no end .
There she was . Or he was . That wasn ’ t her , was it ? The short hair , the .. Didn ’ t she have a dress on ? Or did she ? She can ’ t remember . Are you okay , Lauren ? Yes , yes – I … They ’ re interesting , windows in the night . If you could just
I am the Ocean ; To them I ’ m a Lake 88