The man’s sense of duty and love manifested itself as the violence against Peter, but eventually that lost its original purpose and became nothing more than a daily habit. The man used to hit Peter just in case he ever even thought about venturing outside That was his way of showing love and protecting him. But Peter felt like he was dying, cramped up as he was. He may have seemed fine on the outside, but he felt like he was dying inside.
That’s why he hatched a plan to escape the shelter. He prepared little by little, whenever his father wasn’t looking. But he was discovered and his father launched into a rage and attacked him. Tables and shelves were overturned and the atmosphere inside the shelter reached breaking point.
Peter’s foster father had held him down and shouted at him about how he could never understand the man’s feelings. Peter’s field of vision grew narrower. It became more and more difficult to take his next breath. The man was wringing his neck.
As Peter struggled frantically, he grabbed for a knife that had fallen to the floor and plunged it into his foster father’s neck.
The strength faded out of the man’s hands and his body slumped to the floor.
All Peter could see above him was the gloomy ceiling of the shelter once more.
Unable to process what he had done, Peter spent an entire night with that body in the shelter, but he had to get rid of it sometime.
Ever since he had first told Peter of the world outside their door, his father had also been careful to fully inform him of the terror of necrosis and the BTs. Peter knew that if he didn’t get rid of the body, his father would come back and cause a voidout.
The body had already begun to give off a pungent odor. But there was no place or any way to burn it. All Peter could do was take it somewhere far away, so he dragged the body out of the shelter and got his first taste of the outside world.
What he saw was patches of jagged rocks and short grass as far as the eye could see. The mountaintops in the distance were hidden by chiral clouds. Peter was in awe of this spectacle he was seeing for the first time, but getting the body away from here had to take precedent.
But as he dragged the body away, he didn’t notice the fog of black particles emanating from the corpse. It had already begun to necrotize. Time had run out. All Peter could do was dump the body and run. Then he had a vision. Both hands that had a hold of the body disintegrated into a mist. Simultaneously, he felt the presence of a BT, attracted to the body from the other side. Ever since then Peter had been able to sense BTs, and that had given him the ability to work alone as a porter for so many years.
The necrotizing body had given him power, and whenever he had felt that power waning, he killed in secret. That was how he had managed to survive all alone.
AMELIE’S BEACH
Higgs raised his head and looked for Fragile, but she was long gone.
He was all alone. The golden mask, Amelie’s quipu, and the human-shaped BB no longer belonged to him. He had lost everything. There was nothing left. There wasn’t even anything left of his power he had intended to use to bring the extinction. He had believed that he was in control of everything, but he had been stupid. It had all been make believe.
He finally understood.
Now he was all alone on this Beach and there was no one to hear his mutterings.
I’m Higgs, the particle of God.
He was all alone, isolated without a person in the world to connect to.
This is how I’m supposed to be.
Peter Englert had been forsaken on this Beach with nothing else to do but continue to confess his endless sins.
HEARTMAN’S LAB
Heartman could hear the tune of the Funeral March. He had to get back to his body soon. The passage of time on the Beach was without end and as close to zero as you could get, but there was still a time limit. Humans perceive the passage of time not as the changing of events along a timeline, but as the switching of phases. Each individual event is not washed away by time to disappear, they remain intact as a perceived phase. That’s what we call the past. The future is an as-of-yet unperceived event and humans, bound by time as they are, can only perceive one of a myriad of alternatives.
While Heartman’s ha was bound by the laws of the world of the living, he was unable to search the Beach indefinitely. Choosing a song that mourned the dead as his signal to return to the realm of the living and wake up was Heartman’s own little act of quiet resistance.
The Funeral March should have sounded the same as always, but this time it sounded different. It was hurting his ears. The sounds were overlapping. Perhaps, if he hadn’t been listening so attentively, he would never even have noticed. It was the same tune, but there was a slight delay. It felt like listening to an optical illusion. Once one tune had seized all of Heartman’s attention that was all he could hear, but when he disengaged his focus he could detect something very slightly out of synch. The realization affected his sight. The world around him that he perceived visually felt similarly layered, with a single layer slightly out of alignment. It was the first time he had felt anything like it.
Although, logically, infinite layers of parallel phases selectively unacknowledged had to exist.
Have I augmented my abilities? Heartman wondered, feeling a spark of excitement.
He looked out across the Beach as the limit of his stay approached. It looked different than before. The shoreline that stretched eternally into the distance was being followed by countless numbers of people. Each and every one of them was existing simultaneously within phases out of alignment with one another.
What’s going on? His brain was on fire. It didn’t matter that his heart had stopped, it was ringing like an alarm bell. Huge droplets of sweat merged with his tears, dampening his face. It was like the very limits of his consciousness were trying to break.
“Wait!” he shouted. For a split second, he thought he could see his wife and daughter’s backs among the crowd.
“Wait! Don’t go! Don’t leave me by myself.”
It was just like a repeat of what happened before. As the realization first flashed across his mind, that old woman appeared and jabbed her finger into his chest. Multiple people grabbed at his legs. Heartman was being dragged down from the Beach.
When he awoke, the lab was empty. His image of the world was stable and clear, maintained in a single phase. Heartman turned toward the monitor to check his Beach logs. Now he understood. The entire Chiral Network had been connected. Sam had done it.
He had connected all the knots from east to west.
It was possible that this phenomenon that Heartman interpreted as phase misalignment was occurring on every Beach. He could perceive the potential phases from before choices were made and events were determined. It was like all cause and effect was being disassembled. Without the reintegration of this world using some kind of meta-level law, this world could become engulfed in a wave of potential worlds. It meant that while this world would exist, it would also disappear.
AMELIE’S BEACH
The sound of a gunshot echoed in the distance.
Perhaps Fragile had finally achieved her goal. Maybe she had finally got her revenge on Higgs. With any luck, maybe she had even managed to lay her past mistakes to rest alongside him.