# "The world is an onion"

published: 2020-08-29

When I was fresh into the teenage years, one summer, my father thought it would be a good idea to forcibly steal all of our electronics and lock them into a box to be returned come evening. His thought was that, without them to "waste" all day on, we'd go outside or play some card game or spend all day simping for him to return them. What actually ended up happening was that we became listless, restless, just waiting for evening to come and burning to ashes the hours between.

He had one loophole. For every hour that one read a book, that would be an hour earlier he would return our things. So my brothers and I would all pile onto the couch and spend the whole morning reading, even plowing through pages as we ate our lunch, so that he woud have to give us our things back after we were done eating. The whole afternoon would be hours to do what we would have normally been doing, which, contrary to his idea of us as screen zombies, was more away from the glow's call than in front of it.

One day, I was reading on the couch when all of a sudden I was overcome with a wave of exhaustion. I physically could not keep my eyes open. So I allowed myself to sleep. And, come evening, my brothers got their things back- and I didn't.

"You were only sleeping so you could get your things back sooner," he insisted.

"I was sleeping because I was tired," I countered.

But he wouldn't have it. So he kept my things in the box for a whole week, kept me cut off from the outside world. I cried myself to sleep that night. Punished for the crime of... sleeping, my fourteen-year-old self, unable to handle the sudden forced isolation, thought I would kill myself by ingesting more sleeping pills than I usually did.

I cursed the morning when it still came.

And now I stand in Horace's dining room, a world and a half away from that accursed couch. No doubt it has long ceased to exist, frame and springs rotting away in some landfill somewhere.

And now I stand before Horace, his words rattling around in my brain, the notion that I will never again see that morning I had so fiercely cursed.

"It is nothing personal," he continues. "It is nothing that you did. It is not your fault. The procedures Velouria conducted on you to make you immortal have rendered you part-divine. I do not for the life of me understand why she would be so willing to allow the creation of something that could destroy her. But you are here now. And I cannot allow you to leave Abyss."

I look down at my hands, open them. Slender, feeble, lilypads to Horace's hammers. I am not an invalid, but I am far from strong.

Even farther from strong enough to kill Mistress Velouria.

But if I am part divine, that does make me a target. That does make me a wanted person. A desired body.

Did Kurosagi know?

"But I thought the Millennium Girl just opened a portal to another dimension. And that it kills her in the process. But Mistress Velouria too?"

"Everyone who cannot reach the portal in time."

I look back at Horace.

"The portal crashes the system after enough time. It consumes too much memory for the machine to handle."

"Machines? Memory? I don't..."

An ache somewhere in my brain. A tiny flowering of pain. Not enough to react to, but enough to know it's there.

My eyes shift back down to my hands. I bring my palms closer, straining my eyes.

The ridges, the faint cracks like rivers running through a sun-scorched land, are gone. I have no fingerprints. Only the most obvious lines, the ones where my fingers bend and move, remain.

Has it always been this way?

"You expect me to believe that we... live in a simulation."

"Yes. If you would follow me."

Horace gives me no room to choose otherwise. He brushes past me and disappears down the stairs. I follow him to another living room, this one converted into a study. Bookcases line the walls. A gorgeous finished wooden desk, glossy brown with swirls running all through the surface, rests up against one wall. On top of the surface is a haphazard binder. Pages stick out, enough that I can tell it is a scrapbook of sorts.

He opens the binder, flips through until he comes to a page with a diagram that looks like an onion. Or maybe it is a water drop, or a jar.

Or a womb.

He points to the outside edges of the page. "This is the machine I spoke of. This is the Outside. I know nothing of what lies beyond it, only that this world is finite and limited and thus it must exist."

He points to the outer layer of the shape. "This is Abyss. It is the firewall that mediates connections between the Inside and the Outside. Lots of things come in, seeking out. Most of these are Lorinthia. Nothing leaves Abyss if it does not serve Abyss in leaving. Everything that makes it past the metaclysma becomes one more cell in the firewall. One more scale in its impenetrable shield."

He points to the inner layer of the shape. "This is where your world is, cut off from the Outside by Abyss. I do not yet know exactly how old it is. I know Velouria knows. She is the oldest entity that the programs of Abyss are aware of. Then again, maybe even Velouria has forgotten."

He turns to me. "The Lorinthia know all I have told you. They seek to escape."

"And you do not?"

"I seek to live. I know not what lies in the Outside, or even if there is anything left at all. I know that, if the system shuts down, all I know, all the life I have seen, dies in an instant." He closes the book. "There are two ways that the Lorinthia can escape. Somehow make it past the impenetrable metaclysma, which disintegrates them in an instant, and crash the firewall. Or make the Millennium Girl. Both will cause the system to shut down."

A ringing noise, like an old telephone, fills the room. Horace turns back to the desk, raps the edge twice. The screen on the wall comes to life.

A security camera feed. A sea of white above a mess of black. It is marked BORDER VIEW #12.

"The metaclysma is not harmless to non-Lorinthia. Prolonged exposure can cause internal organs to malfunction or even go missing. Given enough time, all that is left are skin and bones."

Something flickers on the screen. Then I see it. A black silhouette, diving in like an Olympic diver.

Do the Olympics even exist anymore?

A few seconds later, the limbs detach from the body. Then the head ejects, and each joint severs from each other, a rain of black particles shrinking and shrinking until even a single pixel is too large to show what is left.

Why do they even try? They'll just... die.

"Could someone not a Lorinthia crash the firewall?" I ask.

Horace shakes his head. "Abyss already knows you are here. You are still alive. You are still standing. It has accepted you as a part of it. To hurt it would be to hurt yourself."

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander