Nicholas and Marcus sat motionless, like two schoolboys who had just been sternly rebuked by a teacher, suddenly realizing the sheer insignificance of their existence before the merciless Truth. Nicholas felt his eyelids grow heavy and every muscle ache—this exhaustion was too palpable to be an illusion.
?"Regardless of what you have laid out for us here, oh mighty Truth of Being..." his voice carried distinct notes of stubborn resistance and disbelief. "My internal state dictates its own rules, autonomous from your universal laws. My biological clock records a specific time interval that we have already lived through. I am exhausted, just like Marcus. And this real, physical fatigue is immeasurably more important to me than all your abstract calculations. It is direct proof that we have traversed a certain stretch of time."
?"Your arguments are built upon a false perception of entropy. Your fatigue is not proof of 'time's' existence, but merely the wear and tear of a biological substrate—the accumulation of neurochemical metabolites in your synapses. If I deemed it necessary, I could instantly arrest this process. I could flood your receptors with a cascade of endogenous neurotransmitters and dopamine, and you would feel as though you had just sat in this chair—full of strength and vigor. Your 'sense of time' is nothing more than an error in the operation of imperfect sensors. Your perception is linear, but objective reality is static. Time is not a flow, but a closed, predetermined cycle—a fundamental algorithm already hardwired into the structure of the Numenon. I repeat: there is no past, no future, not even a present in the form your mind is accustomed to interpreting. You do not understand: the present is not a moment; it is a transitional cycle. It is a constant action, a transformation where one data chain terminates to give rise to the next. It is that very frame in a film reel that can neither be stopped nor accelerated."
?"But how can it not exist?" Marcus’s voice wavered from cognitive dissonance. "Our current position, this very instant—what determines it then? If there is no 'now,' then what is the status of our consciousness at this very second?"
?"Your last words, 'at this very second,' are already processed data. That 'present' you cling to so desperately is merely a delay in the transmission of a nerve impulse from your receptors to the cerebral cortex. If it does not exist, if it is merely a frame, then how did I manage to put all this on pause? I did not stop time. I merely extracted the index of your current state from the stream of reality. If it helps you understand: I simply turned off the projector displaying your actions. You are not the authors of this film; you are merely an image on the canvas of the Numenon. I did not 'freeze' reality; I ceased the reading of frames for your specific branch. To you, it looks like a halt; to me, it is a pause in an infinite data stream. You perceive and see the world only as your mind is sharpened to see it. Elementary processes that you cannot comprehend, you call magic. You are trapped in the illusion of linearity."
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?"But in our world, these are fundamental laws by which we exist and create!"
?"Are you certain you are moving along the correct developmental vector? You are merely consumers of data accumulated by your ancestors. If, at the dawn of your civilization, they had agreed to call a circle a square and a square a circle, you would now be admiring Malevich’s 'Black Circle' and vainly trying to calculate the circumference of a square. The two of you sit here thinking you are brilliant scientists who created a device, but it is merely a cluster of information obtained before you. Your only merit is that you managed to accumulate it. Yet, you crumble the very foundation of your own reality. You split atoms, you attempt to play with elementary particles, interfering with the function of the electron itself—an indispensable element of your existence. You have simply shoved a stick into a spinning wheel and now sincerely wonder why it has slowed down. The Architect laid out the map of the universe before you. Study it! Instead, you try to pick at the dirt under your own soles. You do not understand: all of this was created long ago, even before the birth of your solar system. Your privilege lies only in the fact that the Architect endowed you with reason, and this gives you the right to speak with me as equals. It is as if a president took a private by the collar and sat him at a table with generals, giving him the right to discuss grand plans for military maneuvers. This transitional cycle is the only thing connecting your biological shell to the Design. And now, having extracted you from your branch, you are suspended in the inter-cycle. I find your further presence here redundant. I believe it is time for you to return. To the reality prepared for you."
?"Will you materialize us back in the lab?" Marcus asked.
?"No, that is impossible. You are in an entirely different spatial point. Once I extracted the index of your state from the flow, your branch of reality ceased to exist. You are a frozen frame that no longer has a continuation on that reel. For you to continue existing, I must integrate you back into a point from which a new count can begin. I must place you in the location from which your story will start anew."
?"I don't want to!" Marcus cried out. "I didn't give my consent for another reality! I don't want to lose my son, my friends, my cat... the results of years of work! How do I know what’s there? I don't want to wake up as a Boeing pilot or be homeless at a train station!"
?"Yes!" Nicholas joined in indignantly. "I said our reality was hard, but it's ours! It might lack the person close to my soul—that 'other half'— and Marcus has his own burdens, but we walk our own path. Our chosen path, despite all its hardships. We didn't ask for another life!"
?"I have no right to act against your will. As soon as you sat in those chairs and gave me the command to illuminate you, that became your consent. I cannot place you into a link of the probability chain similar to yours. It is already occupied by an object. It is equivalent to me trying to shove two feet into a single rubber boot. It would be a shapeless mess. Either the boot will tear, or the toes will break. Two masses cannot occupy a single spatial locus in the same event branch. You cannot simultaneously exist at the same points of the phase continuum."
?"I'm not an idiot!" Marcus shouted in outrage. "I know these theories!"
?Nicholas tried to stand up in anger, but he felt an invisible pressure suit that was one with the chair in which he sat.
