50 - Isekai Waiting Blues (2)

"Odd-kun, do you know what the strength of literature is!?"

"Are you … okay, dude? Where have you been? … You look really manic."

He ignores me, continues. "Do you know what literature, text-only, words-on-a-page can do that no other medium can!?"

I sit up from my bed. "…What's that?"

"Literature can intimate. It can imply. It doesn't need to reify any of what it depicts into any kind of concrete certainty." Alex is pacing around our room now, clapping his hands, humming with mad energy. "… Modern consumers have been treating this as though it's a limitation of the form, when it's really its core strength. If literature encapsulates a thought—well, thoughts are abstract, are they not?! There is no form to a thought. You can interpret them into visuals, unless you're an aphantasiac, but even then someone like J*hn Gr**n's written, like, several bestsellers."

"I, uh …"

"The obliqueness of action. The sheer ambiguity the form allows—THIS IS ITS STRENGTH. A-and literature used to be on exactly this trajectory—until movies came along and ruined everything. Because even somebody who's never written a single word on the page has heard of 'Show, Don't Tell'. But I'm saying that's all fuckin' backwards, man! Like damn, homie, I know what moonlight looks like, just say that it shone and get on with it, am I right. AM I RIGHT!?" He's in front of me now, holding his palm out to me. "I mean, holy shit, dawg—it's called story-tell-ing for a reason. Not story-showing."

… I hesitantly reciprocate his high-five, still concerned about his state of mind.

"I say this without the slightest hint of irony, Odd-kun: there has been nothing so disastrous to the development of literature—and perhaps even art in general—than the motion fucking picture. Sc*rsese was right about M*rvel, but what he doesn't realize is that his entire statement applies to the whole of the entire medium of film!!!"

That's an incredibly hot fucking take, so I lean in and listen.

"… They're like a really good theme park ride. Is there impressive, even ingenious engineering and art involved? Absolutely! The visuals, the special effects, the mechanics. Have you seen that St*r W*rs ride with the trackless carts!? Mind-blowing stuff. … But do people debate the art value of a theme park ride? Aside from a tiny niche of amusement park enthusiasts, not really. You break down each separate component of the ride though—focus on how the cart does this, how the effects are achieved through that marriage of art and technology—well, anyone can appreciate the aesthetic value behind that.

"But somehow—somehow—the ride becomes lesser when you put it all together. Now it just becomes a cheap—or perhaps not so cheap, in this economy—7-minute thrill. Gets your heart pumping. Shock and awe. The spectacle of the thing.

"Movies are the same way. Is there craft in them? Are they concerned with aesthetics? Not in the purely visual sense, mind you, because of course they are—but hey that's exactly the whole point, isn't it? It's not its own art form. It's an accretion of many, many existing artforms, that don't—and I mean this, they don't—come together to produce a new, autonomous artform. Cinema is parasitic in nature. It doesn't coalesce into anything more—you get what I'm saying?!?!"

… I kinda do, but I don't see where he's going with all this.

"You see," says Alex, "I've continued the evolution of what literature used to be aiming for. … Before film came along and wrecked the whole fuckin' thing."

He holds up, between his thumb and forefinger, what looks like a—

"NO!!!!" he screams, startling me. "Don't describe it! … Don't narrate it! … Let it stay ineffable. Let it stay in the abstract. Let it stay as nothing more than a suggestion."

"Um, …" I scratch my head. "… Okay? I mean, I gotta call it something. You want me to just narrate it as 'The Thing'?"

"If you need to call it something, call it …" he gropes around for a word. "… a codex. That sounds kinda cool. And it basically means nothing in modern speech, so there's no overlap that'll reify the whole thing."

He passes me the codex, and I look at it.

It's … a codex. (I guess.)

"This is … a book??" I ask, still puzzled. (It's possible Alex has lost his mind completely.)

He smiles smugly. "It's what a book attempts to approximate in the real world."

Okay, now I'm convinced: he has lost his mind.

"See," he says, "literature's imperfection—its actual imperfection, not its perceived imperfection, like we were talking about—(at least back in the real world)—is the fact that you have to write it down. And then someone has to pick it up, and read it again. … Here in Point Parallax, we can bypass all that."

"Uh … huh …"

"What you're holding in your hand is pure, distilled, crystallized thought. Literature, every story, every book you ever read, merely describes a state. The story has already happened: you only experience and consume it linearly because of your human, physical limitations. There's no need for that in Point Parallax."

"Pure thought," I repeat, nodding. "Crystallized. … So what, you want me to snort it, and go 'tight, tight, tight'?"

Alex grins. "If you want. How you consume it is up to you. As long as you keep it abstract, and implied."

"How … do I do that, if I don't even know what it means to consume a codex?"

"Ya just do it, silly. No need to describe it. See, if this were a TV show, or a movie, or an anime, or even a fuckin' manga—then we'd have to show it. Otherwise we would be skipping over it. … Here, you don't have to skip over it. You can just do it."

… So I do.

I 'read' Alex's codex.

An MC stuck in a time loop.

Alex's golden structure. Routes. Heroines.

A man with an eyepatch, who erases each heroine after her route out of existence.

A bookworm. A rural priestess. An automaton with a wind-up key in her back.

… The last of whom is immune to being erased.

"Huh," I say. "Yeah, I get it now."

"Right!?!?" Alex does a little dance. "Transmutation of thought into the codex. Lossless transmission. … You read without having to read. You essentially, 'have read'."

I look to where I imagine a camera to be. "… I don't know if I can sufficiently convey all this so that everyone can understand what we're doing here."

Alex shrugs. "You don't have to. That's the beauty of the written word. … They're just gonna have to meet you halfway on this."

"Also—there's no ending to this time loop story yet."

"Well, yeah," says Alex, eyes lighting up. "That's why I need you."

"… Me?"

"Yeah. We're gonna finish writing the story. … Together."