# # TP5 - S3 Sequences
[[TP5]]
Step Three
Leon locates the lock in the heavily populated arrival gate to the ImpVerse but soon discovers his lack of past means he is undetectable and enters. He summons Jem and, unwittingly, a past version of Fix. They are frustrated by the mechanism, which behaves erratically and resets. Leon realises the locks are like a conscious: existing in the past, present and future, and Jem and Fix manage to unlock two of them. Leon unlocks the last mechanism using his Abstract skills and his memories return. Ms. Penumbra arrives and the door opens. Emmet emerges and tells his he has unraveled the ImpVerse.
Central Dramatic Question
Will they be able to able to open the lock?
Sequence One
Leon locates the lock in a heavily populated arrival gate to the ImpVerse. His memories tempt him, but he resists. He moves through the crowd, enticed by the memory-laden tendrils of the dead. Without memories, Leon is effectively invisible and after some caution, enters the tower. After some difficulty, he summons Jem and through her, Fix, although they connect to Fix from the early days of his relationship with Jem. Leon wants to replace him, but Jem is fixated. Instead, they start work and soon discover the lock is not what is seems to be.
Sequence Two
Ms. Penumbra verifies her and Variel’s involvement in wiping his memory but insists it was meant to be temporary, with his consent. Leon is hurt by the betrayal but is distracted as Jem’s mechanism behaves erratically and resets. Leon’s senses the past, present, and future distorting the mechanism of his antique watch and the realises the locks are like a conscious. Jem and past Fix swap locks to match the erratic shifts. As they progress, distraught versions of themselves appear. They are shaken by their broken selves but manage to open their mechanisms, before disappearing. Leon finds himself alone with one more mechanism to open.
Sequence Three
Leon knows the third lock is for him. Jem was the present and Fix the past. Without a past, he can only look forward. With only basic lockpicking skills to call on, Leon works the fabric of the ImpVerse and the mechanism responds. His memories flow to him as the mechanism starts to unwind. His yearning subsides and he feels whole. The last mechanism is open. He makes contact with Suunto and Ms. Penumbra appears and opens the door. Emmet emerges and tells them that by opening the locks, they have unraveled the ImpVerse. Leon realises he has been unknowingly doomed over a billion conscious to be lost to The Abstract, including Fix. He knows he must try to save them, no matter the cost.
CDQ Answer
Yes, but in doing so, they have doomed the ImpVerse.
Character Arc
Leon moves from confident and tempted by his memories — to — quickly moving from a feeling of completion and triumph to dread at knowing he has destroyed the ImpVers with a strong impulse to fix what he has broken.
Moral Dilemma
Chase his memories or remain focused on the job. Seeking more answers to Variel’s betrayal of him, or remaining focused on the job Involving a Fix from the past in the present day job, or trying harder to return him to the past. Listening to Jem and letting past Fix stay for the job, or returning him to his appropriate time period.
Ms. Penumbra
Sequence One
In The Real, Ms. Penumbra staunches Rankin’s wounds. Finally, the scientist manages to enact the code and Ms. Penumbra considers killing her, before telling her to return to The Abstract. Rankin stirs. She tells him she did it to free Emmet and he apologises for not helping her with her grief, then falls unconscious again, close to death. She feels unwanted guilt and considers either saving or killing him, but knows the longer he takes to die, the better it will be for her plan, so she leaves him to suffer and leaves for The ImpVerse. She has to be there in time to open the door.
CDQ
Will Ms. Penumbra make it to the door before the door opens?
Sequence Two
Ms. Penumbra hurries through the ImpVerse to Leon. She reflects on the decades of planning and the brutality, murders, blackmail and manipulation, all for this moment. She opens the door and Emmet appears but she is out of sight. She is overwhelmed with relief and joy. Emmet tells Leon he has destroyed the ImpVerse, and all the consciousnesses that inhabit it, but she already knew that. She does not care. She has freed Emmet and plans to stay with him for eternity. She will let the billion conscious die, rather than have him locked away.
CDQ Answer
Yes.
Character Arc
Ms. Penumbra moves from worried and, unusually, some guilt for Rankin’s death — to — relieved and overjoyed that her decades long plan has worked and she has freed Emmet from his imprisonment.
Moral Dilemma
Saving Rankin, or killing him to end his suffering, or let him live slightly longer, in pain to facilitate the success of her plan. Leaving the scientist alive, trusting she will not say anything, or killing her and slipping her into the biological fluid.
ms P ’ how does it go?’ The brutal rejection - no recognition, no memory, then an inkling, then realisation - but she is so stained, then rejection. She is confused, then crushed, then enraged.
Does it work that she has destroyed the ImpVerse? Has it always been about getting Emmet back, without any thought of what comes next? - this makes it seem a bit more brutal. Or has she miscalculated what opening the lock would do? She thought it would be a case of opening it, and joining him there? - more likely? Maybe both? - open the lock, lose some souls in the ImpVerse, walk through and be with Emmet. Close it again. Miscalculated though and it results in the destruction of The ImpVerse instead.
He tells her that everyone needs to get paid. She is annoyed, but contacts Suunto and the money arrives. Leon knows there is still the matter of getting out of ImpCorp and he is keen to get started. She just wants to open the lock. He tells her that he needs a way out, and she tells him that he is currently in the ooze and will need to extract himself. He is not impressed, but understands. The ooze is one entity and will remove itself from him. There will be a change of clothes and something to cover his wounds. Ignore the near dead man in the room. He must not be saved. Leon looks concerned. She reflects on the decades of planning and the lengths she has gone to get here: brutality, murders, blackmail, compromises, all for this moment. She opens the door and Emmet appears behind her. He tells Leon he has destroyed the ImpVerse. But she already knew that and she does not care. She has Emmet back.
*When she leaves, she has to set up her mind bomb to enact if her body is under threat - or does she set it for a set time? Or is she just relying on her ability to detach from her body when she leaves the ImpVerse? They can’t make her return to her body when she is there, even if they break his porting connection - or can they? I need to finalise those rules.
sequence one Leon follows the threads of the ImpVerse. As he goes, his memories trail him. He resists accepting them, but keeps them close by. He wants to gather them if he has a chance. It seems though, that he has lost his lust for them. Here, where the past mingles with the present, he is aware of their seductive nature. For the first time in his life, he can weigh up the danger associated with the pleasure, and realises that if he lets more memories in, they will likely consume him. It is better he leave them for now. He leaves the possibility there for the future though. He cannot afford to be distracted again. He can sense the bindings in the fabric. They are interlocking threads amongst the weave of the ImpVerse. The exterior that faces The Abstract is a hard shell, the fabric wraps around it and billions of tendrils suckle from it. The fabric anchors it all. He can sense the knots of it, all throughout. There are hidden bubbles within the ImpVerse - no doubt hidden elements that only ImpCorp knows of. He cannot sense what is within, but he knows the one he wants is old. Ms. Penumbra has said as much. And there is only a handful that present as locked into the fabric of the ImpVerse, and only one presents as a scar on the ImpVerse. It is so old that the ImpVerse has grown over the scar. Whatever is there, it has been locked away for about as long as the ImpVerse has been around. He knows that is the one she needs. Unfortunately, it is visible and exposed. Not the ideal.
He arrives at the great entrance courtyard to the ImpVerse. Even in the afterlife, there is a queue. He can sense the millions mingling in the center, coming to terms with the death of their bodies. Those that make it here have to have their consicousness vetted to ensure they are able to transition to an existence without a body. And, of course, to ensure that they join the right cue, and have the resources in The Real to ensure the category they are transitioning into. There are thousands of officials present. He can see their threads connected to the fabric and gets a sense of their longevity - some have been here a decade or more, and are still working in death. The early ones did not get the benefits of working in The Real to get access to the higher tiers of The ImpVerse. They were sold narrow plans that felt fantastic at the time. Now, they are the working class. Capitalism lives on in death, it seems.
Leon enters The ImpVerse as subtly as he can. He tears a hole and slips into the crowd. The disturbance is noticed, but it quickly folds and reseals behind him. It creates a distrubance, but no-one seems to notice. Their tethers of consciousnesses reach towards the manufactured sunlit sky above. They quickly fade, but not before he notices that he does not have a tether to the fabric above.
He moves close to an old woman, and he gets a sense of her life in flashes of memory that is a swirling representation of her life. She is jumbled and needs sorting. Her memories pull at her. The ImpVerse tries to order them and her conscious does battle with the order of it all. She is a person who lives very much in her memories. They impede her present day and The ImpVerse is trying to impose order onto her life, trying to chronologically order something that will not allow itself to be ordered. He gets the sense she has been waiting a while. He brushes through the crowd and is entranced by the vastness of the life before him. A million souls, all mingling and talking while the ImpVerse algorythms try to make sense of their lives.
He makes his way to the clock tower that casts a shadow over the courtyard. He can sense the tightness of the lock there. There are so many bundles of fabric locked in here. It is a node, like many others he sensed in the fabric, but this appears to be the one. He starts to work through the crowd. The consciousnesses mingle with one another, summarising thier lives in a few short sentences, trying to find commonalities amongst themsleves - something that links them to the bodies they used to have - like time and place or events in The Real. He sees children in the crowd and is reminded of the cruelty of life. Their ImpVerse existence will always be as a child. He wonders what happens when a child exists forever in The ImpVerse. Do they grow up eventually? Do they stay the same age forever? Is that a blessing or a curse for them?
It occurs to him that he has been there for what appears to be a few minutes, but no-one has made eye contact - they seem to gloss over him. His tether of memories is almost non-existent. He approaches a man, who looks straight through him. And another and another. He touches them, but they appear not to notice his touch, even though they react to it, like a strong breeze has somehow rocked them, only to pass by.
He realises he is as good as invisible out here. His conscious is not separated from his body and is not tethered to the ImpVerse in the way the others are. He does not have a lifetime of deep memory there to tether to the ImpVerse fabric. It occurs to him that it is a lucky in a way that he does not have the long term memories that everyone else has. It, ironically, has made him undetectable in this place. It dawns on him that there has been a long hand in all of this over the years. He has had his memories wiped repeatedly for this moment. Leon has been the key from the start. His memories were torn from him when connected to his mother - she transitioned into the fabric and drew part of him with her. The Jade Rhino, a manifestation of his childhood. He had assumed his memory loss was a result of his mind. Variel had told him so, so many times. He had worked to try and stabilise it for him. He had supplied him with a memory device for him to download the memories onto. For the most part, it had worked over the last few years, but the long term memories disappeared like the rest - they would not fade, like the whimsical moments that everyone forgets, but instead would disappear as if they were never there. When he had tried to re-insert the memories into his mind, they would not hold there like the memories of others did. He had seen the images and recordings taken by others, but there was no memory attached to them. He would watch himself, as an actor in an alternative reality, having no recollection of the story of his life. He wonders if this moment will disappear as the others have.
He makes his way closer to the clock tower. There is a tension growing in him. He is starting to realise that there have been too many coincidences in his life. Or at least it appears that way. The transitioning of the scientists on the day there were children consciously attached to the porting machine. His mother told him that, but it did not occur to him that there could be more like him. Was it by design? It was meant to be unplanned - a terrible accident on the day that locked them away into the fabric of the ImpVerse as the only way to save them. His mother, or perhaps he, just so happened to hold on so tight that it tore part of him out and made the Jade Rhino. The thought of it out there, in The Abstract, searching for him, like a planet, rotating through the universe. It warms him to know it is there. He starts to feel part of him reach out to it - his world tinges green and he can feel his tether start to rise. A person next to him makes eye contact with him, then another, and another. They are being drawn to him. He sees the tether reaching down from the fabric above - tinged with green. He is calling it to him. He concentrates on something else to distrat him and manages to get control (suunto, the watch, a rhyme about memory perhaps) and the tether starts to fade. He is unnoticed again. So, without a tether of long term memories, he does not exist here.
He makes his way to the door of the clock tower. There are two workers there, mingling with the souls and having a chat to each other. There is no-one at the base of the clock-tower, or within five meters of its base. It is as if they do not know that the space it there. Every now and then, they glance up a the tower, to check the time maybe, but the time does not change. Time does not work here.
He decides to test the limits. He moves past the ImpVerse employees. They do not notice him. He steps onto the untrod area at the base of the tower, and they shift slightly, as if a cold breeze has chilled them, but they do not turn around. Leon walks casually up to the door of the tower and tries the door. It is locked. He looks back to the crowd. No-one has noticed him. He knows that if he connects to Fix, he might be noticed. He is has life full of memories. If he brings him to his current location, his tether will be noticeable. It will be the same with Jem. He decides to create a tear and walk through the door. He does so, and is surprised that the ImpVerse people do not even notice. As he moves through the fabric, he gets the sense he is being watched again, but cannot figure it. He opens another tear and enters the clock tower.
*A section on entering the clocktower and finding a rainforest perhaps. Something unexpected, anyway. And a lock. Maybe something symbolic like his watch. He has to figure the watch out in his own unique way in order to make it open. Expose the hypocrisy of time moving forward perhaps -exposing the nature of how our memories are a comfort, a distraction and essential in forming who we are, but also false narratives on our lives. We try to look back on them as proof of our existence, but in reality, they are made up justifications of our lives. We think we are chronological creatures, but it is more cause and effect. It is our bodies that are chronological. Our minds are not made to exist with the restrictions of time.
Once inside, he contacts Suunto again, and Jem ports through. Her tether appears and whips around wildly - trying to connect to the ImpVerse, but it cannot in the tower that is a rainforest. She says she gets a weird feeling in here - like she is in a dream, not connected to The Real anymore. She tries to get a sense of the room, and the lock, but is unable to get a read on anything. She calls Fix, who appears as an alive version of himself. It is not the present day Fix. It is fix from the past, much ealier than the moment before he dies. It is the Fix from a few days after they met. They had only been together a few weeks, about five years ago, but from that point, he always told her that he was adamant they were always going to be together. Now she knows why.
*did this happen before in the story? I’m pretty sure it did when they were unlocking the skin’s abstrat history… I will need to look back. This is the next moment then for Fix. He has remained silent the whole time, but confident that it will all work out.
They work together anyway. She knows that there is something about her grief that is disrupting her ability to connect to the present. Her mind is shorting her connection and summoning Fix from the past. At the moment, she cannot disconnect one from the other. She knows this Fix is brilliant - and trimmer from what she can see. He did put on weight after all. It must have been her cooking as he claimed.
–
Ms. Penumbra hooks in and Leon feels the strain. There are three people using his conscious to connect, and he tells her to hurry up. She describes what she knows of the lock - should be relatively simple. The man who designed the lock told her it was a …… he loved the classics it seemed. That is the joy of the older technologies though: they are learnt anymore. Jem says if that is it, then it should not take too long. They are to make contact with Ms. Penumbra before they open the last of mechanisms as the lock will only open for a moment, then it will shut again. She has to get what she needs before it closes. If they open it without her, they lose their chance. They need to make sure she is with them when they open it.
Jem and Fix get to work and soon realise, after tinkering with it a moment, that it only appears as though the lock is a simple one. There is something at work here that they do not understand. It looks the part, but doesn’t feel right. They get to work anyway.
–
sequence two Suunto makes contact and they chat - raising the tension - something is going on with Ms. Penumbra. She is not answering her and it appears as though she has just killed someone. She has also pushed his body in the vat, and stabbed him a few times. He tells he felt the rush. He is sure she stabbed him in the right places. If he were to die, it would be over. It will mean his return will be brutal though.
…It appears as though Ms. PenumbraSuunto reminds him that he is in the ImpVerse now. She thought he wanted to find his memories again? Surely he could find just a few before the lock is opened and the have to make their exit? Leon realises that it is possible, but raises his concerns over his tether being noticeable if he manages to find enough of them. He knows he is protected based on what happened to Jem’s tether in this tower, but he does not know what will happen if he has to return outside. Suunto asks him if he will have to. He knows that to exit the tower, he will just need to create another tear and exit through The Abstract. There is nothing stopping him. Suunto asks him to put aside Ms. Penumbra’s meddling for a while. The job is progressing. Take some time for himself. He deserves to have back what was taken from him.
Leon disconnects and considers searching for his memories. He has the opportunity to, but fears that they may distract him. He decides that the opportunity is there to do something about it, and he delicately taps the fabric of the ImpVerse. He can sense his memories in the fabric - childhood and more recent. They are all there. When Variel took them, he knew they would have been uploaded to The ImpVerse, somewhere. As part of the fabric, courtesy of his mother, the memories he uploaded must have made their way to the fabric as well. They have sensed him, and are making their way back to him. It is what the ImpVerse does.
The memories come back to him. He senses them, but does not indulge in them. He feels the puzzle of his life unlocks in some way? Here in the room he is not tempted to be absorbed by them. He can feel them move about him, touching lightly and flowing through him. They come at him like old memories, just in glimpses and feelings, but it is the connection to his current conscious that he can feel. They are connecting to him. He can feel something forming inside, but is unsure as to what is happening. A memory of being beaten up in a shopping alley in town comes back to him - it explains why he never shops there. Another childhood memory - a rhino stuffed animal, all green - it must be one of his earliest ones. He senses the Jade Rhino, running through The Abstract, but quickly pushes it away. He does not want that connection again. He moves to the next - the memories flood back to him, filling him. He is overjoyed. This is what he has been longing for. No matter what happens from here, he will be able to transition to The ImpVerse with a lifetime of memories.
He is disorientated. They pull at him. He starts to lose his clarity of the present. They are tempting morsels that want his attention. He wonders if this is what memory is like? How do people avoid being so distracted by them? He knows they are a joy, but it is like a block of chocolate - one square leads to another. He needs to refocus on what is important. Luckily, he can sense the memories amongst him, locked in his consicous now. He knows the ImpVerse wants to fill them out for him, in detail, but for now, they need to be faded, as the memories should be, and left in the past. He needs to focus on the present.
One memory presses on him though. It is of Variel - a conversation he should not have overheard - in his apartment, earlier in his life. He woke up, only to be restrained by someone large - Variel appears and injects him with sedative. Variel tells the big dude not to worry - he’s going to wipe this memory too. The less he remembers, the better for everyone. He knows Variel has been removing his memories. But why?
He reflects on the phrasing of the cryptic clues provided by Ms. Penumbra - ‘something about being a man born yesterday or something’. It occurs to him that there have been too many coincidences in his life to bring him to here. Infiltration was about being invisible - removing himself from his body and becoming someone else. His had been so good at it because he was so detached from who he was. He did not have those memories that forged who he was to hold him to his way of doing life. He had been able to see the skin as a puzzle that needed to be solved. Unclouded by his own perception of life, he was able to disect the lives of others, and become them. How had he come to be an infiltrator? He does not know? Suunto told him he was on the streets when she found him, about to be caught for stealing something she does not remember, but moving through the crowds. She had almost missed it herself when he turned a corner and became someone else with a hat and a jacket change. She said he seemed to grow older, taller and the swagger in his step made him unrecognisable. It was beautiful, she had said. But he does not remember any of it. If he had his memories, then he would not have been driven to get here and would never have taken the job. He would never have been able to access the fabric, would not have been able to be absent enough from his life to be able to sense the fabric of the ImpVerse. Was it all by design that he was here? He does not know what he believes in terms of God, but he knows that there has been someone’s hand in all of this. Someone powerful. He knows it is not a higher power. It is Ms. Penumbra.
He connects to Ms. Penumbra. She tells him it is not a good time. She has a situation she is trying to deal with in The Real. He confronts her and she asks him if it can be done another time. He says it can’t wait. He is as good as invisible in The ImpVerse - without a tether of memories to the past, he is unnoticed. She says that it is a good thing and asks if he has found the lock yet. He tells her that he has figured out her role in his development - she has had a hand in all of this from the start. She asks what he considers to be the start. He says it was probably at his conception, and she laughs at that. She says she did not have a hand in that, although if she could have, she would have if it meant he was going to be able to do what he is currently going to do. He is angry that she has meddled in his life, but she says that it is what she does. She uses people to get what she wants, what she needs, and what he is about to do it bigger than him. He asks about his memories - if she has been the one wiping them from his mind, but she says that she figured that the ImpVerse works on connecting memory and that Imps are the culmination of their memories. That is how the ImpVerse works - consciousness mingled with memory, mingled with the ImpVerse, strengthened by the memories of the founders. They tether to the fabric, strengthen it and live on. He asks again about if she wiped his memories. She tells him that is more an overzealous Variel. She said she found out about it just recently and he has paid a price for that. He was meant to erase them prior to the job - not consistently erase them. He may have messed things up a little there. He was always a high achiever, but would fail spectacularly. He was meant to supply you with a memory device to record your memories and have them returned to you after the job was completed. He was not meant to wipe them, or store them in the ImpVerse. That was just unnecesary. He is rocked by Variel’s betrayal. He though he was someone who he could rely on. She tells him he rolled over quite easily. The man had many flaws. He was good at pretending to be someone else, as we all are from time-to-time. She tells him that if he stored his memories in The ImpVerse, that they should be all there for him. Once he has the lock opened, he can do whatever he wants in there. Once the lock is opened.
Leon wonders how he could have been so trusting and so stupid. He is angry at Ms. Penumbra and stews on the coincidences from his life a bit longer. He even considers his place in the team. Was that something that was engineered as well? Jem and Fix are working the lock. Fix is flirting outrageously, and Jem is responding with a dismissive hand, but loving every moment of it.
He contacts Suunto and lets her know of his discovery with Ms. Penumbra. Suunto is compassionate, and reassures him that if she had known, she would have told him, but he dismisses it before she finishes her sentence. He knows she is not involved. He just needs to let her know. She says that she has a reckoning coming. Suunto will raise it with her when the job is done. She has caused him harm and she told Ms. Penumbra early on that she is not to harm her team. They are precious to her. Leon does not necessarily know what to do about it, or if there is anything he can do about it.
Jem swears and his attention is brought back to the lock. They have unlocked the physical mechanism, but when they turn wheel of the first of the three mechanisms, the mechanism unlocks, then resets in the original formation. There is something seriously wrong with this lock. It is not working as a lock should. They have mechanically unlocked the first cog. They can feel it. But once it opens, it resets.
–
Leon insists on everyone getting paid first. She transfers the funds and tells Leon how to extract himself from the fluid and the building, and insists he leave the man bleeding on the floor to die. Leon hesitates but agrees.
The third is for the future and Leon realises that is him. Although, he does not have any lock picking skills, so he uses his connection to the fabric instead. He works at it from the connection it has to the fabric. It sings to him as the dials open. He pictures it as a watch instead - the one he knows intimately. He is a person with no past, who has always been obsessed by it, but always looking forward to getting what he wants. The three elements have always dominated his life, but he has always been looking forward - to getting into ImpCorp and finding the answers he wanted. He is the logical one to do it. Leon’s memories come back to him, soft and sweet and fulfilling, as he opens each aspect of the mechanism. He is past, present and future align. He is complete. The yearning for them subsides, and parts of his life start to make sense. Monumental flashbacks of key moments - make it beautiful. The lock opens in response - the past, present and future all align in him and the lock responds in kind. The lock is opened - they just need to turn the handle. Emmet appears - they have doomed it all.
*Leon sits and gets out his watch. It is all screwed up and he is trying to think. It dawns on him that they are going about it wrong. He gets Jem to try the lock again, but he reaches into the fabric a moment and sees the fabric twist with the mechanism, but returns the lock to its natural place. There are three different threads that sound differently to each other. Leon senses memory in one of them, a calm in the second and sense of hope in the third. He realises they are three states of time. Past, present and future. It dawns on him that each mechanism must align with the right person and that they are unlocking a conscious based lock. Does the undoing of the first lock trigger a conscious to talk to them? As each lock gets close to opening, the person unlocking it gets to see an aspect of themselves they do not like - Jem in her grieving state, Fix alone, beaten, broken as a child. Each struggle to overcome what they are seeing, and Leon surmises that it is recalling a time they were not who they are now. It wants them to stop, but they didn’t stop then, and they won’t know. The first two align with the people opening them, but the third does not. The third is for the future and Leon realises that is him. Although, he does not have any lock picking skills, so he uses his connection to the fabric instead. He works at it from the connection it has to the fabric. It sings to him as the dials open. He pictures it as a watch instead - the one he knows intimately. He is a person with no past, who has always been obsessed by it, but always looking forward to getting what he wants. The three elements have always dominated his life, but he has always been looking forward - to getting into ImpCorp and finding the answers he wanted. He is the logical one to do it. Leon’s memories come back to him, soft and sweet and fulfilling, as he opens each aspect of the mechanism. He is past, present and future align. He is complete. The yearning for them subsides, and parts of his life start to make sense. Monumental flashbacks of key moments - make it beautiful. The lock opens in response - the past, present and future all align in him and the lock responds in kind. The lock is opened - they just need to turn the handle. Emmet appears - they have doomed it all.
–
*Is Leon the future. Does he need to put all his memories back into the ImpVerse again? Open the lock, they flow back to him, but then he needs to infuse them into the lock to seal his conscious in there. It makes more sense.
**Leon needs to slowly rebuild his watch in The Real - while they are talking, or any moment in pause. It will help build this moment.*
Fix is smitten with Jem, who stares in frustration at the lock. Leon’s memories press at him, but he pushes them aside to examine the lock. Leon examines the lock himself. He can sene what they have already stated. There is something more at work. He needs to think, so he gets out his antique wristwatch, which starts to tick erratically - forward, back, slowly and rapidly. He opens it and the mechanism fades from and returns to reality. It spins and twists and stops seemingly at will. It is then that Leon realises that the space acts like a conscious - time does not exist in a conscious. Leon connects to Fix, who appears and is unsurprised to find his earlier self, although his earlier self, and Jem, appear as if they have been caught cheating. With Fix’s arrival, Leon senses a change in the lock. He gets Jem to open the first mechanism again, and reaches into the fabric. There, he witnesses the fabric resetting the lock. The fabric is being controlled by a conscious blended with the fabric. Leon recognises the feel of it and can see the memory at work in each thread, from the life of the person it belongs to. He understands at that point that they need to treat the lock like a conscious, not like a linear life. The conscious is a mix of past, present and future. He asks Jem and the two Fix’s to each work a lock. They do so, and Leon observes the tendrils align, one from childhood, one from the twenties, and one from a future that never was. He can sense them align with Jem, Fix of the past and the present day Fix. Ms. Penubmra arrives as the lock is undone, and Leon manages to block the conscious from recalibrating the locks, using his own memories to block the connection. He regrets their passing, but also realises that he has so many more than he did previously. Ms. Penumbra, who has reverted back to a younger version of herself, opens the door. Leon feels a shudder and Emmet appears. He says they have destroyed the ImpVerse.
past fix present fix present jem
With Jem and the team at a loss, Leon examines his reconstructed watch. The one he has memories of his mother giving him in The Real. He pulls it apart and examines the cogs, each tied to each other and to the memories they hold. He feels the lock shift and realises the lock is tied to memory and conscious. He gets back to work with Jem, and they manage to unlock it. A man appears: Emmet, and he tells them by unlocking the lock, they have unravelled the fabric of the ImpVerse and doomed a billion conscious.
Leon contacts Ms. Penmbra for more information. The lock is not what she said it was. She loses her crap. They have to open it. Everything depends on it. She has given them everything she has. There is nothing else. They need to open it, or no-one gets paid. She tells them that they need to make sure she is there before they open the lock.
With Jema at a loss, and Fix staring at her, so much in love, Leon goes to examine the lock himself. He can sense what they are talking about. There is the mechanical before him, and something else behind it. They felt it and he feels it too. The memories come to him and interrupt his thoughts. He wonders if this is the way it is going to be now, and laughs.
Jem has a go at him, but realises that it is not the way to do it. They take stock and recalibrate. Leon wants them to open the next mechanism and he watches them work, trying to sense something. He reaches into the fabric ever so slightly as they work and as they turn the wheel of the mechanism, he ‘sees’ the tethers, imbued with a conscious, reassemble twist time and reassemble the lock again. There is a conscious at work in the mechanism. He can see that. It is the other layer that they all sense. But how do they unlock a conscious as well as a mechanism.
He needs to think, so he gets out his antique wristwatch, which starts to tick erratically - forward, back, slowly and rapidly. He opens it and the mechanism fades from and returns to reality. It spins and twists and stops seemingly at will. It is then that Leon realises that the space acts like a conscious - time does not exist in a conscious.
Leon tells them of what he has found and it all starts to make sense. The lock is bound by a conscious. Of course it is. What is the ImpVerse if it is not a giant consiousness made up of the founders and tethered to all the consciousnesses within? They are approaching the lock as they would in The Real - linear. But in the conscious, there is no order. It is the present interrupted by the past and thoughts of the future. As a man with no memory, he ironically let the past govern his present and future. He can see now how his memories have shaped his present, but he does not rely on them to govern his present. Having no memories has forced him to live in the present, just like what they thought was the lock before them. The consciousness exists in three plains - past, presents and future, all at once. They need to approach the lock the same way. He may be able to disrupt the conscious behind the wheel if they can open all three wheels at once.
The idea makes sense to Jem, but she does not understand how the mechinical aspect of the mechanism can be unlocked all at once. He says she does not have to. They need to treat this lock as part of a consciousness. We keep physical objects to remind us of moments of the past. Why is that? They embue our lives with our past. When we pass them, our subscious touches the moment, even if our conscious minds do not. Without those external triggers, the memories would be lost to us. The lock represents the three aspects of the conscious and they always work together. The lock will be the same.
Jem, realises that her connecting to Fix of the past, using Leon’s strange connection to The Abstract, should be enough to have it all make sense. Her grief is still raw, and she does long to go back to do it all again. Her grief has distorted Leon’s connection to Fix’s consciousness. Her past, present and future have been present with her everyday. She asks if he can get the present day fix as well - the future Fix, to assist. Leon does not know, but he will try to hold them all in place.
He manages it, and the future fix arrives. After a bit of banter about weight, Fix is brought into the plan. The past fix realises that he is dead, but he will not let him know when he dies. That would be tempting, but he does not want to mess with it. Fix has enough faith to realise that humans are flawed. If there is something greater out there, and the ImpVerse surely proves that, then he does not want to tamper with it. The young Fix tells him he feels the same. They found her, and that should be enough proof that things are meant to be. Jem wants to argue, but knows when not to. She needs to deal with her grief.
The past, present and future all align with the correct mechanism (they feel which one is right) and get to work. The mechanism feels right.
Suunto calls in and Leon strains to hold her. He is holding the link to two Fix’s and Jem at the same time. He tells her they have a plan and to relay to Ms. Penumbra to get ready. They may have a way forward and will tell her when they are close.
They get to work on the lock. Leon, tears through to the fabric and sees the memories attached to the conscious disband as the lock is unwound. Each click of the mechanism unleashes a wave of thought and memory into the fabric. He can sense them, just floating away from the lock, out of range.
He winds his own conscious along the fabric of each tether once the mechanisms are unlocked, trying to block them from returning. He will just need to do it for a moment. If they block it long enough for the mechanism to turn, then it should work. They do it and Leon fights to stop them from reforming the mechanism. His conscious manages to stop them from returning the lock to its past state. The plan has worked.
The mechanisms are all unlocked. They just need to turn the handle and the door should swing open. When the mechanisms unlock, Leon’s connection to the past and future Fix are severed. They are banished from the room. Jem also goes. He is alone in the room.
He summons Ms. Penumbra, who arrives quickly. Her tether appears, but it is thinner than the rest and less chaotic. It is as if she does not have as much as everyone else to look back on. Although, Leon gets as sense it is all focused on one thread - Emmet.
Ms. Penumbra tells Leon that he has done well. She changes her appearance to that of a young woman. She tells him he can go, but then realises that he cant. He is the reason she is able to be here. She asks him to open the door.
When he does, he feels the ImpVerse shudder. The rainforest clad walls of the clock tower shimmer and he feels a great disturbance. A mad, crazed looking man emerges from behind the door. Leon recognises it as the conscious behind the lock.
The first thing he does is look to Leon and with anger in his voice tells him he has destroyed his creation by opening the lock. The ImpVerse is doomed.
*The jade rhino is sacrificed into the lock - he has glimpses of his childhood, but is not allowed to experience them. He also has to sacrifice his present ones as well to forge the lock. He exists, but does not recognise anyone when he enters? His life wiped?
Tags: #template
#sequence
Links: Chasing The Rhino Masterlist