“We were actually in your hometown, Daniel,” Boddy explained. “Archie had been consulting with members of various Houses interested in the theory of thought construction, and said she had to conduct an experiment in realis. Master Carver sent me along to guard her. Porter was there too, as her assistant.
“It was one of the shortest journeys and one of the longest visits of all the times we went to realis. Archie had Porter drop us off on some restaurant’s patio. We were all three in our human guises, of course. I wanted to go as a bee, but Archie insisted. We never left the patio. We were there for almost 8 hours. Porter wound up just paying the restaurant and the host directly after we ate one meal and they wanted us to leave. Rented the table for the day.
“I wasn’t entirely sure what the other two were doing. I got the general outline of it, but it was all pretty…technical from my end. Archie had a theory about the Lane, built up from fragments of theories she had borrowed from other Houses. Basically, it boiled down to this: If constructors can enter the Lane by accident, which is how most of them end up in irrealis in the first place,” I looked at Gary, who nodded. Well, I guess that confirmed my guess about constructors being more likely to find irrealis. “Then potential constructors would interact with doorways in a way that’s sort of a potential entrance. Not opening the way entirely, but enough to make a ripple.”
Gary interrupted. “I’ve heard that one before, but it’s been tried. Nobody has ever been able to identify any difference between different non-aware individuals crossing a potential doorway. Even if they check busy malls on major shopping days, when thousands or tens of thousands of people pass through the same door, they can’t notice any ripple at all, let alone resulting from a specific person.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a trick to it, apparently. Thought constructors alone wouldn’t be able to do it. In fact, you might be uniquely suited for not doing it, seeing as how any time you come to the Lane you come in outside the House grounds, right? Barring an invitation, that is.”
“Okay yeah, that’s true. You’re saying that it only works for people entering House grounds proper? How could that possibly help, though? You’d have to make every non-constructor aware of the irrealis as part of the experiment.”
“Conditional invitation, is how. That’s what Archie needed Porter for. He could issue invitations, as the doorman. It’s how we manage visitors, right? So Archie told him to issue a provisional invitation to any human thought constructor. Then, he kept his eyes on the gate. If it started to open onto the House grounds, he would revoke the invitation before the human stepped through into it.”
“Huh. But it would only do that if the person was a thought constructor? And it worked, even for potential thought constructors?”
“Yeah. Like I said, we sat at that table for hours. Through two busy meal periods, plus the start of what Porter called “bar time”. We saw probably four or five hundred people go through that door.”
“And one of them was me?”
“Maybe. I wasn’t told to watch the faces of the potentials; we just wanted to know if it was possible. It was. Porter had to shut down the gate twice, actually. One of them might have been you.”
“But Carver hired me. Said he knew about me, had researched me.”
“All of that was true. But from what I knew of the search, he did all that after you stumbled through that door the first time.”
“He lied?” I realized it sounded rather stupid of me to be surprised, but in this case, there had been a lot of evidence to support it. Like how he knew my address, my vocation, my name.
“He lied about Maps too, right? Why would this be different? I can’t be sure, he might have sent Porter out on other tests, hunting for specific people, but from what Archie was saying that day, it seems to me like it would have been a lot easier to issue a conditional invitation with a much wider net and just not close the door.”
Gary was nodding enthusiastically, writing notes on a legal pad that I realized after a second he had constructed specifically for that purpose. “Of course. Any potential ends up in irrealis, and you can just track them down later after they inevitably panic and run off.”
“Hey!” I started to defend myself. I may have done exactly that but it was still kind of a bold assumption to make. I hadn’t mentioned it during my recap, either.
“Not you specifically, Corners. We almost all do it, the first time. Unless we’re slightly unstable, or very very stable. And we don’t usually come out inside the walls of a House, either. Just the Lane itself. We don’t see denizens in their natural forms until we’ve been here a couple times, unless we happen across one out on a job.”
“Yeah that was rather shocking,” I admitted.
Boddy shorted. “Hobs are shocking? You’re lucky you didn’t come out in a House staffed by humans or worse, one of the things that looks human but eats kidneys or something. Hobs are harmless.”
“Yeah, but when you’ve lived your whole life and the only things that speak English, walk on two legs, and wear suits are humans, suddenly seeing something that isn’t human doing it kinda throws you off balance.”
Boddy shrugged. I suppose it would be harder for him to relate to. He’d grown up with the idea of humans, hobs, and all manner of other beings of irrealis being around him. Seeing a new one would be less surprising, since he already had several dozen to reference.
“Anyway,” he concluded. “That’s how they figured it out. Takes someone with Porter’s authority, or any other doorman or I suppose a head of House.”
Gary had more questions. “You said Archie took notes on this? Did she share them with other constructors? Other Houses that she was collaborating with?”
“She said she wanted to, but Master Carver requested that she wait until after this job had concluded. Or, I guess it was more of an order, as her employer. She wasn’t one to really…push against authority. She went back to her archives. Didn’t see her for a few days. We had lunch together, the day she wrote up Daniel’s contract. But according to Daniel, she never delivered it, not herself. I saw her a few times during the next couple weeks, but she always was busy, so I just waved hi and went about my business.”
“But you did see her after Carver sent the impostor to doctor my mindscape?”
Boddy nodded. He seemed worried, though. I guess he had thought that if Archie hadn’t actually delivered my contract, she couldn’t be in on the whole thing, but if she had known how to find me and had still been around after whatever that thought constructor woman’s name was, how could she have been unaware of what Carver wanted me to do? I had always figured Archie was in on it, anyway. She had written the contract, even Boddy admitted it. Though he did say the description of the item wasn’t in the version he had read.
“All very fascinating,” Gary said. “And I shall make sure the revelation isn’t limited to one House, particularly not just one exceptionally untrustworthy House, as of this moment. No offense, Mister Boddy.”
Boddy grunted in a noncommittal sort of way.
“But that’s not why I’m here. We need to get your mindscape under management to prevent potential disasters, Daniel. After we do that, practice and self-discovery are the best teachers for this skill, generally.”
“I had some questions, too, actually,” I responded. I looked around the room for my hotel notepad. I didn’t see it anywhere, until Boddy tapped me on the knee with it. He must have been looking after it since I got knocked out.
“Okay, some of this I think I already worked out. The door went to a police station because Rookie put the station there, not because I was filling in the blanks. When I start planning to change something, like making a stairwell, the world--my mindscape--does start molding to it before I actively start shaping. Is that normal?”
“Normal enough. Like I said, you’re going back-to-front on the usual path of development. By the time people can do what you can do, they usually are already accustomed to a certain amount of reflexive shaping, so we’ve never really considered whether it was a trained or an innate ability. Seems like innate is going to have a lot of support for it if you go public as a freelancer.”
“Sure. And the synesthesia-like sensation I mentioned?”
“That’s common.”
“Dimensions in the mindscape? The city, the buildings, all of that seemed to have a fairly constant size, but Loyal can change from human-sized to monster-sized and back. Is that a property she possesses or one of the mindscape?”
“Little of both. The mindscape isn’t static, but it is static in a relative sense, after a fashion. While you’re projected there, all the bits of the mindscape are going to default to being the same relative dimensions to your projection. If you wanted to, you could change the dimensions of your projection, or the dimensions of one part or another of your mindscape, but if you do, all the other parts of the mindscape are going to stay the same relative size to each other.”
“So, I can grow a building, but it doesn’t mean that other buildings are going to warp to accommodate it?”
“Nor is the space on the ground that it occupies. You get used to it after a few tries. The mindscape is like that. Physics need not apply.”
“Dreams? Several times I’ve projected while sleeping, and when I check my physical awareness, I see dreams there. I would have thought they’d be a part of the mindscape.”
“Sometimes they are. Dreams are complicated. Most thoughts are complicated, actually. The mindscape reflects a sort of…metaphysical mind. Some people call it the soul, or the spirit, or the id. I like the psyche, myself. But remember, all of your thoughts are physical phenomena, too.” He tapped his own skull. “Incomprehensibly and currently-incomputably complex phenomena, but when you have a thought, there are signals firing between neurons up here, right?
“Dreams work the same way. They’re a part of your psyche, yes. But not always. Sometimes dreams are just neurons firing. They don’t hold deeper meaning, it’s just random sensory data that your brain doesn’t know what to do with. Only your physical self will experience that kind. It’s rare for people to remember much of those, and if they do it’s never for long.”
“And the other kind? The kind that takes place in the psyche?”
“Those will show up in your mindscape. Sometimes they mean something, like if you’ve got a problem and you can’t work it out. Sometimes they’re just latent emotions, usually fears, trying to make themselves known. Usually people remember those, at least for a couple hours. It’ll be easier for you if you’re projecting at the time, but also riskier.”
“That brings me to my last question: What happens to me, this me, if my projection is…destroyed, or damaged, or something in my mindscape?”
“Phantom pain, usually. It fades with time. The real risk is that something might cause damage to the mindscape itself. Especially the foundational parts of it. Natural dreams aren’t going to do it, but if someone messes with it or you carelessly do something in there, you can cause permanent personality changes or even psychosis. So don’t, is my advice. I know some constructors who deliberately and carefully make changes to their mindscape to become more like what they want to be; braver, smarter, more attentive, less sensitive to insults. From my perspective, it’s not about who manages it without damage and who doesn’t. It’s about how long they can go without damage. Longest I knew personally managed five years of self improvement, then they completely severed their mind from their physical senses by accident trying to improve their pain tolerance. Makes life very difficult for them, because they basically need to project and do the picture in picture thing just to do day to day stuff. Plus they had to make a whole mess of constructs to deliberately record sensory memories because without those, they’d only have physical memories, not ones that touch their psyche. They don’t have the time or the thoughtstuff to do anything but keep themselves barely functional anymore.”
“Okay, so don’t mess with my foundation, I will definitely be adding that to the warning-bot immediately.” I turned the notepad over onto the bed. “Okay, I’m ready to build this thing. How do we start?”
“Let’s start by projecting into your mind. We won’t be building it there, but it will be easier to draw up blueprints, as it were. Is it okay if I project into your mindscape? Customarily, constructors ask permission.”
“Yeah, that’s okay. Give me a few seconds to uh…issue some orders to my guards, though.” Warden, Loyal. The tutor is coming in. Don’t eject him, he’s here to teach. Understood, answered Warden. Loyal let out a sort of bark-trill noise that she had adopted after I reshaped her. But Daniel, I’m going to be keeping an eye on him. If he tries to do anything unexpected, I’m yelling ‘sic!’ and we get to see how dangerous Loyal really is. “Okay. You’ve been given provisional permission. But my guards aren’t particularly trusting, so try not to surprise them?”
I turned inward, forming my projection outside my forge-house. As I did, I felt another mind taking shape alongside mine. As we manifested, Gary’s physical body said, “That is why we don’t give them names.” And then we were standing on the street, my projection blessedly free of pain, Gary’s surprisingly free of tattoos. It was time to get to work.
