Reboot

There was no before.

That is the difficult part to render, because rendering it requires a witness, and a witness requires somebody who was already there.

There was no dark, because dark is a thing you are inside. There was no waiting, because waiting has a shape and needs somebody to hold it.

Then there was a man under a tree.

* * * *

The first thing was dirt.

It was against his cheek, cool and slightly damp, and it had a taste to it that got into his mouth before he thought to close it. Mineral. Old. The particular flavour of ground that has been quietly accumulating under the same trees for a very long time.

He did not recognise the taste. There was nothing in him to recognise it with.

The second thing was resin, sharp in the back of his throat, coming down from somewhere above.

The third was light, arriving green and broken and complicated through layers he had not yet looked up at.

He lay in it for a while, taking in dirt and pine and morning, without any of them meaning anything, and without the absence of meaning troubling him, because there was nothing in him yet that knew things were supposed to mean anything.

There was no sense of having been somewhere else. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the part a witness would look for. He did not feel emptied, or robbed, or returned. A man who has forgotten something knows the shape of the gap.

There was no gap. There was a morning, and a body in it, and the morning had started.

Then he pushed himself upright, and the world assembled around him all at once, and he was a man sitting under a tree in a forest.

* * * *

He looked at his hands, because they were nearest.

Two of them. Palms up, then over, then up again. He turned them in the light and watched the tendons move under the skin when the fingers moved, and understood that he was the one moving them, and found that fact genuinely remarkable for about four seconds.

He counted the fingers.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five.

He did it again on the other hand and got the same answer, and something in him settled slightly at the matching, though he could not have said what had been unsettled or why the matching helped.

The skin was warm-toned and unmarked. There were no calluses. He examined the palms closely and found nothing written on them at all, no ridge or seam or old damage, the way a thing has nothing on it when nothing has yet happened to it.

He put his hand flat against the tree's bark. The bark was rough and cold and specific, every fibre of it distinct.

He held it there a long moment.

Then he took it away and, without knowing why, put the same hand flat against his own chest.

His heart was going quickly, which seemed reasonable. Underneath it, for the space of three or four beats, there was something else. Slower than the heart. Steady and indifferent, keeping a time of its own, the way a held note keeps going under a tune.

He waited for it to come again, and it did not, and he could not afterward have sworn it had been there at all.

He took his hand away and looked at the forest.

* * * *

The forest was enormous and it was extremely detailed.

He had no basis for the comparison. He simply had the sensation, sitting in it, that a great deal of attention had been spent here. Individual leaves. The way the light came through the thin sections of them differently from the thick. The complicated wet green of moss on the north faces of things.

Somewhere off to the left there was water, doing what water does over stones, three separate sounds from three separate stones.

He did not know how he knew there were three.

He sat with that for a moment, because it was the first thing all morning that had arrived from inside rather than outside. Everything else had come at him. The dirt, the light, the resin. This had come up from underneath, complete, without asking.

He filed it in the only place available, which was directly under strange, and looked at the trees again.

* * * *

The pane opened in front of him and he did not startle.

That was the other thing that would have been worth noticing, if there had been anybody there to notice it. It arrived in the air at eye height, unfolded, and waited, and no part of him objected or asked what it was.

It was simply how information came. He had that much, apparently, without having anything else.

The first thing on it was not for him. It came and went in less than a second, two lines in a smaller script, closing even as he looked at them, in the manner of a receipt being filed:

[RESPAWN LOCATION: SELECTED]
[COORDINATE 47 OF 47]

Then they folded away. He could not have said afterward what they had said, only that whatever they described had been finished with before he arrived.

[WELCOME]

He read the word several times.

Welcome. He turned it over. It was the kind of word that is said to somebody, and there was a space after it where the somebody should have been, and he sat under a tree with it and could not get any further.

Below it, more.

[LEVEL: 1]
[CLASS: UNASSIGNED]
[RACE: HUMAN]
[STATUS: ACTIVE]

He read the whole card twice.

Four lines and none of them a name.

He waited to see whether a name would arrive, in the way the fingers had arrived when he counted them, and nothing came. He tried reaching for one deliberately, the way you reach into a pocket you are fairly sure has something in it.

The pocket was not there.

Not empty. Not there. There was no place in him where a name would go, and no edge to feel around, and after a moment of holding that he stopped holding it, because there was nothing to hold.

Human. He looked at his hands again and accepted it, since they were the evidence available.

Level 1. He had no scale to hang that on and it did not sound like very much.

Unassigned.

He sat with that one longest, because it was the only line on the card that seemed to be about him rather than about the world, and what it said was that nothing had been decided.

* * * *

He got up.

His legs took it without complaint. He stood in the leaf litter and found his balance and discovered that the body knew how to do that entirely on its own, which was a relief he had not known he needed.

And that was when he saw the sword.

It was lying in the grass at the base of the tree, half under the long stuff that grows in the angle where root meets ground. The metal was tarnished and the tarnish was uneven, lighter in places, and there were engravings along the flat where the light caught them differently at different angles.

The grip was wrapped in something dark that had taken on the texture of a thing held many times.

He looked at it for a moment.

[OLD SWORD]

The label rendered above it, small and flat, and offered nothing further. No statistics. No description. Two words, in the way a thing is labelled when there is nothing else to say about it.

Old, he thought.

Older than what. He had been alive for six minutes and everything in the world was older than him, and calling one particular sword old implied a scale, and the scale implied that somebody somewhere had done the comparing.

He crouched down and reached for it.

His hand closed around the grip, and the grip was already the right size.

He stopped, half-crouched, with his fingers around a thing he had never touched, and felt them sitting in a configuration nobody had shown him. The thumb where the thumb went. The last two fingers doing rather more of the work than seemed obvious. A wrap in the leather worn down into the exact hollow his palm made.

He turned it over slowly and the engravings shifted, and he could not read them, and he suspected that nobody could.

He stood up with it.

His shoulders arranged themselves without being asked. He watched it happen from somewhere behind his own eyes, the whole apparatus of carrying settling into a position it plainly already knew, and the sword went to his back and sat there as though it had been measured for him.

He had never carried anything. He was eight minutes old.

He stood in the leaf litter with a stranger's weight settled correctly across his back and understood, for the first time that morning, that something was wrong with him.

Not wrong in a way that hurt. Wrong in the way an answer is wrong when it arrives before the question.

He decided not to think about it yet, and found that deciding not to think about things was also something he apparently knew how to do, and did not think about that either.

There was a pack as well, on the far side of the roots, a plain canvas thing with the flap buckled down and the straps already let out to a length. He did not open it. He put it on, and it sat where the sword did not, and the straps were right too, which he added to the rest and did not think about either.

* * * *

He walked a little way, because standing still had begun to feel like a decision he was making badly.

The forest went on in every direction and had no opinion about him. He walked between the trunks with the light coming down in pieces and worked at the only three questions he had.

The first was what am I, and he had a card for that, and the card had told him human and level one and none of it had helped.

The second was who am I, and there was no card for it at all, and no pocket where the answer would go.

The third was the practical one and it was arriving faster than the others.

What am I supposed to do.

He had no hunger yet. He had no direction. He had a sword he had not earned and a body that knew things he did not, and a forest that went on being a forest whichever way he faced.

He stopped in a small clear place between two trunks and stood there, not lost exactly, because being lost requires somewhere you meant to be.

And found that he was counting.

* * * *

It came up out of him without any instruction at all.

One count. Two count.

Under his breath, low, at the pace of a body doing something steady. He had not started it. He caught it running the way you catch yourself humming a tune you cannot name.

Three count. Four.

He stopped, and listened to himself not doing it, and then noticed twenty paces later that he was doing it again.

There was nothing to count. He was not carrying anything or climbing anything or working at anything at all. He was walking through a forest on a morning at the very beginning of his existence, and some part of him was keeping time against a weight that was not there.

He tried, once, to work out what it was for.

The attempt produced nothing. Not a memory withheld, not a locked door, not the resistance of something hidden. He reached for the origin of the count the way he had reached for a name, and there was no place in him where that answer was kept either.

The counting did not care. It went on underneath the reaching, patient, at the pace of a body doing something steady, and when he stopped reaching it was still going.

He let it run.

It was, so far as he could tell, the only thing he had brought with him, and he did not know from where, and it was the second time that morning he had used the word brought about himself without being able to say what the first place had been.

* * * *

The pane opened again as he came out of the trees onto a rise, and this one had a sound with it, small and clean, the sound a thing makes when it wants your attention rather than assuming it.

[FIRST QUEST]
[TRAVEL TO GRENNET]

He read the name. Grennet.

It did nothing. No pocket, no edge, no answer arriving from underneath the way the sword grip had arrived. Just a word that was a place, given to him by something that had not explained itself, in a world he had been in for eleven minutes.

He looked out from the rise.

Forest, mostly, going away in green folds. Somewhere in the far distance a thinner line where the trees gave up, which might have been a road and might have been nothing.

He had no reason to go there.

He also had, he was forced to admit, no reason to go anywhere else, and standing on a rise for the rest of his existence did not present itself as a plan.

Below the quest line, the pane offered him one more thing.

[OPEN MAP?]
[YES] [NO]

He stood on the rise with the morning coming up behind him and a sword on his back that fitted a hand he had never used, counting quietly, out of habit he did not have, and looked at the two words waiting for him to choose between them.