Please Input Name

The prompt arrived mid-stride and stopped him where he stood, one foot still forward.

There was no chime and no warning. The pane was simply there, at eye height, in the way that the map had been there, as though it had always been about to happen and had merely been waiting for a convenient morning.

He put his foot down and looked at it.

A field, empty, with a cursor blinking in it at the rate cursors blink. Above the field, four words.

[PLEASE INPUT NAME]

Beside the field, small, a circular icon with an arrow chasing its own tail. He had no word for it and no reference for it, and it was clearly meant to do something.

The forest went on around him being a forest. The arrow at the corner of his sight went on pointing northeast, patiently, as though nothing had happened.

He stood in the middle of the track with the pane hanging in front of him and understood, slowly, that the situation had reversed.

Everything so far had been given to him. The map. The arrow. The count in the corner of his interface that told him things he had not asked about.

This one wanted something back.

* * * *

He pressed the field first, because the field was obviously the point.

Nothing happened, in the sense that the field accepted the pressing and then waited. The cursor went on blinking at the same rate it had been blinking before he touched it.

He waited with it.

He was expecting something to arrive. That was the reasonable expectation, given his experience, which was one day long and consisted entirely of things arriving unbidden and complete. The map had arrived. The arrow had arrived. Three sounds from three stones had arrived, sorted, without being requested.

He gave it a decent interval.

Nothing arrived.

He pressed the field again, in case the first press had been faulty, and the cursor blinked, and he stood in a forest waiting to be told his own name by something that was plainly waiting to be told it by him.

"Ah," he said.

* * * *

So he reached for it deliberately.

He did it the way you reach into a pocket you are fairly sure has something in it. Without much ceremony, expecting a small ordinary success, the way he had reached for the word for the thing the light did through leaves and got green without any trouble at all.

He went looking in himself for a word that belonged to him. A sound that people had said to him. A thing he had answered to.

He did this for some time.

He tried approaching it sideways, thinking hard about the fern beside the track and letting the other question run underneath, on the theory that some things come when they are not being watched.

He tried making sounds out loud, quietly, to see whether any of them fitted in his mouth. He got through perhaps a dozen. Several of them were words, apparently, because they arrived with meanings attached, and none of the meanings were him.

He tried simply asking, which felt ridiculous and which he did anyway.

Nothing at all came back.

* * * *

The pocket was not there.

That was what he arrived at, and the distinction mattered to him a great deal, even though there was nobody in the world to explain it to.

An empty pocket has edges. You put your hand in and the hand meets cloth and comes out again, and you know the shape of what would have gone in it, and the not-having is a thing with a size.

This was not that.

When he reached for a name he reached into a place that did not exist. No walls. No floor. No sense whatsoever of a thing having been removed, no torn edge, no residue, no ache where the answer used to sit.

There was no gap.

A man who has forgotten something knows the shape of what he has forgotten.

He did not have a shape.

* * * *

He sat down on a root with the pane still open in front of him and stayed there a while.

He was not distressed.

He examined the absence of distress with some interest, because he suspected it might be the wrong reaction and he had no way to check. It seemed, on the face of it, like the sort of situation that ought to produce something.

But there was nothing to be distressed about.

He could not mourn a name he had no impression of. He could not feel robbed of a history for which he had no evidence. He had a day of existence, a sword he could not account for, a map with a tail on it, and a pane waiting for an answer, and none of that added up to a loss.

You cannot miss a thing you have never had the outline of.

He turned it over twice more to be certain and got the same result both times, and then let it be what it was, which was not very much.

Above him the canopy did what canopies do. A bird made a comment somewhere and was not answered.

* * * *

He noticed, sitting there, that he was quite comfortable with not knowing things.

This struck him as possibly useful, and he examined it properly.

The world had handed him nothing but unexplained arrangements. A map that only knew where he had been. An arrow with infinite patience and no explanation. A sword that his own hands understood better than he did. A count running under his breath from a source that did not exist.

He had met each of them the same way, which was by testing them.

He had walked backward to see whether the grey closed. He had gone fifty paces the wrong way to see whether the arrow would complain. He had listened to the water twice to check the number.

Every single time, the testing had produced something.

He decided, sitting on a root in a forest with a blinking cursor in front of his face, that this would be his method.

He did not have a word for method. He simply observed the pattern of his own behaviour across a quarter of a day and elected to keep doing it, and that was the first decision he had ever made about himself, and it was a good one, and he did not know that either.

* * * *

He pressed the icon.

He did it partly because it was the only other thing on the pane, and partly because the little arrow chasing its own tail suggested motion, and motion was what he wanted.

The field responded immediately.

Names cycled past faster than reading.

Dozens of them, then hundreds, a river of syllables belonging to nobody, scrolling far too quickly for any one of them to become a thing he could consider. He caught fragments as they went. Something with a hard start. Something long with a great many soft sounds in the middle. Something that arrived with the distinct impression of belonging to a woman, though he could not have said how he knew.

He watched it run.

The speed of it was, in its way, the most information he had received all day. There were this many names in the world. Every one of them presumably belonged to somebody or had belonged to somebody. None of them were his.

And the world did not mind at all handing him one out of a hat.

He watched a hundred more go past and found, unexpectedly, that he was not offended by this.

* * * *

He pressed again to stop it, and the field held one word.

ALARIC.

* * * *

He looked at it for a long time.

It meant nothing. He tried it in his mouth, quietly, twice, and it did not fit and it did not fail to fit, because there was nothing in him for it to fit against. It was six letters and three sounds and it belonged, so far as he could tell, to the same category as the ferns.

He considered pressing the icon again to see what came up next.

He got as far as raising his hand.

Then he stopped, because he could already see the shape of that. He would press it eleven times. None of the eleven would mean anything either, because meaning was not the sort of thing that was going to arrive from a wheel. He would sit on this root working through four hundred strangers, comparing them against nothing, and at nightfall he would still be here with a blinking cursor and a colder root.

The wheel could not give him a name that was his. That was not a thing the wheel had.

What the wheel had was a name that was not anybody's, which was, on inspection, exactly what he required.

He looked at it once more.

"Alaric," he said, out loud, to see how it sat in a forest.

It sat fine. The forest had no opinion.

* * * *

He pressed SUBMIT.

The pane accepted it without ceremony. No confirmation. No second prompt asking whether he was certain, which he thought afterward was a considerable amount of trust to place in a man who had made the decision with a wheel.

The field closed. The prompt folded itself away, in the manner of a thing that had got what it came for.

And in its place, briefly, his card rendered.

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

He read all five lines twice.

The line at the top had not been there yesterday. Yesterday there had been four lines and a space where a name went, and he had reached for that space and found no pocket behind it, and now the space had a word in it and the word had come out of a wheel.

The card did not distinguish between the two situations. As far as the card was concerned, that had always been his name, and the matter was settled, and there were other lines to be getting on with.

* * * *

He stood up off the root and shifted the sword on his back.

Something had changed, slightly, in a way he could not locate.

He tested it, because testing was his method now. He walked ten paces and thought the word at himself. He said it aloud again, at conversational volume, as though answering somebody. He tried imagining a voice that was not his saying it, and found he could not, because he had never heard another voice.

None of it produced the thing he had been half expecting, which was recognition.

But he was somebody, on paper.

It was not much. He was aware that it was not much. It had been decided by a wheel of strangers' names and a finger, and it had taken a few minutes, and he would spend a great deal of the coming months not thinking about that at all.

He was, however, no longer a man with a blank at the top of his card.

He found, walking, that this was worth something. He could not have said how much.

* * * *

The arrow was still there.

It had waited through the whole of it, through the reaching and the sitting and the wheel and the minutes on the root, without once flashing or repeating or suggesting he hurry.

He was beginning to have a relationship with the arrow.

He set off after it, northeast, with the map opening behind him at the rate of his own walking, and the count going under his breath the way it had been going since the beginning.

One count. Two count.

He noticed it at about the fiftieth pace, and let it run, because he had tried once already to find where it came from and the reaching had gone out into nothing.

Somewhere ahead of him, past several miles of grey, there was a word that was also a place. He had no picture to attach to it.

He walked toward it anyway, being Alaric, which was a thing he had been for about a quarter of an hour, and which was fifteen minutes longer than he had been anything else.