A Story About Shadows, Maybe? (Original Short Fiction)
This is possibly the most incomprehensible thing I've ever written. I'm posting it as a warning to others not to get blackout drunk and try to write. I took this bullet so you don't have to.
“Did you ever wonder what happens to them?”
Kris posed the question in complete earnestness, the Lego starships hanging suspended in the air by their hands in mid-makebelieve combat as the boys scribbled down new rules with their free hands, furiously trying to outthink the other.
“What happens to what?” Jasper asked, making a note about a perceived weak point in Kris’s defenses as he moved his collection units laterally along the trade axis. “Units can’t move in clusters of five unless accompanied by a capital tradeship,” he added, furiously scribbling the new rule in his notebook as he adjusted his own Lego ships accordingly. Kris grunted, then retracted a few of his units as he jotted down a few notes of his own.
“Shadows,” Kris said, carefully reorganizing his military ships as they skirted the border, his trade ships hovering just out of range of Jasper’s anti-military satellites. “A military brigade can’t operate outside five units of difference of the commanding vessel without time delay. Any ships outside five units of the mothership take an extra turn to move.”
Jasper scoffed, moving a few more ships. “They move everywhere,” he said. ”Shadows, I mean. It just depends where the light is. Your astro-miner is too close to the star. Call it back or I get to destroy it.”
Kris quickly retrieved the offending ship, but simultaneously moved a smaller ship into place.
“As long as I don’t have another ship in range of this star’s corona, I gain 300 RP per turn from this starwave-collector,” he said, adding the rule to his notebook. Jasper growled, then grunted once in acknowledgement. He didn’t have any ships that could currently act as a starwave-collector, so he’d have to play into Kris’s hand for the time being.
“Fine,” he said, hastily building something from free Lego blocks, “but I can take one turn to move this Void Funneler into place to draw energy from all the empty space your ship creates by absorbing starwave energy. It gives me the same RP gain that you get per turn due to entropy.”
Kris shrugged, acknowledging Jasper’s thoughtfulness at taking full advantage of their implicit rules. They had both agreed that neither of their rules would overpower a previous rule the other had made, but that didn’t stop either of them from matching new rules with their own. Jasper had been particularly adept at that throughout the game -- where Kris succeeded in giving himself advantages, Jasper succeeded in nullifying those advantages. It had been incredibly fun. But that wasn’t what Kris was ultimately playing for.
“But, I mean, what happens when they’re gone?” Kris said, recalling his starwave-collector to prevent Jasper from benefiting from it. “It’s like Narcissus. Did he really see a nymph, or was it just his own reflection?”
Jasper shifted a few of his units in response to Kris’s withdrawal, grunting at the remark.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Three of your five astro-miners have been on the same block for three turns. They’re useless unless you move them this turn. Not that I’m trying to help you. But it would be boring if I won so easily.”
Kris nodded to his friend and shifted a few of his ships, but made no aggressive movements.
“I’m talking about the Greek myth of Narcissus,” he said, his fingers moving adeptly as he reorganized his military fleet. “The story is that he fell in love with his own reflection, but that he thought it was a nymph in the water that he was seeing. So, was he truly in love with himself, or with someone beyond his grasp?”
“Whatever,” Jasper said, shifting his units to support a more aggressive posture, “either way, he lost, right? So both answers were wrong.”
Kris stroked his chin as he thought about that, analyzing Jasper’s placement along the border.
“I guess that’s true,” he said, transferring several units across the border. “These units have first-strike imperative, so you can’t target them or move in an obstructive flight path to them for one turn.”
“That’s not fair,” Jasper complained. “What if they would naturally have flown there? You can’t say that my ships never would have done that.”
“I can,” Kris said confidently, looking over the ship arrangement. “There are no useful comets or asteroids in this sector of the map, and I have defensive satellites lined along the perimeter here. Your ships would have no reason to come this way. Thus, my own ships would not be detected if they crossed at this point.”
Jasper scribbled in his notebook, flustered.
“But what if my ships have long-range sensors that--”
He looked up, Kris holding up his own notebook. In it, he could plainly read, “ALL SHIPS ARE UNDETECTABLE IF MOVED WITHIN SIX UNITS OF ENEMY SHIPS”.
Jasper sat back in a huff, moving a few ships on the edge of contested space, trying his best to take advantage of Kris’s new rule.
“Fine,” he grumbled, “but this will backfire, just you wait.”
Kris smiled, sure that it wouldn’t, but unwilling to underestimate his opponent.
“Anyway,” Kris continued, resigning movement rights to his friend, “the point is, what if there really is another world outside our understanding, but we’re simply too unoccupied to realize it?”
Jasper shifted a couple ships, then built a new one from the raw materials at his base, placing the new ship at his dock.
“How do you mean? No ships can cross within five units of my fleet, and I’ve developed a new tachyon pulse emitter, which can detect enemy ships within ten units. Any enemy ship detected is visible to every ship in my fleet.”
“That’s fine,” Kris said, somewhat disinterestedly. He didn’t move his invading ships any further. Then he sat back, his hand on his chin.
“Well, I mean, think about it,” he said, Jasper suddenly looking up at him in surprise, implicitly suspending the game.
“Humans are easy to preoccupy, right?” Kris asked, the answer hanging obviously in front of him. He waved off Jasper’s assent.
“I’d say they’re also easy to unoccupy. The difference is simply that one keeps a person thinking about something else, while the other keeps someone thinking about nothing at all.”
Jasper shrugged, leaning back on his hands, clearly forgetting about the game in front of them.
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” Kris continued, steepling his hands, “if you give a person an interesting puzzle, they’ll keep themselves occupied with it until either they solve it, or they give up on trying to solve it, right?”
Jasper nodded, accepting the basic logic of the claim.
“Well, assume that you presented someone with an unsolvable puzzle. In the second case, they would ultimately give up, because they would have given up regardless of the difficulty, as long as it was beyond them to solve.”
Jasper nodded, fascinated.
“But let’s consider the other possibility,” Kris said. “For the people who refuse to give up, they would never solve the unsolvable puzzle, nor would they ever give up trying. Eventually, they would reach a point where they could make no more forward progress, but they wouldn’t think about anything other than the puzzle itself. They wouldn’t be preoccupied -- they would be entirely unoccupied. There would be nothing in their mind except the puzzle, but the conditions of the puzzle would never change. Of these two situations, which do you think would be the greater hell?”
Jasper moved a few ships, pointing out the strategic value of them.
“If you don’t do anything in two turns, I’ll win,” he said. Kris simply nodded.
“For someone confronted with hell, do you think two turns would ever suffice?”
Jasper huffed and leaned back, his elbow creasing at his knee as he sat back against the wall behind him.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “You keep talking about hell, and shadows, and I don’t know what it has to do with our game. You’re going to lose if you don’t move your units or make a new rule this turn.”
Kris just sat back and laughed, pointing down to the floor. Across it was Jasper’s shadow. Kris’s was conspicuously absent.
“You see, the thing is,” Kris said, as Jasper looked up in horror, “I already played this game with Kris. Funny enough, it didn’t matter if he won or not. He was so obsessed with winning that he gave into his reflection -- or should I say, his shadow. He committed the obscene sin of Narcissus, falling in love with himself. But after this game, I know that you also suffer from that sin, and so I know that you will also be joining your friend in the world of shadows. You might call it ‘hell’. Because, while you might think I’ve been trying to preoccupy you with this game, the truth is that it was unwinnable from the beginning. You have stumbled into the unsolvable puzzle, and now you’ll be lost in it forever.”
Jasper shrugged, wondering what the hell kind of ending this was, and sternly resolving not to write after having too much to drink anymore.