An expected interview

That was totally unacceptable!

Stop being such a prude.

A prude! You just appear out of thin air in my bathroom! When I was in the shower! When I was naked! I’m not being a prude, you’re some kind of voyeuristic pervert.

Do you take showers with your clothes on?

NO! Why would I?

Well you just specifically said that you were in the shower naked. Which seems to suggest… that sometimes… you shower with your clothes on?

You’re trying to wind me up, aren’t you? Trying to deflect from your transgression.

Transgression. When did you learn such a big fancy word? Stop trying to impress me with your intelligence, especially when you look so ridiculous with that towel wrapped around your head.

[At this point Jo tries to snatch the towel from my head. As I defend myself the other towel slips off my waist]

Did you just squeal?

NO!

[I did not.]

[I have my towel back on now]

Why are you so ashamed of your body? Looks fine from my perspective.

[At this moment, and it literally happens instantly, Jo transforms into a perfect imitation of me, hair, eyes, skin complexion, moles, weird fishtail birthmark on my hip that I used to be so self conscious about that I would get changed in the toilet rather than the changing room for PE at school, scars, dick and balls. Everything. Naked. She has her/my legs wide apart and is swaying her/my hips. A grotesque pendulum like motion is going on]

You can’t even look at it can you?

Why are you me? What are you doing?

Trying to put you at ease with your body.

Stop gyrating it then! That’s not even my body, you’re over inflating things.

What, these things?

[Jo flexes. Her/my arms, shoulders and chest swell to bodybuilder proportions, becoming all veiny and weird, while the bottom half stays the same. Her/my body looks top heavy and ridiculous]

That’s not what I meant

You meant your penis, didn’t you? You know that my one is exactly the same as yours, right? It’s all a matter of perspective, when you look down it looks smaller than when you look in a mirror.

Wait… You haven’t looked in a mirror at yourself, have you?

OK well check this out then.

[In Jo’s hand a tape measure appears out of nowhere]

What are you doing?

Look mine is this long, and yours is-

[Jo approaches me and I run away. I make it into my room and lock the door behind me.]

You squealed that time.

I did not squeal! And you’re not coming in here until you have put some clothes on!

Fine

And changed back in to your own body.

Fine

[Jo is behind me, in my room. Still naked and still my doppelganger. This time, I do squeal.]

Don’t do that!

You locked me out.

PRECISELY!

You locked me out of your room, when I was naked in your body, in the corridor which is shared with the other residents of this building. I think you would prefer me to be in here with you.

-

Precisely. Anyway put some clothes on, you invited me here for our second interview and so far I am finding this all very unprofessional.

-

What are you waiting for?

Could you turn around, please…

[Grudgingly Jo turns around, she continues the theme of my insecurities about my body but I’m not really listening. What I am just realising is that I have invited back my fictional character to undertake a second interview and I have not thought about what to ask her. Then I realise that Jo has just given me the topic. As soon as I am dressed, I grab a piece of blank paper and study it.]

How did you get in here?

[I turn around cautiously, luckily Jo has transformed back into her body. She also has clothes on.]

Your room?

Let me start again. I asked you here because I thought it would be fun to ask you some of the questions I frequently get about you.

You want to do a FAQ session? Are you dressed now? Can I turn around?

Yes and yes.

No one reads your website, so who is asking these questions?

Why are you being so mean?

I’m… I am aren’t I. Sorry. I have just been with Life for a few days so I’m a little agitated.

Do you want to talk about it?

Cute but you are not a therapist. Tell you what, when you invite me back for our third interview, I will bring him with me. Then you will understand everything.

Cool. Deal. It will be cool to meet another one of my fictional characters.

Maybe don’t say that. We don’t even know if you’re real or not. So, do you have a list of questions or are you just going to wing it?

Yes. I have a list.

[I wave the sheet of paper in my hand, Jo raises an eyebrow but I don’t think she realises that it has nothing on it]

First how do you change your body like that? Like when you changed into my body just then or like when you became a cat.

[Jo takes a seat on my sofa, bringing her feet onto the seat and crossing her legs. She has her shoes on, I think about protesting but I realise that she has just magicked up these shoes from nowhere, so they probably aren’t dirty, right?]

So, you play video games. You know when you create your character and you have all those little sliders that allow you to first change the big things, like; the height, the weight, the face shape, etc. of the character. Then you have the subsequent ones that allow you to define more precise things like chin pointiness, monobrow density, ear asymmetry etc. etc. That’s how. Only considerably more complex. I kind of step out of time and play with the sliders, creating a character.

Imitation, like earlier, is done a bit differently as you can basically use an automatic button which does the work for you.

What… Like a character creation screen? How is that even possible?

Don’t ask that question. We went through infinite realties and possibilities in the last interview. Everything is possible.

OK. How did you learn that then?

Learn it? OK that is a good question a tricky one too…. I think… I taught myself?..

How do you teach yourself this type of thing? It doesn’t seem like a trial and error type process.

I think you have misunderstood what I meant. I went back in time and taught myself how to do it.

How? How did your future self know how to do it in the first place? That makes no sense at all.

First of all, it doesn’t have to make sense. Secondly this was way way back in the past. At least way way back in my past, although it might be the future from your perspective. Anyway, because past me knew how to do it they were able to go further back in time to tell past past me how to do it. Then when past past me grew up they went back in time as past me and taught past past me how to do it.

Isn’t that a causal loop paradox?

Maybe. Probably.

So how is that possible? Surely an outside source had to tell you this information

Argh. JT let’s stop there. I want you to mathematically describe to me how someone rides a bike.

Well… you pedal… converting cylindrical movement into linear movement via the gears and wheels… then… you… your balance… steer?...

I’m going to stop you there. That is a description of how you ride a bike, not a mathematical model. Don’t worry though, it’s a trick question, you can’t describe how someone rides a bike, it is an extremely difficult thing to do. It is even harder to do it when you take into account environmental conditions.

My point is that you can ride a bicycle and you can do it without knowing how it actually works. That is how it is possible.

But how can you go back in time and teach yourself something?

Tell me the precise moment that you learnt to tie your shoelaces.

What? I can’t. How would I know that?

Precisely. There isn’t a singular moment.

That doesn’t explain anything.

Look not all of the rules are made by Shane Carruth. In different realities different rules apply and because I exist outside of any one reality, I can bring rules from one reality into another. Causal loops don’t exist everywhere, so it’s really not a problem.

When you visited Professor Polwold and Doctor Alma you condemned them for not using science correctly, how is this any different?

What they were doing is different. They were ignoring the rules of their reality and that isn’t possible. It’s like water, water doesn’t care if you think you can breathe underwater or not. You can think or believe whatever you want but if you try it you will only experience difficulties.

So, if you submerged your head underwater now you would die?

Yes, technically, I would, in so far that it is possible for me to die. Unless I brought something into this reality to enable me to breathe underwater, like gills for example.

Look you’re an engineer by training, right?

No.

Oh, yeah, I should have figured out that from your description on how to ride a bike. Must have been thinking of someone else. Anyway, to keep it as a semi technical explanation. What I am doing, essentially, is copying and pasting a couple of lines of code from one script into another. The complication is that the things I am copying and pasting are in a different and unique programming language each time. Making them inaccessible to you but I can use language binding techniques to make it work.

What the Professor and the Doctor were doing was typing randomly in the code and hoping that their gobbledegooked refuctoring would create something. The versions of them you wrote about were the monkeys that managed to write Shakespeare.

So, did they create Birth?

No.

Who is Birth then?

She is the sister of Death and Life. She rules over the most conceptual of the realms. What I mean by that is when someone is alive, they believe that the first moment they existed is the moment that they were born or conceived. Everyone who is alive is existentially aware of death and a large majority believe in an afterlife, in some form or another. While some believe that their soul might have existed before their birth very few believe that their spirit did.

Similarly, those that die tend to know they were alive, but they have no idea what follows death.

Think about your own culture. In how many different ways is the afterlife shown? In how many different ways has death been personified? Now how many times has pre-existence been shown?

Which makes explaining Birth so complicated as not many people think about what happens between death and life. I guess that is why her domain is so non descript with all the mist, floating lights and whatnot.

Can I meet Birth?

You saw what happened to Professor Polwold’s world, do you really want that to happen here too?

Why would it happen here?

Birth is banned from Life’s domain, Death’s too. Something happened between them, before you ask, no I don’t know what it was, only that they don’t talk to each other much anymore.

I don’t think Birth has taken her estrangement too well, so, whenever she does cross over, she has a tendency to destroy the reality.

So not a good idea to bring her here. Also, not the greatest idea to go and visit her realm either, you kind of lose yourself there.

What happened to Sarah?

Sarah? Who’s Sarah?

She was the one who killed Samuel, in paradise.

Oh Sarah. I forgot about her.

She killed someone, how could you forget about her?

By living too many lives… I moved her on to Death’s domain.

You killed her?

Essentially. I removed her from Life’s domain and put her straight into Death’s. It was painless. She doesn’t even know that it happened.

Oh

Listen, if that affects you then you should probably stop writing stories about me. I have done a lot worse than that.

Did you also kill Mark and wipe out his whole existence?

Who is Mark?

Mark is the guy you went camping with.

Camping with? I don’t do camping. I lived in places where dysentery is a fact of life, why would I want to go camping?

You go camping and you have a small toilet problem…

I have no idea what you are talking about.

[I point to an old draft copy of the story which is sat on my desk. Jo picks it up and reads it]

Either I have completely forgotten about this, or it hasn’t happened yet.

How is that possible?

JT stop asking that question.

I have lived for many eternities with an infinite more to come. It’s perfectly acceptable for me not to remember everything.

Like Evil Jo?

Precisely. Like Evil Jo, I have no idea if I have or have not been her yet.

However, looking at this story it seems unlikely that I would have actually killed Mark and destroyed his reality. It seems like an overreaction, if I’m honest. Then again in the moment, maybe I did.

You have a corridor in your house where all the different memories are stored, couldn’t you look down there?

I also have this book.

[An old black leather bound book appears in Jo’s hand.]

Before you ask, I coded it straight into this reality. The same with the tape measure earlier.

In this book everything I have ever done is recorded. Everything. Even the subconscious stuff like heart beats, breaths and neurone firings, it is incredibly dense and written in a fourth dimensional text. Back in my “house,” as you call it, I have, as well as the corridor, a reference library for everything.

Can you imagine how hard it is to find something specific in that?

Couldn’t you digitise it?

I’m not even going to start to answer that. Any other questions?

[I look down at the blank piece of paper. I can’t think of anything else to ask.]

No that seems to be all of it.

All the questions on that blank piece of paper are answered then? Perfect thanks.

[Jo points to the mirror behind me, the mirror from which she can clearly see that the sheet of paper I have is blank]

Let me know when you are free again and I will bring Life. Make it a public place, that way you will really get to know him.

Oh and you should really get that mole checked on your right thigh.

[With that Jo is gone.]

Totally inappropriate behaviour by Jo