Gun of Ashes

An error that should have been erased, yet was left behind.

There were no great gates on the way to block their advance; in fact, there was no need for any obstacles. After walking for a while, the room from his memories appeared before his eyes.

It was a standard cube, its surface entirely sheathed in smooth Forbidden Alloy. Lorenzo reached out and brushed his hand over it; there wasn’t the slightest speck of dust, only the metal’s coldness.

”This should be it.”

Lorenzo spoke as he lifted his head. Above this cube was the reactor; one could make out a faint ghostly glow.

”Let’s go.”

The Plague Doctor gestured for Lorenzo to open the door.

Lorenzo felt around and, following the Secret Keeper’s memory, pressed down on the smooth surface. This seemed to trigger some switch; protrusions appeared on the once-smooth metal. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, it would have been hard to imagine that such a flawless metal surface could have been cut.

The door opened.

This was probably the final leg of their journey, yet both of them felt remarkably calm; even if they wanted to utter some grand words, they no longer had the strength.

Everything was very ordinary, so ordinary it could not be more ordinary.

Lorenzo lifted his foot and stepped into the room, the Plague Doctor following close behind.

Nothing happened.

The interior of the room was not large, leaving Lorenzo and the Plague Doctor little space to move. In truth, the two of them had no need to move around much.

A desk stood directly before them, facing the door. There should have been something behind it, but those things were all piled together, emitting a constant buzzing. Lorenzo guessed it must be some sort of machinery and long-term power device, keeping the thing on the desk running without interruption.

It was an old-style computer.

At least, from the Secret Keeper’s memories, that was what he called such things. The screen remained perpetually lit, its colors skewed a bit green, but one could still barely make out what was displayed upon it.

Judging by the look of it, this device’s power consumption wasn’t very high, which was why it could endure across such a long span of time.

On second thought, it made sense. They had gone to such lengths to build this room; merely keeping a screen from ever going dark sounded like an exceedingly simple task by comparison. After all, it was far easier than maintaining a vast shelter.

The Plague Doctor, meanwhile, was looking at the rack bolted to the wall. It held many items that seemed to be personal effects, but most of them had been blurred by the passage of years. He searched carefully and found only a single group photo that could still be barely discerned.

There were two indistinct figures on it. Unable to make out their faces, the Plague Doctor put the photograph back in its place.

”This should be the Echo of the End.”

Lorenzo suddenly spoke. He picked up a black cube from the corner of the desk.

There was no strict containment; the thing just sat there, casually placed beside the computer.

The Plague Doctor had never seen a black like this—almost as if it were absorbing all light. From his vantage, it was practically an absolutely pitch-black plane, though in reality it was three-dimensional.

”An Anti-Meme is a piece of information, a segment of utterly self-enclosed information. The Echo of the End is the same. We cannot know a thing that is ’unknowable’, but we can force it into a fixed form, force it through Dimension Reduction, give it a shape that can barely be recognized. Though this is not it, it functions like a pronoun, something that can stand in for it.”

Lorenzo recited the Secret Keeper’s words, then carefully stowed the black cube away.

”Will you be able to use it?” the Plague Doctor asked.

”Not sure yet. But there will be a way.”

Lorenzo spoke as he shifted his gaze to the screen. There was only a single icon on the desktop. He pressed the Enter key; a document popped up. From the way the entries were arranged, it seemed to be a log.

He murmured aloud.

”Our experiment has finally made a breakthrough. Cognitive observation is ’rising’; it has already reached the ’height’ we anticipated. We’ve seen it...

We’ve seen the Infinite Void.”