NUL

"You have to understand, that I'm here to be with you, not to compete with you." she said.

Michael spread out the bandana of tightly tied kerchiefs, each a different story level. Nine in all. Across his lap and through his hands.

Then suddenly, almost without thinking, he reached over and gave the wheel a jerk.

The car spun and Lucendia was flying out onto the sand, and over the side of the dune toward the lake.

"What'd you do that for?!!" their guide Wu yelled from the back seat.

"For everything! For Shela, for Alexi, and mostly Coda!" Michael yelled back.

"You mean all nine?" Wu paused. "Yes, that's all my doing. Here, take it. It's yours now."

But it was too late, Michael had coiled around, pivoting his back and flung his arms out wide and unwound like a pinwheel. In a solid, gyroscopic whirl he was sailing out over the cliff in free-fall after Lucendia.

One hand, fingers unfolding and spreading wide and, wait, in the other hand he held the memory stone. Wu had thrust it there before he spun over him.

His boot had smacked Wu under the chin, and as Wu spun in the low gravity - he had smacked the memory stone directly into my hand.

Now as I fell, I was falling through matter, through time, through consciousness. I had become the sum.

And with each fall there was a collision, but this time with each impact there was a sudden wave of awareness passing directly though the wave of impact. Through each framework of the story. Each descent was a life and they were infinite. Over and over and over, without a set direction in time, but with a tremendously logical set of stories that played out over and over like a grand symphony, rising and falling. Sometimes minor pieces, sometimes major threads, each wound together. And where they crossed, there were choices!

I didn't catch on at first, so overwhelmed by the sheer immersion, but there at each denumoi (Denouement in French), peak of action, there was a multitude of outcomes. These were the roots, and from the roots a new story would unfold, cycling me back up into the upper branches from which I would again fall into the heart, into the sun, but how, and why. What the hell was going on?!