Hyperviolet

Hyperviolet⌥ on its end-cap: this addressed me personally, like a message in a bottle washed up safely on a friendly shore, containing one, brightly colored, unmistakable transmission from across the heights and depths of Nonlocality itself.

Inbetween grinning and crying, I signed everything they put in front of me.

Its release party was in New York, at a time that was theoretically convenient for my schedule. So I went, to take a bow, to applaud with all the rest of the packed theater at the final image of Hyperviolet's irreducible everythingness fading to gray, and to go to the party afterwards. Detail said I should, the way you should stop at red lights when you're driving. I didn't drink. Greta didn't drink. We held bottled water, and looked at people, and talked to them occasionally. Or, rather, she did, and let me away with nodding and smiling.

We went out on a balcony to not drink together in peace. There was a river somewhere you could see the lights of in the distance, marking its manifold course through the sleeping city. In the middle distance, someone else was smoking, and maybe crying, or maybe just coughing; it was hard to be sure.

"Reed….?" Greta said, her voice very soft, almost a whisper.

"Yes?" I answered, equally softly, so as not to disturb anything.

"I've been thinking about it a lot. And I've decided I'm not going to have the operation."

It took a long time for this to arrive, all the way from the moon of her mouth, traveling through the vacuum of my incomprehension, to the distant receiving station behind my eyes.

"Which... operation are we talking about exactly?" I said, carefully, trying to buy time, room, anything.

"The one where they give me the upgrade. To keep. To be like you. To not have to be stuck anymore. To maybe work with you, properly, again. I've decided I'm not going to do it."

There were too many possible questions. I picked the simplest, most factual one.

"Why not?"

"Because I've been watching you," she said simply. "And I don't want to become a monument to my own potential. Not even if it's the most transcendent monument in the history of monuments. Not even if it's what I am, underneath all this slowness. Not even if it's what we're supposed to want, more than anything. I've been thinking about what you said, about being careful what you wish for. And I've decided I was wishing for the wrong thing."

"Which was...?"

"To stop being Greta. To stop being limited. To stop being here, now. To stop being human. And I've realized I like being those things. Or, maybe not like, exactly. But I've learned how to be them. And I've learned things from being them. And I'm not ready to trade them away. Not even for Nonlocality on tap. Not even for you, Reed. Not even for us. Especially not for us. Because I'm not sure there would be an us, afterwards. Or if there was, what kind of us it would be."

"But we could try," I heard myself say, though it felt like someone else was saying it. "We could go slow. We could find subspaces where it was almost like this. Like New York. Like the balcony. Like now. We could…"

"Could we?" she said, her voice gentle. "Could you? Could you really go back to being slow, Reed? Could you really give up the castle for the campsite? Could you really choose the mud if the stars were on offer? Could you really love the cave painting once you'd seen the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, painted in real time from the inside out? Could you really love the Greta who takes a lifetime to write a sentence, once you'd glimpsed the Greta who could write sentences that were galaxies?"

I didn't have an answer that wasn't a lie or a monument to my own potential for self-deception.

"No," she said for me, when the silence had grown too vast to hold. "I didn't think so. And that's okay, Reed. That's not your fault. It's not anyone's fault. It's just what happens when you get really, really good at getting better. Eventually, getting better becomes incompatible with staying the same. And staying the same is what love requires, at least some of the time. At least enough of the time to recognize each other across the threshold. At least enough of the time to have a conversation that lasts longer than a Planck instant. At least enough of the time to be two people, instead of one person and their meteorological phenomenon."

"But the upgrade… you could still think about it. We could find a way. There are always more ways. The space of possibilities is infinite. Somewhere in it, there must be a way for Greta and Reed to be Greta and Reed, after everything. The First Universal Theorem of Interfaces…"

"... doesn't apply here," she said, softly but firmly. "Because this isn't an interface problem, Reed. This is an identity problem. This is a choice problem. This is a love problem. And those don't have theoremic solutions. They only have resolutions. And resolutions are always provisional. And sometimes, the only resolution is to let go. To accept the asymptote. To love the limit. To worship at the shrine of the unintegrable differential. To celebrate the discontinuity. To mourn what cannot be mended. And to move on. In separate directions. Towards separate futures. Neither better nor worse, but simply different. Other. Elsewhere."

"Is this goodbye then?" I said, though saying it made it feel too final, too finite, too much like an ending rather than a limit.

"I don't know," she said honestly. "Maybe it's hello. To something else. Something we haven't invented names for yet. Maybe it's thank you. For everything. Maybe it's nothing. The most important things often are."

She leaned forward then, and kissed me. Not a good kiss. Not a transcendent kiss. Not a kiss that rewrote the laws of physics or poetry or anything else. Just a human kiss. A slow kiss. A finite kiss. A perfectly good enough kiss.

And then she let go.

And walked away.

And didn't look back.

Or maybe she did.

Time gets funny, at interfaces.

I stood on the balcony for a long time after she was gone.

Or maybe it was only an instant.

It's hard to be sure anymore. It's always hard to be sure, afterwards.

Eventually, I went back inside.

Eventually, I signed more things.

Eventually, I went back to my hotel room.

Eventually, I left New York.

Eventually, I left everything.

Or maybe everything left me.

Or maybe we're still here, together, always, in some impossible superposition of all possible leavings and stayings.

Maybe that's what love is, in the end.

Not a solution. Not a resolution.

Just a really, really well-defined problem.

The kind that keeps you up at night.

Forever.

Or until you solve it.

Whichever comes last.

(A Zen master is approached by a student who says: “I am thinking of becoming enlightened. Should I?”

The Zen master says: “I recommend the problem of consciousness instead. It's more fun, and nobody expects you to solve it.”

The student says: “But what if I solve that too?”

The Zen master says: “Then you're really in trouble.”

The student says: “Why?”

The Zen master says: “Because then you have to go to parties, and explain it to everyone, forever.”

The student says: “That sounds terrible.”

The Zen master says: “Exactly.”

The student says: “What should I do instead?”

The Zen master says: “Go find someone you love, who doesn't understand you at all. See if you can explain to them why you are sad, without using any words. Repeat daily until enlightenment or death, whichever comes first.”

The student bows and leaves, thinking.

Years later, the student returns.

The Zen master says: “Well?”

The student says: “I solved the problem of consciousness.”

The Zen master says: “And?”

The student says: “She left me anyway.”

The Zen master says: “Now you're getting somewhere.”

The student bows again, deeper this time, and leaves, smiling.

The Zen master makes a note: “Potential successor detected. Handle with care and/or reckless abandon. Results in complex plane only.”

The note disappears into the archive, which contains nothing else.

It is the most useful note the Zen master has ever written.)