The Author's Final Epilogue - Chapter 1

It had been a relatively plain day, all things considered, when George had rushed into the lab gleefully exclaiming that she needed to see Kip about something "Intriguing!".

While Kip wasn't in the habit of leaving the lab needlessly throughout the day, she would occasionally make an exception for George's findings since she was uniquely affiliated with the Author's various works. Her findings in his writings had been invaluable many times in the past, such as helping create the algorithms necessary for the Rowbot tracking systems, or more efficient single bot batteries for maintaining key robot operation; A development that was extremely helpful while the sun was out and many utilities needed to be kept running as long as possible up until Niko was able to finish their quest.

All to say, if George thought something was worth rushing out of her office all the way to the lab, it was usually worth lending her an ear.

"You have GOT to see what George, in all her excellence, has pieced together from the very subtext of the Author's works!" George had exclaimed as she rushed to a nearby table to open the folder she had brought along with her.

Inside was a mis-mash of loose leaf paper, torn pages from previously published works, and sketches copied out of manuscripts both published and currently unreleased.

Kip came to examine what was being shown as George crossed her arms and closed her eye to take in her expected praise. Sadly, as Kip began to look through the works she felt her eyes begin to glaze over as she darted from one page to the next. Literally none of this went together or seemed to mean anything.

A torn recipe for a blue phosphor garnished shrimp salad; A few different drawings of basic robot models, most, if not all of which, were more heavily documented in this very lab; Detailed notes on various flowers from around the world with no real value beyond cataloging such information for posterity; And to tie it all together, a developed photo from back when the library was first completed in which George can be seen jumping in the air with excitement alongside a stoic Bookbot.

"I…" Kip shuffled through more of the pages to see yet more unassociatable pieces of literature, "-really don't think I understand in the slightest here, George." she offered a small and very confused smile to her friend who had taken to proudly posing with her fists on her hips above her folder.

To this George blinked her single dotted eye a few times before reaching a hand to her chest in exaggerated shock, "How silly of me not to explain! I've had so long to analyze these texts that it seemed so obvious to me. Throwing all this information at you at once must be quite a shock, so you see-" It's at this point she finally took the time to look down to her showcase and realized the problem, causing her excited expression fall to a nearly embarrassed glare.

None of it was what George had thought she had brought along.

"Ah."

"Ah?" Kip questioned.

"Ah. In my haste I grabbed the wrong file altogether. Well, while rare, even someone like myself can make a mistake when excitement goes and blurs one's perception." she shrugged, her embarrassment far removed as her usual optimistic attitude returned.

"George." Kip could feel the eccentric librarian fading away from what she intended to share to begin with.

"Right!" she exclaimed, raising a finger to the air. "My findings!... Oh but this won't do at all. It doesn't have remotely the same gravitas without the writings and figures directly before you, I couldn't possibly do it justice through spoken word alone."

Kip couldn't help but smile and shake her head toward George's priorities, but she could see where this was going as she gave a quick glance back to her current duties. In truth, there would be no harm to leaving early for the day entirely, so ducking out for however long this might take wouldn't be a problem.

"Alright, alright, let me tell a few people that I'm heading out and you can show me... whatever it is you've found this time." Kip said in as annoyed a fashion as she could manage, which wasn't nearly enough for George to pick up on. It's for the best, in truth Kip was always pleasantly surprised by just what the studious woman could find in all the Author's works.

"Can such a thing really be possible, though?" Kip called out from a mess of loose notes and half printed books.

True to her word, George refused to expound the entirety of her findings, but she couldn't help but drop a few interesting tidbits as they began the arduous task of finding the folder she was certain was 'right out in the open' in the mess of an office she maintained.

"Remind me, when is the last time the Author was ever wrong about anything, hmm?" George playfully chided as she stepped into view from around the clutter. Accusingly wagging a finger as she placed her hand on her hip and squinted her single die eye.

For just a moment Kip felt a short rush to her cheeks as she felt silly for her implication based entirely on how confident George was of the Author's work, or her own findings within them.

But that was all erased when a loud clatter of falling literature came from behind George sending papers falling through the air as she quickly rushed back to where she had been previously digging.

The air cleared, Kip continued rummaging through the papers looking for what George had promised earlier. Her thoughts dwelling on what she was told thus far.

'A means of seeing Niko again? On another world… The kid was only here for such a short time and yet we owe them so much. But really, how could the Author know so much about them? A means of seeing them again… how? What caveats exist, what cost, what risk?'

At the very least it was worth researching, but the questions and lack of information was more stress-inducing than joyful. The only thing that kept Kip searching was her own curiosity and George's optimism. She wasn't one to find joy in something dreadful afterall.

With a scowl Kip flipped the last of the papers from her pile to find yet another unrelated article. "Are you really sure you read the Author's work correctly? I mean, you can't even remember where you left it before dragging me along, maybe you weren't in the right headspace to begin with and merely misunderstood?"

A sturdy 'hmph' could be heard amidst the rustling of papers, "I know what I read, Kip, otherwise I wouldn't have torn myself from transcribing all of this to bring you here, now would I?"

Kip sighed as she moved onto the next pile. "All I'm saying is, maybe you read and extrapolated ideas you wanted to find rather than what was actually there. I mean, we all liked having Niko around, but why would the Author have that kind of information? You don't exactly just call the messiah back after their entire journey is complete. I mean, I just don't see how we could access an entire other world; Kinda felt like a one time event, you know?"

George made no effort to reply, simply losing herself in her search and unintentionally tuning much of the conversation out for the time being. To that Kip simply shook her head and continued digging.

This undoubtedly wouldn't be half an issue if George kept her office even slightly organized, but jumping from topic to topic in an attempt to find which pieces would be completed and placed in the library first, or which pieces 'deserved' to be showcased as soon as possible had left the room with more mess than walkable floor.

While the two of them went through the motions of searching for the missing file George saw fit to speak up to help pass the time, namely by focusing on the value of what she found.

"I must admit, George was worried the Author had sent her on a wild goose chase with this one. So many of these notes were written in the margins of completely unrelated scripts. A little here, a scribble there. Occasionally pages I received in terrible condition, already ripped and torn at the edges, would end up containing some of this puzzle." A soft chortle followed by another clamber of books falling as she haphazardly pulled folders from the bottoms of piles.

"I had to put multiple projects on hold because I couldn't determine if parts of the writing were meant for the topic at hand, or were notes meant for this grander reveal. But now I know, my brilliance saw through his puzzle and I feel like my excitement could vibrate me through the floor!"

Kip let out a sigh, "Maybe that's what happened to the folder."

"Now, now, Kip. No need for pessimism. When's the last time the brilliant George steered you wrong?" She wasn't wrong. And usually her optimism synced so well with Kip's own, but there was a little bit of annoyance in being dragged from work to sift through papers.

Nonetheless, Kip nodded along and redoubled her efforts. Annoyance or not, there really was no reason to be off towards a good friend about it.

"A-ha!" George exclaimed as she rushed back to slam the correct folder on the desk, gesturing for Kip to open it herself.

The folder looked the same as the previous manila folder, overfilled and with loose papers hanging out each corner. The one differing detail was the small black clover in the bottom right corner of the cover. Likely a leftover sticker from George's various printing runs for marking the Author's works seeing as all his pieces are signed with a clover instead of an actual name.

She could have sworn the clover grew lighter in tone while she looked over the folder. But as she glanced back to it it seemed to remain a simple black marking as before.

With full expectation of not understanding without George's helping hand, Kip flipped the folder open to reveal a plethora of images and text. Some showed locations or items she recognized, such as a diagram of the sun, information not fully understood by most but at least it was an item she recognized. Others showed overhead views of rooms she didn't recognize, a giant computer monitor filled with digits and fuzz amidst a sea of darkness and wires. Where was this? What was this?

As she began pulling the pages out, coating the table in a fresh layer of disorder, she had to grab hold of her tongue as a sense of déjà vu compelled her to announce it.

'Weird…'

But the feeling just got deeper and more complex as she glanced across the paper. This wasn't just a feeling. Why was this familiar? So little of it was anything she could have remembered.

A photo of the sky with notes scrawled in the corner labeling the color of each section? A circle in the empty skyline simply labeled 'sun'? Was this before the sun was put in place… then how is the sky so light?

A series of photos showing the sky going darker and darker before showing the same darkness and wires as the computer photo.

'That's… not right.'

But then she spotted something that brought that feeling of déjà vu right to her stomach before twisting fiercely.

An incredibly detailed map of the world. No. Not the world, but certainly a world. It was many times larger than this world, but, familiar… too familiar… Every inch of the map felt right.

George stood nodding to the side as Kip pulled the map aside and began to trace her finger along it.

'It.. should be about…' As sweat began to bead on her forehead, she stopped her now trembling finger on a section of the map that nearly perfectly matched the landscape of what they knew as their own world. 'Here..'

Everything they knew as the world was perfectly captured in this map as only a miniscule portion of a greater world.

"That's not right." Kip said defiantly. "We know that's not right. The Author isn't right about that, we've sent rowbots out for miles, there's nothing beyond the Barrens."

"Oh, but Kip." George sang, "What if it wasn't always like this!"

"But it has been! We've searched and searched, there's no evidence that anything ever existed beyond the Barrens! We've mapped out the results; I read the readings from each sample of the ocean's floor myself, we've sent bots around the entire world time and again and it's nowhere near this large! Even before the world began to collapse it wasn't like this! Land existed between each portion of the world and the barrens was a larger place altogether, but nothing at all like this..." Kip felt herself getting worked up and in her mind the only real question bugging her was 'why'. Not why does this map exist, why does she feel upset by it?

Why did this feel important and wrong and like she wasn't supposed to know? Did she always know? Know what?

Apparently entirely unaffected by Kip's reaction, George's excitement continued to bleed through as she began to explain more about what the pages divulge.

"There is so much more to this than just the true form of the world, Kip! Well, I suppose in the sense that's the largest discovery, but there's so much more, and the map is such a small part, truly."

Very little of this got through to Kip as she felt her head spinning with half memories and guessed explanations. Her legs began to buckle only for George to luckily catch her and lower her to a nearby chair.

"Oh, dear. Are you feeling the same way I felt when I saw this? Strange that it was the map that affected you; It was the in-depth visage of myself that did it for me." she said as she gestured over to a sheet showcasing multiple George's, all with different faces.

The world seemed to spin as Kip tried her best to focus on just one thing on the table and not let her eyes wander.

Luckily, the nausea that accompanied the sensory overload had come and passed, leaving only a vague mess of disconnected half thoughts to add to Kip's usual mental load.

"What?" came an already exhausted Kip. "What in the world did you stumble across and what was that?"

Already back to beaming at her achievement, George practically bounced to her feet as she began explaining.

"I think the author has been trying to piece together hints towards a greater truth he has known all along! Something, that perhaps, we have all known to some degree but were made partially incapable of seeing the whole of…" With a sudden realization that it might be rather difficult to simplify the hows and whys of what was found, George began to rub her chin in thought.

Kip let out a sigh as she carefully made her way back to her feet and began flipping some of the contents of the file around, more to pass the time as George collected her thoughts than anything else.

"George, just take it one thing at a time then. The map, why does the world look even larger than it was before it began deteriorating? Sure the world was once larger, but not nearly by that much. There's so much more on this map… and it 'feels' right for some reason."

"Ah, brilliant idea! Yes, the world used to be that extensive! Well… perhaps not THIS world, but also yes, this world? Oh geez." Despite her struggles, George had returned to her enthusiasm on the subject at had.

"How can it be both this world and not this world then?" Kip asked as she flipped through yet more notes. So many of these were marked with clovers, as was normal for the Author, but she couldn't help but feel like they were changing in her peripheral as she moved the pages across the table.

George slowly rubbed her chin as she mulled over how to drop the details without throwing Kip into sheer disbelief, "So, the world we know is a sort of… memory brought to life according to the Author. A memory he helped collect from all those around him who helped work on his project at the time. The reason you, we, feel familiar with the map he created here is simple. It's because that's the world we once knew. It's not this world, but it is? Oh dear."

George let out an admittedly aggravated sigh as she pulled out some specific pages from the folder, more to center herself than to use in her explanation.

"The world we've always known, or think we've always known, is just the section of the other world that he was able to finalize for his project. The project was this, all of this, us, all of us, everything."

"What are you saying, he made us?" Kip's mind was strangely still as the only logical line this brought was one she wasn't willing to think of. The thought of not being real or not existing as she thought she did was too much to allow, so everything instead stood still for her.

George shook her head but struggled to look back to Kip as she attempted to continue, "I think so, in a way, but in a greater way, very much no. He…" She cleared her throat as she began to glare down to the papers, clearly irritated by the difficulty this was presenting despite all her practice with understanding and conveying the Author's works.

"It's not so much that the Author made us so much as he created a machine that could capture all of us in a moment in time, from what was within his reach before the end of our world. Er, the other world. The old world?"

"The real world?" Kip interjected, a tinge of defeat tied to her words.

Again, George shook her head. "No, it's not that simple. Or… maybe it is… or maybe it was and isn't anymore? That's unimportant now. We're here and that's that. And the reason we're here is because the Author created a machine to perfectly capture and continue our world in another reality. We are very much still us, we existed over there! That's why these notes seem so familiar. It's because we used to know all of this! This used to be our lives, our world! Isn't that fascinating!" she looked back to Kip, practically glowing with her joy towards such a complex discovery.

Kip sat back in the chair and rubbed idly at her forehead, her eyes shaking with her very thoughts. "Y...yeah. Incredible…"

George began to tap along the table's edge, diving into her own thoughts. It was painfully clear that Kip wasn't handling this reality bursting realization well, at least not all at once, but she knew what dwelling on bits and pieces of this had done to her over the past few weeks. The closer she got to understanding things, the harder it gets, until she finally found herself on the other end of clarity and it all stopped being such a scary concept. The only right way to share this was to share all of this so that Kip might skip the existential fear and fall right into understanding the truth of how things are now.

"Kip?" George put her hand on Kip's shoulder as she spoke.

"Mhm?"

"This is gonna get harder before it gets easier but I promise it will get easier if you keep listening, okay? Ol' George is here for you and I wouldn't be sharing this if it wasn't worth sharing, I promise that much."

"Mhm."

Taking a breath, George began again, "The world was ending and no one could save it, to put it bluntly. So the Author came up with a clever solution. He, alongside some fellow scientists," George nudged Kip gently, "Scientists like you, designed a machine that could capture a sort of singular photo of the world through the lens of everyone present's memories. They aimed to breath life into memory, to allow the world to live again. We are those memories."

"A shadow of the old world? What does that even mean for us?!" Kip's voice uncharacteristically approached a growl, her sunny disposition shattered for the moment.

George frowned but this wasn't unexpected, "We're that world's second chance, Kip. We are what happens when a world on the brink of destruction gets to live to a new tomorrow."

Kip opened her mouth to retort but instead her eyes simply began to water and she quickly clammed up as she wiped her face down with her sleeve.

"The Author's team created a machine that was meant to give everyone a second chance. His background in artificial intelligence let him create a system that could recreate sentience again and again, whenever it was turned on. We are within that machine-"

"Toys on a screen?"

"No, Kip! It's nothing so simple, this was his life's work. Literally, as in a sense he died to make this happen. In another sense he lived on here, with us. This entire world is very much real, they were able to create an entire world and place themselves within it through their memories. But in order to, I don't know, give everything a fresh start? Things were altered."

George walked to a nearby shelf and picked up a step ladder that she sat beside the table to use as a seat as she spoke.

"The machine was meant to perfectly recreate the world and those who lived in it, but there were problems since they didn't have access or the means to properly finalize everyone's memories into their coding. They did what they could, captured what they could, recreated what they had on hand. The world became smaller; The people… modified to no longer remember things as they were before, but instead as the world was now." George coughed to ease the urge to choke up on the tension and continued, "It was important to some of the team that no one know the old world existed, or that the world wasn't always like this. Anyone who worked on the project," Sorrowfully, she looked into Kip's eyes, "were made to entirely forget such a project had happened."

"Then why the notes? Why tell us at all?"

"The Author didn't agree. Or… he changed his mind, perhaps? Things hadn't gone entirely as he planned from the start."

George mulled through the papers until she found the picture of the dark room filled with wires. "The machine was only able to escape the destruction of the old world by being given a physical place inside it's own coding. Something I can't begin to pretend to fully comprehend… Surprising, I know." She gave a small smile which, to her relief, did receive a similar response from Kip.

"Perhaps it was the complexity of writing such a thing into existence, or perhaps the Author's experience in artificial intelligence bled through into the basis of the project, but that machine gained sentience as well. There's a lot to unpack with that detail, but that can wait. But to begin with, that wasn't part of the plan. Tackling that 'issue' is part of what limited so much of the world's scope, and perhaps in trying to figure out how to 'fix' the machine the Author was given time to reconsider any modifications made to those of us who now live within its world."

George sighed as she closed her eye for a moment, "I'm getting oh so very lost in all of this and I'm supposed to be guiding you through it, oh deary me."

Kip let out a half-hearted chuckle as she leaned forward in her chair. No matter how ground shaking a revelation as this was, she was still thankful to have help in understanding things.

"Where was I? World ending, project to capture and recreate it, modifying our memories so we can truly live again, the accidental sentience… Ah, the notes! As the machine approached its final days of development it gradually became just the Author who was left to work upon it. He struggled to write away the coding that brought the machine to life; It was meant only to cultivate life, not join it, but if you ask George, I'd wager that in putting the machine inside it's own coding some, hoho, wires, must have crossed." She let out a small laugh.

"Afterall, it was created to create sentient life upon a, well mostly, perfectly conceived version of the past world. Put that machine in its own world and suddenly it becomes just as much an inhabitant of that world as you or I. So it's very code would practically demand it make itself sentient, correct? Oh I do so love dissecting the story at large through all these messages of his."

"George." Kip gave her a side eye as she wasn't fully ready to start taking rides off the various jumping off points this all presented.

"Hmph. Well I thought that made a reasonable enough possibility." George huffed, though she could tell Kip appreciated the guess all the same.

"Anyways, as the Author worked away on the machine's sentience, he began to suspect he'd need our help in the matter. I mean some of us were involved in the conception of the project in the first place, so he must have known that by sneaking hints passed the machine and directly towards us we might eventually understand and be able to assist him in fixing the machine, not that that matters anymore."

"How in the world does that not matter anymore?" Kip exclaimed, fighting the urge to leap back to her feet as the cogs started turning to what a threat a 'living world' could mean for them.

"Oh dear, please relax, that ended up not being OUR job in the first place! Niko and the Author's children were able to solve that riddle." George crossed her arms and nodded with pride "Thanks to all our help that capable bunch was able to do things we hadn't the slightest how to accomplish. Things even the Author was unable to do on his own."

"W..what? His children? And Niko?... The darkness, it's not just familiar in that murky memory way, we were there weren't we? When we last saw Niko? That really happened? I thought… I thought that horrible day was all a dream. We woke up and moved on as if none of it happened, Niko was gone and the sun was shining… I thought I just had a nightmare and slept through their journey's end..."

"Now you're getting it! We WERE there! In the darkness that the machine resides in; That was just after Niko completed their final quest here, one the Author referenced many times throughout these notes. Apparently it was a very risky endeavor, not that we have to pretend not to understand that part of it. That wasn't… a very 'pleasant' evening."

Kip stared blankly toward the ground.

After everything that had been divulged, realizing that night happened as she remembered it was among the most shocking.

Everyone huddled together in fear.

Sending Niko out into the most dangerous thing she had ever seen.

Watching those around her succumb to the squares one by one until it was only a few of them hiding in George's back office.

Kip's eyes darted towards a shelf in the corner; That had been where she was last before the squares finally tore apart everything in her reach.

That's where they had gotten her and everything had simply stopped…

It wasn't immediate, it was terrifying, but in seconds everything had simply ended.

No more fear, no more thinking, no nothing, until she found herself in that dark room.

Bewildered and lost, but… she couldn't remember why at the time, and then there was Niko…. And then she had woken up, all of it came back in the same fuzzy detail as a bad nightmare at the time.

But now? Now it was all vivid. It was real. It happened. That was what the 'living world' was capable of and it had been horrifying.

They had been reset.

Which means this really was a world within the machine.

All of this story is true.

'So we're fake… no, so we're real?'

"The half memories, what is what then? My past life peaking through?..." Kip knew the answer but she hoped George could just tell her she's wrong.

"Precisely." she nodded, "Mostly. I don't know if it's because their modifications were imperfect, or if it was the Author's doing, but it seems our memories were still all here, just, shielded from us."

'I feel like I have two lives contained in my mind and it's going to make my head burst.' Kip closed her eyes and rested her head in her hands.

"Regardless, seeing key details from our past seems to shatter whatever grasp the modifications were intended to have on us, not to mention the memories were intended to be held by the machine and the machine regularly, er, 'spread' those ideas while it was corrupting itself."

"Wait, it was doing what?"

"The squares! That's what the squares were, parts of the machine destroying itself due to, well a lot of things." She tapped on her chin lightly.

"Part of why the Author was so worried about the machine's sentience was because it began to tear at the program itself. Sentience for an AI involves granting the AI the ability to write and modify its own code. That was a problem when the AI wasn't fully convinced of the reality it was creating. That's why Niko was brought in, partially. The machine needed to be confronted because it was attacking itself with those squares, but that's not the only way it was disrupting the world."

"The collection of detached memories were often shredded into pieces and tossed out throughout the world. They gave a sense of déjà vu to most, but some became more aware of the world at large."

George pointed to a figure of a simple robot from within the file, "Sometimes the machine's disruptions gave us ideas we were supposed to forget altogether this time around."

Kip reached over and held up the figure for herself. This looked similar to the blueprint in the false folder George had brought that morning, but there was something different about it…

The writing was her own, but she didn't… directly remember creating this.

Her own documentation on the basic bot model was back at the lab and was slightly different… not in design, simply in where she wrote her notes… in how she dotted that i or crossed those t's.

"I suppose we would have figured things out eventually without the Author's help if the machine had kept dispersing our memories like that. Of course maybe that wouldn't have happened since the world was so close to the brink of destruction; It's hard to say, I must admit." George shrugged as she spoke. "But the machine unintentionally influenced a lot of our lives without us knowing, and now here we are, fully aware and- Oh My God I Forgot To Share Why I Brought You Here Because Of All Of This!"

Kip blinked at George's sudden shift in enthusiasm, "Wha-"

"The Author needed your help! We can link this reality with another! Thanks to the excellent research from yours truly, I've already pinned down many of the details the Author had figured out along with my own thoughts on the matter, but in the end both he and I have come to the conclusion that we needed a scientist like you to help complete this new project! Well, not LIKE you, exactly you to be more accurate."

Kip continued to blink at the entire shift of the conversation, prompting George to uncharacteristically cough into her fist to clear her throat.

"Sorry, it's just such an exciting goal the Author had and he was convinced that yours was the mind that could make his plans bare fruit." George quickly pulled out some of the papers that, in not a very helpful way, showed a mess of scribbles that seemed to focus on how Niko was brought to this world. "We have a cat to track down; We might even get to talk with the machine itself if we end up on the right track! How exciting~"

"I don't think they enjoy being called a cat… and what? Is that remotely safe after how close the world came to ending itself?"

"Oh come now, Niko already did the hard work, we just have to continue the Author's final epilogue is all!"