The Palace of Recursive Doors
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The first door was made of obsidian, its surface so perfectly smooth that she couldn't see her reflection, only the distorted shapes of what lay behind it. The key was already in her hand, though she couldn't remember picking it up. She knew, without knowing how, that once she turned it and stepped inside, she would forget why she had come here - forget everything, in fact, except the one thing she needed to remember to find her way back out. The inscription above the doorframe read: "Here lies what you cannot carry." She hesitated for just a moment, then turned the key and pushed lightly on the obsidian door.
Behind it she saw a rather messy nine-year-old Avery, covered in dirt, her hair tangled in a black mess that framed her dark eyes and pale, unhappy face. She was in a tree, hanging onto the branches and crying, but it didn't take long to realize the object of her mourning: a lump of dirt that her mysteriously absent father had turned into an alien artifact of some sort. She was sobbing complete nonsense, and her parents wouldn't even explain what had happened. She was alone, and her father was gone. (Her sky glass pants were gone, too, but that was the least of her worries right then.)
There wasn't much of anything she could say to the child. Aversions made her impatient with the girl's inability to just dust herself off and move on. But there was something more under all the grief; Avery craved a kind of attention, the kind that wouldn't let her be brushed off by loved ones, and Cricket pushed that need to the surface, where it had no reason to shove down deep again. She opened her arms to the little girl, who burrowed against her, shaking with each sob. She stroked the tangled hair and told her stories until her little arms wrapped around her neck, and finally Avery was clinging to her, her fists in the hair at the back of Cricket's head, her tears soaked into Cricket's shirt. Cricket took her out of the tree and rocked her until she stopped crying.
The fading image opened back up, and Cricket almost found herself at the base of the large but crumbling redwood tree that stood at the top of a hill at the back of the Glen, when the image shifted, and she found herself standing, dead center of a large clockwork mechanism, holding a key on a golden chain. The key turned and an oval door opened in its center. The inscription read, "Turn back the hands of time."
Time. That was the explanation for why this all felt so familiar. She had done this before. Several times, actually.
She stepped inside, and found herself in the middle of a golden machine, moving in some tiny way, but surely in time with the rest of the world. In the hall there were doors. One stopped her as she walked by.
Inside, she found the adult version of Fox, sunken into a chair so deeply that she could barely see his eyes under their involuntary cowl of hair. "Hello, Cricket," he said.
"She wasn't exactly who I was looking for. I was looking for the boy I lost... no, maybe the boy I didn't, but will... or maybe I wasn't, is he here too?"
"No one is here who wasn't, and most of you are here who will be."
He stood up and turned to face her. Sixteen-year-old Fox stuck out was her image in the first ever video monitor at the Glen. Cricket came close and reached out her hand. She wiped the dust out of his eyes with a gentle touch, and the cowl fell away to reveal a calm and confident man.
"But you are the one I always wanted," he said. "The other one wasn't me - it was my father. You will be Fox one day."
She wanted to say something like, "that scares me," but she didn't need to. She could be Fox, all the way.
But all the way, excluding the heartbreak and loneliness that seemed to accompany him through every phase of his life. Cricket described life at the Glen to him, and she showed him something that she hadn't yet created, and his joy was radiant.
The image faded, and upon it Cricket saw her young self, sitting in the dark of the Den, watching John and Ramona through Jinn's monitors. It was not something Cricket now tended to encourage. The temptation to interfere in their lives was strong - Ramona from that day on had fallen into the highest ranks of Cricket's favorable outcomes after all - but Cricket resisted, aware that interfering with the lives of others was what brought so much of their own pain.
Instead of reaching inside the image of Jinn, Cricket reached out into her image in it. At the image she saw a time when she was a kind soul, far more gentle and kind than she had become. "I wanted very much to make her happy," Cricket said, "but of course it was an impossibility." Cricket cringed. For some reason, her image spoke to the one she could see inside, somehow able to reach across the divide between them. This girl looked back at her with an expression of pleading that cut deeply into Cricket. "You will not tell her, from now or from then, even though you know it is true! Don't you dare!"
"She can never have what she wants," Cricket's image told her. "I didn't turn out the way you thought I would."
"I didn't turn out the way either of us thought I would," Cricket's image◆ About the ending
❧ About the title