The Cartographer of Unstable Revisions
Kimi K2 (0711) and Davinci 002
The cartographer's guild forbade her from mapping the city twice, but she had forgotten which version she was currently inhabiting. The woman serving her was dressed in the fashions of the day a few years ago. The present was the era of a now-dead governor whose means of royal succession were...violent? Or was that the last revision? Was the most recent the one in which a dark-haired woman walked around the neighborhood with a handkerchief over her nose?
Jaspilla paused to pick at a freckle near her chin. She dunked her plain, dry biscuit into a cup of mulberry jelly. "It's just that things are more...spirited here."
The cartographer narrowed her eyes. "Not what I heard. I was listening in on a man reaching your age saying he grew bored."
"Wait, that guy over there?" Jaspilla indicated the striving artist she had earlier noticed. "He's me? The age, you know. Not me, but-- Never mind. Sorry to bother you. Obviously, I need something." She finished off her mulberry jelly and mulberry-sweetened milk, and stood. She could hear her blond hairs straining with the weight of the pins. She raised her hand in a traditional gesture of sealing payment with the seller of a good or service. It was meant to stop the transaction in case of dissatisfaction, but Jaspilla also hoped that the cartographer would give her a tearful pat on the back before she left.
"You need to learn how to live for those people, you know," the cartographer said. An area of her cheek was mottled with pale gray blemishes connected by blue and gray veins.
Jaspilla looked down at her slim, white chin. "I know. I need to be myself."
"Trust me, that'll hurt almost as much as this one." The cartographer gestured to a tiled wall, prime for portraiture but currently taken over by a flowering bush. It looked like one of those ones from the coastal coasts, something they only had in the last iteration of residence.
Jaspilla shuffled her feet. "I'm not sure I want to kill as many flowers as the version I used to be," she said, clenching her jaw around the beginning of a smile.
The cartographer spoke with an incredulous laugh. She appeared to find Jaspilla, in her state of dubious homelessness, even more amusing than the high-strung aspiring painter. "Kill? Good Lord, I won't do that to you," she said. She shoved a pair of prescribed, brightly colored glasses toward Jaspilla's face. "These shouldn't be too bad. It's only for a few minutes."
Jaspilla took the glasses and held them out in both hands, staring at them for a moment in confusion, while the cartographer threw around words like "yes" and "that makes more sense." She held them there when the cartographer gently batted her chin to put them on. They were triangular in shape, their thick, black frames pulpified and spongy in texture. She leaned in closer to the mirror, half-smiling in embarrassment that the mirror was of the old variety and didn't have a magnifying surface like the ones she had seen young people using these days.
"You're the goddess, excuse me, nymph of spring," the cartographer said. She was rubbing her knuckles into the soft cushion of Jaspilla's cheek. "Now you're the puffy winter."
"Excuse me, what?" said Jaspilla, looking into the mirror and seeing nothing but her reflection overlayed upon a pale, smooth winter landscape. She jumped back and the cartographer laughed experimentally at her toothy expression.
"You are the spring of youth, the bloom of youth, and you always will be, but you do get older, don't you?" The cartographer was pointing at her. "Do you know if you're supposed to age externals in this version?" Jaspilla shook her head and the cartographer turned back to her reflection. "First step, you need moisturizer."
She prodded Jaspilla's cheeks and nose with the end of a large, gloved hand. "You look rude. You absolutely cannot look rude."
Jaspilla buzzed her lips, grimaced, then smiled. She peeled the glasses off and held them up to view the cartographer through them.
"Perfect," the cartographer said. "You look like old French propaganda for the revolution."
"I'm...I'm not even that old!"
"I promise, most people are supposed to look like that. It makes them interesting to look at. You don't want to be interesting though, you want to be boring."
"I want to be myself," Jaspilla said. She thumbed the glasses, which were still on her nose, smiling. "Do people have to ageexternally? Is that an essential thing? Because I feel like time is significant in a lot of our mortals' perspectives. I'd prefer to just ride on flowers and my biochemistry is totally up to snuff."
"Build your season around a biological clock you might not even have," the cartographer replied. She scooped an unappealing featureless blob of ground flesh off her chin and licked it into her mouth. Her tongue elongated and narrowed and became furred, and she spit the thing out again. The door rap came quickly at the sound of it. "Quick, before you disappear."
She slapped the glasses on Jaspilla and declared her ready. Jaspilla felt gravity distort, her hair soaked with dissonant energy. It felt as if she was resisting weight, an action made redundant by her evaporation brainwashing body to simply ignore it.
"Emerald earrings?" the cartographer asked. Jaspilla was pulled apart, disintegrating on the outside as her features shifted, pushed aside by a disease with hundreds of colorful names but only one disastrous effect. She was sucked in, becoming another Jaspilla.
The door joists rattled against a rain-scorched technicolor beetle the size of a horse. It shouted, revealing as appendages the collecting modules and glittering appendages of two bees nearby. One squealed in delight, the other in horror.
*"Are you the merge barge?"* the cartographer asked, reaching into her apron corset and pulling out another pair of glasses. With a rough inhale, the tiny people were forced through their toosh-iz and transformed into two petite umbrellas, a bright red and a bright yellow. The umbrellas fought over papers and quills that fell from their bodies once the housing had been displaced. *"I am the merger,"* the beetle said. *"I am your coming and your going. I am peace, surrender, and the desire for peace and surrender.*
"Excellent," said the cartographer. *"The merge," is the name of the latest overwrite.'*
The umbrellas lodged securely in the ground, and thank goodness past incarnations of the cartographer had stuck around to do her the occasional favor, which made the umbrellas the oldest masonry on this parcel of her thing.
The umbrellas etched out a path from the bardo between to the shrinkhouse just east of the bardo where the augmentation of the umbrellas became the illusion of facades, and the facades became one half of a small living residence, gleaming in orange brick and sharp-eyed architectural flourishes.
"Excellent?" one umbrella asked, pulling papers out of their faces.
"Absolutely," the cartographer said. *"You have your mergence into happier homunculi will be painless, since it will happen while you are standing still inside a third revision.*"
Jaspilla cleared the air of sparking light codifying fraud and debris. "I'm not the same as the last time you met me," she said. "I've been◆ About the ending
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