Order and Chaos

chwokaos
Order: Fågel

help mary duh

"I know who Chwoka is," I began, "they're... uh..."

What even is a Chwoka, back Mary up

"I have no clue, actually," I said. "I've never met them. Actually..."

I've never even heard of a Chwoka. Must be some fancy title.

"What even are you? A chwoka?"

"It's pronounced," Chwoka insisted, "Chwoka."

"And what's that?"

chwokaos
Order: Fågel

"I'm the writer," he said. "You see, the author is dead!"

"The writer of what? I've read a lot of books, I'm Commun Marx, I've never read you."

"The writer, of you!" he said. "Of all of this!"

"No, you're Nothing."

"Damn, cutting put-downs from my own fictional character. How low have I come," said Chwoka. "But I have the perfect rebuttal!"

get punched in the teeth; lose crown

He swung his meaty fist and clocked me square in the jaw. My one remaining tooth went flying.

"That's for never having any funny lines!" he said.

"How would that be my fault if you wrote me?!" I cried, through the blood coming out of my mouth trickling down onto the cobblestone floor.

"I'm going to wipe this slate clean," Chwoka said. "Undo this whole universe and story, for real this time, like was my master plan all along. It's called death of the author, it's survival of the fittest, I must cut down my own creations."

"Good luck," said Mary. "I'm in control of universal stability and I can't die!"

I, Chwoka, reached out and broke her fucking neck over my knee, killing her instantly. Also Commun's eyes fell out of his skull and then Milton slipped on them, falling out the window and splitting his head open on a rock even though it should have been a safe water landing. A pity, Milton was my favorite character. But every single character died, the universe unraveled, and nothing was left behind, in a flurry of tedious winking 4th wall breaking and banal functional prose with no cleverness to lighten the load.

---

My name is Geg "Cornelius" Pegagus, but you can call me Cornelius for short. Every day, I wake up at 9 PM, put on my fancy hat, drink four beers out of a big spoon, and then go to my job, which means opening an app on my phone that's like Uber exactly but it's called Rydrr. That's also the name of a dragon.

I look around as I do donuts in the abandoned parking lot I live in, which is my breakfast. There are even less stars tonight. A sob cries from my phone — a customer. There's a not a minute to spare as I wind down the scenic route.

The rain slicks down the roads of glass as I smash through them. I can't see a thing because I've turned off my headlights, but I can smell the smoke all around. Finally, the customer clicks open the rear passenger door and climbs in.

Ironically enough, it's a yellow taxi cab. "Follow that cab," he orders. I throw the car into reverse and floor it, maintaining steady eye contact with my companion.

"So what's your story, Mac?" I say, as if I know their name. "Falling on hard times?"

He sighed. "I'm not following my parents into their profession. That's what you're there for," he said. "I'm a professor of philosophy. My name is Plok II. These bones are too tired to roll."

"Oh really?" I feigned interest. "What do you study?"

"Nothing," he said. I chortled. Those useless academics. "It's an epistemological concern. The question is simple, but vast: Is nothing a thing?"

Well, what do I think?

Whatever the fuck

fanart (warning, mild gore) https://i.imgur.com/ja5mGMo.png

hard left. left. now.

Unfortunately, you think Nothing.

Chime in that, an absence can certainly be defined as a concept, which makes it at least some manner of thing, doesn't it?

But in order to explore the nature of nothing in greater detail, it could help to set up a point of comparison to measure it against. Take, for example, our reality. The present we sense and interact with. Something we can certainly conceptualize and experience. And we can compare that to something else... the past. Something we can no longer experience or influence, but which we can identify as a concept. Isn't that some manner of Thing made of Nothing? That is to say, if our only access to the past is via a series of memories of supposed events, isn't the past just a series of things that no longer are? A sum of our non-existences? As far as our present and real selves can tell, the present is all that is. It's possible that you merely have some illusory memory of past, fabricated by a lying mind. Mere moments ago, it's possible that nothing actually existed! That existence was null and void!

And yet, you'd still claim it existed, no?

Unfortunately, you think Nothing.

"I don't really think about that sort of thing," I say to him. "But if you really pressed me about it, I guess I'd say..."

Chime in that, an absence can certainly be defined as a concept, which makes it at least some manner of thing, doesn't it?

But in order to explore the nature of nothing in greater detail, it could help to set up a point of comparison to measure it against. Take, for example, our reality. The present we sense and interact with. Something we can certainly conceptualize and experience. And we can compare that to something else... the past. Something we can no longer experience or influence, but which we can identify as a concept. Isn't that some manner of Thing made of Nothing? That is to say, if our only access to the past is via a series of memories of supposed events, isn't the past just a series of things that no longer are? A sum of our non-existences? As far as our present and real selves can tell, the present is all that is. It's possible that you merely have some illusory memory of past, fabricated by a lying mind. Mere moments ago, it's possible that nothing actually existed! That existence was null and void!

And yet, you'd still claim it existed, no?

"...but that's just off the top of my head," I continue. "Haven't really given it that much thought."

Whatever the fuck

"To be perfectly honest," I go on, "the whole thing doesn't really make a difference to me. I'm more concerned with keeping this cab running, not answering grand questions about the nature of reality."

That's when I hear sirens and panic.

"Are the cops after you?" I ask.

"Could be. A lot of people have taken a sudden interest in my work," Plok II replies calmly. "It wouldn't surprise me if the police were among them."

hard left. left. now.

Well. I'm not getting mixed up with the cops. I make a hard left turn in hopes of shaking them off.

---

My name is Officer Lauren Order. Except I keep thinking it's Officer Turbo Toaster when the cat starts getting sleepy.

The cat's my partner. His name is Officer Milton Felus, and he's God. He tells me the universe isn't the way it's supposed to be, that it's tilted really far over to the left. Almost vertical. I'm not sure what that means, but he assures me it's bad. Keeps muttering about how it's supposed to be past tense. I don't know what that means either. Maybe it's just a side effect of all the coffee he drinks.

I'm worried about that, but apparently the stability of the universe depends on him staying awake. So until we can fix this mess, that's the way things are going to be.

And apparently, the cab we're chasing - not the cab, the cab in the cab - is the only one who can help us. But first we've got to catch him.

Unfortunately, the cab we're chasing - no, not the cab, the cab the cab is in - just took a real hard turn down an alleyway. I'm following, obviously, but I'm real worried about what else we might find there.

Worry is the enemy. We can't be busy worrying when we should be busy chasing.

If you're really unlucky you might find yourselves---or the friends you made along the way

Worry is the enemy. We can't be busy worrying when we should be busy chasing.

"Don't get worried," said Milton, reading my thoughts. "Stay calm and focused on the task at hand," we cruised at about 60, following the suspect through the dozens of twists and turns and forks in this alley that narrowed until it was smaller around than our car, knocking over trashcans and scaring cats who weren't in the car. I wasn't sure I'd be able to find my way back out of here.

"Don't worry, Mac, I know this city like the back of my hand!" I cry to my passenger as I drift, throwing out the front end (we were still in reverse.) Quietly I focused on the back of my hand gripping the steering wheel, on which I had drawn a map of the city. It was no help driving at night with all the headlights off, though.

"Instead of watching your watch, watch where you're going," Professor Plok II coughs. With an obliging nod, I defer to the cab on matters of cabbery. (Cabaret?) I turn on the headlights and look straight ahead out the front windshield. You Won't Believe What I Saw Next!

400 angry ninjas.

400 ninjas had been lying in the darkness, and now that I had flicked on my low-beams, attracting them like cats to a flame, they slithered on their bellies towards us from all angles like the vermin they were, out of dumpsters and the crevasses between bricks. "Just like I expected," said the Professor. "Stay calm — remember that their only weakness is salt in the eyes."

This was bad news. I had eaten the kilogram of salt I typically kept in my glove compartment for dinner two nights ago. And what made it worse?

If you're really unlucky you might find yourselves---or the friends you made along the way

"There! They went down that tunnel!" I surmise, inaccurately. Quickly, I unscrew the parking brake handle and jam in my police-issue baton in for extra leverage, drifting into the alleyhole while flooring it. About three seconds later, I crash. I wasn't wearing my seat belt, so I fly straight ahead through the front windshield, into the opposite car through its front windshield, and then my cop diving training kicked in, so I gracefully swept into their front seat utterly unharmed, with my face where feet normally go and vice versa.

"God damn it!" I hear the woman whose car we had just run front-to-front into curse. Now she was over in my car, in the same position I am in.

"No I don't," Felus mutters to himself, to nobody's notice.

I slip out of the flaming totaled wreckage of an automobile, after popping open the glove compartment, reaching past the salt lick, and gnabbing the singed insurance information. I trip on my way out and fall face-first on the ground. I can hear her walking towards me. I roll over onto my front to look at my victim as they cock their gun, discharging a perfectly good bullet.

I was coming face-to-face with my own face. They looked exactly like me! Not a superposition, not a long-lost twin or clone or time-displaced version of myself, not a bodysnatcher who serves as a satanic figure representing entropy; a duplicate. You'll Never Look At The Concept Of Self The Same Way Again After You See This — But You Won't Be Able To Stop Smiling, Either. Until You Watch What Happens Next!

"Hands on your head!" she cries. "Knees on the ground!"

I comply as she handcuffs me. Milton, for some reason, was smiling. Fuck Milton.

"What the fuck," she barks, "are you doing with my face?"

"I —"

"Don't you know impersonating a police officer is a crime? What were you doing hauling 60 down a dark alley with your headlights off? Who are you?! Answer the question!"

This was bad. They were armed, scared, convinced I was their clone, and not gonna give me a word in edgewise. And what made it worse?

There was about a ten second stretch of silence in my memory. You know - the type you get when you cross a threshold and all of a sudden you can't understand anything that's going on anymore. That's what it was. It was right at the time where we went around the tunnel, and I followed them inside the tunnel. You know - a flash of lightning and a buzz and a word and all of a sudden you feel really quite listless.

Hundreds of thousands of them.

There was about a ten second stretch of silence in my memory. You know - the type you get when you cross a threshold and all of a sudden you can't understand anything that's going on anymore. That's what it was. It was right at the time where we went around the tunnel, and I followed them inside the tunnel. You know - a flash of lightning and a buzz and a word and all of a sudden you feel really quite listless.

There was an inexplicable blank in my memory. Exactly the kind of blank you'd have if you were really a clone who had only come into existence at around that time. So maybe I was. Maybe the cop holding the gun to my head was the real me, just like she thought.

Then she got kicked in the head by an angry ninja, and Milton yawned. Ugh, that's why I had the blank in my memory. Milton must have dozed off for a moment. He produced a cup of coffee from nowhere and promptly started drinking it.

"We need to find that cab soon," he said, sounding unsettlingly calm as we watched me try to fight off an angry ninja. "I think I'm building up a tolerance to this stuff."

"Hold on. You're the god here. So tell me, am I the real me?"

He managed as close to a shrug as a cat can.

"As long as you're the Lauren Order who's going to help me save the universe, does it really matter?"

It probably didn't, but I wasn't going to admit that to him even though he probably already knew I was thinking it.

But how were we going to track down a cab in a cab?

Hundreds of thousands of them.

I hadn't even lost the cops. There were swarms of them, more cars than I could count, surrounding us and the ninjas.

A lady cop - the exact same lady cop - stepped out of all the cars, each one accompanied by an identical cat cop. And they all pulled out their guns and pointed them at the ninjas, us, and each other, and said, in unison, "YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!"

I should clarify that the cops weren't some kind of sci-fi hivemind, they just agreed very strongly that somebody should be arrested and had a good sense of timing.

But sci-fi hivemind or no sci-fi hivemind, I needed some kind of plan for getting out of this mess. I glanced at the professor for guidance, but he didn't seem to have any.

So what was I going to do?

Time to railroad this operation.

forget a character

forget a character

I glanced at the professor for guidance, but he didn't seem to mind. I looked back at the crowd, the angry ninjas, the army of cops. If I could just eliminate one of these archetypes with my mind, I might stand a chance... I started focusing on locking away my presence in the current awful moment with denial, so hard veins popped out of my head. I shook.

Then I wasn't.

Time to railroad this operation.

"Alas, we are too late," shrugs Milton Felus. "The cab driver disappeared into thin air and the cab is surrounded by duplicates." He dabs. "If you had been a better driver we could have been there with them."

"Then maybe what we need..." I notice I'm in present-tense again as I employ my Police Brutality training and choke my assailant into unconsciousness, "Is a vector of chase by which I needn't drive!" I kill my now-defenseless assailant as punctuation, described in little detail so as to display an ounce of good taste on the part of the author in 2019 especially as compared to the same author in the same story in 2015.

"I can't drive," says the increasingly-apathetic-and-sleepy Milton Felus.

"There's only one way to do it: we need to steal a train," I say.

"Commandeer," corrects Milton Felus, who in this universe is also a cop and uses cop words like "commandeer" for civil forfeiture. "Professor Plok Two is now in the custody of the duplicates and duplicats. Before long there will be Professor Plok Three, Four, even Five... Five hundred thousand, that is. I don't see how we can apprehend the perps by train."

"It's the only way!" I snap, ramming my idea through and not allowing any alternative paths to be imagined. (I was unaware but historically, indecision has split timelines — if I was to be an asshole it at least paid to be a stubborn asshole.)

Milton & I go crouch in a snow drift by some railroad tracks. I wear desert camouflage gear that actually makes me stand out more against the stark white expanse. What is our plan for hunting the train as it rolls by?

Just grab onto it

(what the hell is this adventure it seems amazing)

Impersonate a train so you can get closer without scaring it off

Impersonate a train so you can get closer without scaring it off

"Choo choo," I say. Milton gives me a judgmental glance.

"I'm trying to make the train think it's among its own kind so it won't panic," I explain.

"I know. I have divine powers, so I know exactly what you're thinking. It's just that the thought process itself makes no sense. For one thing, you don't sound like a train, you sound like a human saying choo choo. Because that's what you are."

"Choo choo!"

"Saying it again won't make it any more convincing."

"That wasn't me, that was the train." I turn around. "Choo choo!" I reply. Milton just shakes his head.

"Of course, when the world itself doesn't make any sense either, what difference does it make," he mutters. I pretend not to hear him, even though he's probably fully aware I can.

Just grab onto it

(what the hell is this adventure it seems amazing)

 As the bright light of the train draws nearer, I grab Milton with one hand and grab the train with the other. Except the train, in this case, is a rather short one-armed man. He's simultaneously holding a flashlight and operating a minecart, which seems to bother Milton for some reason.

"I'm not taking any passengers," he says pointedly. "This is strictly a freight train."

"Where's your freight, then?" I ask.

"I dropped it off, now I'm heading home for the night. What are you doing here, anyways? There's another train nearby, it's dangerous to stay on the tracks."

"That was me," I say proudly. "Doing a very good train impersonation."

"Oh, I thought it just had a broken whistle."

Milton sighs.

"Let's get to the point. We're police and we're commandeering your vehicle. You take us to where she says - " here he glances at me pointedly again " - and we don't give you any further trouble."

"Dang cops," the train grumbles. "Fine, get on."

We hop on the mine cart and the man starts pumping hard.

"So where are we headed? Not that it's going to make much difference until the next junction."

Milton doesn't say anything. Right, this wis up to me. So where do I tell him to go?

the place where the perps are