The Lifter's Paradox [Round One: the Great Golemworks!]

Round One: The Great Golemworks

Chapter One: First Impressions

“The fox nips at the rabbit’s tail,” Norm mumbled, clutching the ends of the tie. Thirty-two years of life and he still could not do this properly if he wasn’t in front of a mirror, or, at least, standing still. “The rabbit leads the fox around the tree. Twice?”

Norm knocked shoulders with a passing pedestrian, felling the tree and crushing the rabbit. “Watch it!” warned the offending party, his beer belly quivering from the aftershocks of the impact, flaring his neck veins in the way that other men raise their fists.

Norm pirouetted and dropped a quick “Sorry” before stumbling over the leg of an unfortunately-placed homeless man and twisting his ankle. “Ow. Sorry.” A gust of wind offered Norm’s tie a chance to escape, and he snatched it out of the air before it could throw itself into the path of a passing car. He held the tie in his hand, feeling that the accessory was somehow charged with symbolism. “The fox is startled by the approach of the Duke’s hounds,” he muttered to himself sadly. Then, checking his watch: “The fox accepts that he is going to be late.”

He harbored a personal superstition that if he ever made a perfect first impression—which, to his mind, entailed showing up at a job interview both on time and wearing a tie—then a satisfying and lifelong career path would stretch before him like Jacob’s ladder. This was nonsense, of course. Norm was a human pinball: he had sort of personal gravity around him that caused things to crash into him, never when he expected. Cars, basketballs, obligations, opportunities, catastrophes, and (occasionally) women. The women were always unstable, the catastrophes inevitably left him single and unemployed, and the interviews were always in twenty minutes. Norm woke up every morning feeling unprepared for the future, uncertain about the present and with strong reason to question the past.

In a situation like this there were two main options. The first would be to forget the tie and run to the interview. He would show up at the interview on time, disheveled and sweating, and look the interviewer in the eye as though to say “I have passed the trial of we-can-pencil-you-in-for-twenty-minutes-from-now. See how I have suffered in the name of your busy schedule. Hire me now.”

The problem with that was, Norm honestly had no desire to suffer for a job he was already convinced he would get (on the strength of a duplicitous, highly selective résumé) and then lose again before the leaves turned yellow. Instead he decided option two: show up fashionably late and try to play it off as an act of supreme confidence. Give the interviewer that other look, the one that says, ”I’m sorry, I was busy interviewing with several of your key competitors. They paid for lunch, joined my fantasy baseball league and offered me more than you yourself make. But if you want to hire me, I’ll consider you, I suppose.”

He practiced that look on his reflection in a storefront window as he straightened out a tie and resumed the narrative of the fox and the rabbit. All he succeeded in accomplishing was making him look like he needed glasses. Norm sighed. He wouldn’t hire himself. The rabbit ducked behind a highly fragrant bush, tricking the fox’s keen sense of smell. It lay quivering in the grass, heart racing upwards of three hundred bpm, watching the fox dart its head back and forth, knowing it had earned only a temporary reprieve. Norm studied his face—not quite masculine enough to impress women, not quite dark enough to frighten white people. His eyes were dull and unfocused and failed to communicate the things that he had seen, the things that he was unable to discuss with others but which he would have liked to have imbued him with a palpable air of mystique, the slightest hint that there was anything about him that was not sickeningly normal. Norm Albertson. Mild of manner, subsistent on turkey sandwiches, catches a cold every two months like clockwork. The rabbit braced its legs against the tree hollow, readying itself to make a run for the safety of its hole. It leapt clear over the fox’s head. A pigeon flew into the window, snapping its neck against the face of Norm’s reflection, and dropped dead to the sidewalk.

It occurred to Norm that he no longer remembered, if he had ever known, what position exactly he was applying for. He knew the address and the last name of the person he was supposed to meet: “Landa,” who he assumed to be a woman, though this may have just been wishful thinking. He would show up three minutes late, apologize profusely, smile big and proceed to present himself as someone so dependably normal that it would seem like an unforgivable risk to hire anyone with more of a personality. The apology, the smile, and the normalcy would all be lies. Norm straightened out his tie and scraped a bit of pigeon brain off his shoe.

As he turned away from the shop window, Norm tripped over a universe and nearly fell on his face.

Ah, he thought, during the brief instant in which, hurtling through an infinity of infinities, he experienced exactly nothing. This was not his first rodeo. One side effect of being teleported was a calming burst of alpha waves as one’s bioelectric patterns warp in response to the momentary absence of reality. Norm reappeared in a dark place, slightly lightheaded and vaguely relieved that he wouldn’t have to go through with his interview.

The man in front of him wasn’t illuminated by any particular spotlight—he was simply perfectly visible because the complete and utter blackness of the wherever-he-was simply seemed not to apply to him. “Hello?” Norm tried to say, only to find that sound didn’t carry very well in this place, either. Was there even any air around him? If not, why wasn’t he asphyxiating or exploding from the lack of pressure? These were absurd questions to be asking, he realized, relaxing a bit.

The man—casually dressed in a tee shirt and jeans, one sneaker tapping cheerfully against what might be called the “floor” of the endless expanse of nothingness—was able to make himself heard without trouble. “Hello,” he announced, looking about as though addressing a large crowd. “Before we get started, just a couple things I’d like to mention.

“First.” There was something that screamed “not human” about the man’s expression and demeanor, though whether it was because he looked too human or not human enough, Norm could not decide. “This is happening. I won’t allow any delays due to denial or your insisting that this is all some horrible nightmare and blah blah blah blah blah.” His voice at once had a humorous, ironic lilt and a vaguely angry, paternalistic quality. “One of the benefits of being me is that I can’t be ignored nor rationalized no matter how hard you try. So, get used to your new conception of existence. So, to reiterate: I am real, and you’re really here.”

Fair enough, thought Norm, who had a highly developed sense of suspension of disbelief as it was. He wondered who else was listening to this shpiel, if anyone, and whether they felt the same way. He recalled (not too clearly now—it was more than a decade back, now) his first collision with the fundamental weirdness of the universe, the revelation that the world of the normal he’d inhabited was nothing more than a glossy dust jacket on an almanac of wonders, horrors, and stupid gibberish. He didn’t envy anybody who was going through that process now, alone in the darkness.

“Second.” The man wiggled two fingers by way of demonstration. “It’s important to this venture, as I go on to explain to you what I’ve brought you here for, that you at no point question why. You must understand that there is no why that you can comprehend. I am not like you. I am not bound by the same concerns or motivations. Attempting to empathize with me—to fathom me—would be just as futile as attempting to destroy me.

“As an aside--I cannot be destroyed. Let alone killed—if you can understand the distinction. I have existed since before there was even an idea of you. I will continue to exist until that idea has been forgotten... by everyone except me. So in a way, by coming to my attention, you’ve achieved immortality. No, more than immortality. You’ve been engraved in the fabric of the multiverse, forever.”

This did not come as a comfort to Norm.

“Now, time to get better acquainted. Let’s start with me.” The man pressed a hand to his chest and bowed with a flourish. “I’m the Problematic. You might refer to me as an omnipotent being. As opposed to a deity. Which is another distinction that might be beyond you. In this aspect, I’m taking on the honorary of Grandmaster. Whereas you are taking on the role of Contestants. Or Champions, if you want to get all romantic about it. Sacrifices, maybe, if you’re feeling morbid. Anyway, now for the rest of you.”

Norm was thoroughly confused and frightened. He discovered, and was not terribly surprised, that he could not move. The Problematic gestured, and a giant ant appeared next to him.

Or maybe “ant” wasn’t the right word—it stood on two legs, coming up roughly to the Problematic’s chest, and its other limbs ended in thin-fingered, chitinous hands, which held, respectively, a longsword, a shield, and each end of some sort of battleaxe. Atop the plates of her exoskeleton—which didn’t look quite like those close-up magnified images of ants Norm had seen on the Internet—it wore a loose fitting blue garment that Norm wanted to refer to as a frock, over what appeared to be a full suit of armor. Through the slits in its helmet a pair of compound eyes glistened, staring blankly forward, revealing nothing.

“First up,” said the Problematic, “We have Ari, a worker ant of the Miktana Clan, native to the Sangsaxian Kingdoms. She’s a warrior-mage-priestess-thing of the Order of Ak’Va—which serves to illustrate, perhaps, the difference between a deity and an omnipotent being. There’s a little bit of Ak’Va inside Ari and it gives her magical powers as a reward for her faith and devotion to it.” He shrugged. “I don’t get it either. Whatever the case... Ari. Big ant. Chosen of Ak’Va.”

The ant vanished with a snap of the Problematic’s fingers, to be replaced by a six-legged reptilian creature clutching a spherical black object in its forelimbs. It was about a foot tall and three feet long, and struck Norm as rather cute, its big round orange eyes frozen in a nervous stare. It wore no clothes except, absurdly, for a small cloth hat perched between its eyelids.

“This is Llathorp,” explained the omnipotent being, kneeling down to examine the lizard. “A gamma male of the Ornithrops, hailing from Ska-Queth. He’s largely unremarkable—his species are pretty much this adorable across the board—save that he stumbled across that magic eight ball a couple years back. It’s, well, it’s magic. Quite so. So that’s his gimmick.”

He banished Llathorp. The next “contestant” the Problematic presented was—to the relief of the self-consciously anthropocentrically-inclined Norm—a human, though he doubted she’d been pulled off the streets of New York in 2013. She wore an ankle-length gown the color of blood, inscribed with a series of elegant and meaningful-looking patterns, and a metal crown nestled in her white hair. She stood tall and straight, displaying no weakness from her age (Norm would have put her around seventy, at a guess) and, disconcertingly, she looked bored, utterly unimpressed by her surroundings.

“Behold!” cried the Problematic in mock deference. “Queen Sofie III of Manvaña: the Crimson Queen, to her detractors. Bane of the forces of darkness! Anointed and coronated anathema to the Adversary, his legions, and the legions’ legions in turn.” He rolled his eyes. “More deity stuff. Point is, she’s a very impressive person.” He snapped his fingers, and the personage vanished into the darkness.

Norm was really starting to miss his ability to move. For most of his life he had not wanted to move, and had not enjoyed moving when he had been, but, in retrospect, he’d appreciated always having the option. Moving could prove very useful when one did not want to be where one was, and Norm didn’t. These were his thoughts up until the Problematic made a floating guitar with a swastika painted on it appear in the air next to him.

The guitar was black and red, the swastika white, and the entire instrument glowed with an unearthly blue energy. The overall effect was garish but oddly compelling. “This is Felzenwaltzen, a guitar of Germany,” said the omnipotent being, as though that explained anything. “Felzenwaltzen is the result of top secret Nazi experiments on a new form of energy called ‘Rock and Roll.’ It is an entity of awesome and terrible power. By some standards.”

This was when Norm’s uncanny ability to accept strange circumstances ran up against a bit of a wall. Clearly this was a practical joke, or some sort of bad fanfiction, or—

And then he recalled the Problematic’s voice. “First: This is happening.” And it was happening, Nazi guitar and all. Norm shuddered as best he could in his immobile state. The guitar disappeared. The Problematic summoned a girl—human, again—who Norm would have guessed to be thirteen. “This is Annie, a human with no country,” he explained.

Annie did not look well. She was unbearably thin, shielded from the elements only by a tattered dress and a dried layer of blood and dirt. “Annie’s been on her own for a long time,” explained the omnipotent being sadly. “Well, mostly on her own.” He snapped his fingers and a bulldog appeared at Annie’s side.

Well, bulldog was as apt a description as Norm could manage, though there were some key differences between the creature and what he would have recognized as a bulldog. For one thing, it was roughly the size of a bear, its prune-shaped face stretching grotesquely across its bulk and leaking a glowing green fluid from various folds and orifices. “This,” said the Problematic, “Is Annie’s friend Watchdog. He’s coming along for the ride, because even in my cosmic-scale lack of empathy I wouldn’t be cruel enough to separate a girl and her dog, and because Annie would be boring without Watchdog.”

Watchdog, though every bit as paralyzed at Norm, seemed to bare his fangs defiantly, which was either a trick of the non-light or of Norm’s eroding sanity. And then he disappeared along with Annie. The Problematic disappeared as well, then reappeared next to Norm.

“This is Norm, a human of America,” the grandmaster announced to the invisible audience. Ah, thought Norm. My turn. He felt glad, absurdly, that he had gotten his tie on straight before being whisked off out of the universe. “Norm is, by the standards of his people, extremely normal... except when he isn’t. You’ll see.”

Norm wasn’t sure what to think of that description. He supposed he owed the Problematic a word of thanks for not getting into detail. On the other hand, he wondered nervously what was being omitted from the other “contestants’” biographies.

The Problematic moved again—or Norm did, he supposed—and the next contestant came into view, an ugly-looking blue-skinned creature that stood up to their host’s ankle. A pair of paper-thin wings and a ratlike tail distinguished his silhouette from that of a tiny, squat human, and his bright orange suit and top hat suggested a set of cultural and aesthetic values utterly foreign to Norm. Although, he mused, if he himself were six inches tall he, too, might elect to peacock a bit in order to get noticed. There was something metal strapped to the little guy’s back that Norm couldn’t make out. “This is Charles,” said the Problematic, pointing with his foot. “He’s an imp of Ix-O, a lesser incarnation of Greed. He’s quite the little entrepeneur!”

Away went Charles. These descriptions kept getting shorter. Norm had the sense that the Problematic was getting bored. “Last but not least,” the omnipotent being announced, bringing forth another human, a sharply-dressed man about Norm’s age. “Here’s Johnny, another human from another America. Johnny’s a city cop. Honestly, he’d be pretty boring, but for...”

An utterly beautiful black sports car manifested by Johnny’s side. Norm fell in love.

“...Cat Six, his car. Cat Six is a really cool car. Trust me.”

Man and car disappeared. The Problematic wiped his brow. “That’s it for introductions. Anyway, I’m sure you’re all wondering why you’ve been brought here.”

Norm, in fact, had been neglecting to wonder that, having devoted himself to the study of his fellow “contestants,” assuming, perhaps, that the information the Problematic had imparted would be on an exam later. Still, the omnipotent being had now piqued his curiosity, in an existential-horror sort of way.

“Simply put, I’ve gathered you eight—counting Annie, Johnny, and Thorp, rather than the eight ball, Watchdog, and Cat Six—to kill each other. A grand battle across seven worlds, or, worst case scenario, a contest of survival.”

Norm wilted. He’d been unconsciously assuming, for some reason, that the Problematic was here to grant him some sort of boon. Special powers, maybe. This, he supposed, was what he had been getting at about the difference between an omnipotent being and a deity. Also, he had mentioned sacrifices, which ought to have been a hint.

“The rules are simple,” continued the Problematic. “I put you in a place. You will find that you cannot leave that place. You stay there until one of you dies, either because someone else did the smart thing and killed you, or because you just messed up somehow. When someone dies, you all move on to the next place in line.”

Norm tried to picture himself killing the blood-spattered little girl. Then he tried to picture himself being torn to shreds by the giant bulldog. The latter option seemed far more likely.

“If you’re the last one left, congratulations! You get a free ride back home, or any other corner of the multiverse in which you wish to spend the rest of your infinitesimal mortality in. And if you’ve been a really good boy, there might be a wish in it for you, or a job offer, or some more people to kill.” The Problematic shrugged. “Depends what mood I’m in.”

There was no sadism evident in the omnipotent being’s voice, nor any feeling at all beyond a dryly ironic disinterest. Why are you doing this? thought Norm. The answer came to him from a few minutes in the past: “You must understand that there is no why that you can comprehend.” His host’s monologue had anticipated his every reaction to it—was this what it was like to deal with an omniscient mind, or was human nature (or giant-ant nature or lizard-thing nature) simply this predictable? Or, alternatively, had this become a dull routine for the Problematic? Norm had no reason to suppose that this was the first time the “grandmaster” had played these games.

“Anyway, I think that’s everything. No need for me to keep blathering on while you’re probably desperate to scratch an itch on your nose, or start killing each other. So, omitting any surplus ado, let’s start on round one!”

Norm felt the use of his muscles return to him just as he teleported again. Again he felt that briefly relaxed feeling—which was either the feeling of not existing at all, or something more complex—and then he came to, finding himself somewhere that reeked of oil, sweat, and what might have been manure. He blinked three times, straightened his tie, and looked around.

He was in a massive complex that seemed to have been hewn out of a gargantuan underground cave. Towering structures of loosely-stacked scaffolding and stone stretched here and there from the floor to the distant ceiling, illuminated less by the deliberately-placed torches that stretched away from Norm in rows and more by the flashes of fire and sparks that bloomed in every corner of the complex, signifying crude but intricate industrial processes. It was uncomfortably hot. Everywhere men strolled about, usually shirtless, men with big arms and long beards, drenched in sweat, grimacing and grumbling. The men didn’t look at him as they passed, but seemed to sniff him out, recognizing his status as one outside their working-class world, perhaps pegging him as a quality control expert or a consultant, an agent of change, a meddler.

Norm considered this and decided that they were likely not incorrect in this. He was an alien invader here. It was possible, he supposed, that the Problematic had only taken him as far as, say, Norway, but this was unlikely. That the men were speaking perfect English seemed only to confirm his suspicion that he was farther afield than conventional science believed to be possible. He was an anomaly here. If one of these men had landed on Earth, the government would have taken him away and harvested his organs for science.

He felt a pang of empathy for the rest of the “contestants,” who he imagined would have more difficulty remaining inconspicuous here than he would. This empathy disappeared when he remembered that the others had been ordered to hunt and kill him. Not all of them would choose to participate in the battle, of course—Norm wasn’t planning on it himself—but some of them certainly would. Norm had a target on his back simply by virtue of evidently being the easiest to kill. He didn’t have a terrifying giant dog or cool car to protect him, and he wasn’t the “anointed and coronated anathema of the Adversary,” whatever that was. Maybe the others, thinking themselves prudent, would heed the Problematic’s cryptic “You’ll see” and elect to avoid Norm, suspecting that he had some terrible secret powers waiting in the wings.

Norm sighed.

At the tail end of the sigh a delayed fear response came out of him like a lump of phlegm, manifesting in a short yelp that turned the heads of some of the workers. Norm sat down against a rock and obstinately shut his mouth before the yelp became a scream. The fear, finding itself unable to manifest itself orally, moved down to his left hand, which started trembling as though about to tear itself apart. Norm raised his hand to his face, watching it shake about involuntarily, attempting to close it into a fist and finding himself unable. After only a few seconds the fear released itself and his hand went still. Norm, feeling quite a bit better, made that fist and stood back up. He reminded himself inwardly that this was not his first rodeo (he liked that phrase), and that his normalcy could prove an advantage here.

Feeling that this place and its inhabitants did not value tasteful accessorizing, Norm untied his tie and slipped it into his pocket, then unbuttoned his shirt and tied it around one shoulder. He debated taking off his tee shirt as well, but decided that he didn’t want to draw too much attention to the gap in muscular development separating him and the workers.

He waited until a man walked by whose proud, upright walk and severity of grimace seemed to set him apart as an authority figure. “Hey,” he said, self-consciously adding a little world-weary throat to his voice. “I’m here looking for a job. Are you the man to talk to?”

The man stopped in his tracks and turned to face Norm, feet kicking up dust. “You?” he asked.

“Me,” Norm confirmed defiantly, trying not to wince from the punch he half-expected.

“Hrmm,” grunted the man, scratching his beard. He walked over to the rock Norm had been sitting against and dipped his fingers into a pouch at his belt. His fingers came out drenched in a brown, muddy substance, with which he scratched a few lines and dots into the rock. Norm thought he recognized the symbols as Hebrew, but assumed offhand that he was mistaken. The rock glowed. “What?” asked the rock, in a weatherbeaten voice that sounded much like everyone else in this place.

“Got a guy lookin’ for work,” responded Norm’s benefactor in the loud, slow voice that older people used in phone conversations. “Should I send him your way?”

The rock was silent for a few moments. Then: “We can squeeze in an interview in twenty minutes, but he can’t be late. Busy day today.”

“Ah, forget it. We’re half an hour away, easy.” The man turned back to Norm and shrugged in sympathy.

Norm smiled bitterly. “I can run,” he said. “Just point me in the right direction.”