The Primordial Record novel Chapter 2215

Chapter 2215: I Am Not A Creator

The words of the Painter shook the room... and it paused for a moment, as if it wanted Eos to fully appreciate the weight of its words before it continued,

"Everything I had not yet done. They loved, built, fought, cooperated, invented languages...."

The Painter seemed to have been transported to the first Existence, as its voice became a bit more wistful, "They ate and drank, had children... they died, and mourned, and they began again. All of it was new, all of it was happening for the first time in any reality that had ever existed, and I sat in the stands, and I took it in, and the taking in was the most extraordinary experience of my—of what I then learned to call my—life."

It’s paused here, and Eos made no sound; he did not even move an inch, and the Painter nodded in satisfaction before it continued its tale.

"I had been attention without object for an eternity. Now I had object. And I discovered that the object was better, the richer the beings on the floor suffered."

"Suffered."

"Specifically. Yes. Joy was a fine spectacle, I will not claim otherwise, I have no reason to lie here, but suffering was finer. Suffering at novelty is the densest concentration of new information that the universe has ever produced. A being experiencing a thing for the first time that it does not know how to process is a pitch of flavor that nothing else comes close to. I had made beings. I sat in the stands. I watched them find out about grief. I watched them find out about betrayal. I watched them find out about the thing they loved being taken from them and not coming back. And every moment of it, to me, was magnificent."

Eos’s tenth-dimensional flesh did not move; he so wanted to move, but he did not reach this point by being overly rash.

"Did you intervene?" he said.

"Often."

"To—"

"To maintain the pitch. Yes. When they began to understand their suffering, I would change the rules. When they began to build defenses against the worst of what was happening to them, I would introduce a new form of harm they had not been equipped for. When they began to speak of me in the stands—and some of them did, in the later eras—I would break the speaker and cause it to be known, among the others on the floor, that speaking of me had consequences. It was an experiment, you understand. It was the first experiment. I was learning what I had made and what I could do with it."

"How long did this last?"

"Their time or mine."

"Theirs."

"Their last historian estimated eleven hundred thousand of what they called Grand Cosmic Eras. They were wrong by a factor of six, but it was an impressive estimate for beings of their constraints."

"And yours."

"Mine is not measurable in their units."

"Then what ended it?"

The Painter was silent for a moment.

"The floor... cracked."

"In all those generations, I had not anticipated that the floor would crack. I had designed them to suffer, but I had also designed them to think, and thinking and suffering together, over enough time, produce— eventually, inevitably—the beginning of a kind of collective attention that I had not accounted for. They did not, by the end, defeat me. They did not organize against me or build weapons that could harm me. They did something subtler. They began to attend to me in return."

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