The Many, The One
- The Engine, The Weave -

A roadsign

“Your God is too small.”

A nod to Giordano Bruno as portrayed in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, in the story told by Neil deGrasse Tyson—the man with the nice smile who knows about the stars.

How much of everything have you included when you say everything?

Specs begins with the colors he knows. The questions grow with him: what is this power, who is this person, where does one thing end and another begin? Then the same names, voices, and connections turn up somewhere his questions did not leave room for.

The Many, The One. Change your point of view, and the same thing can ask something different of you.

Whose story became your compass?

William Riker can help shape a moral compass in ways that Abraham does for someone else. A story gives a person a way to recognize a responsibility—and language for answering it.

In Through Yonder, J reaches for Riker to think about serving a captain while representing a crew. The association moves beyond the screen into questions about whose voice is heard and who is being represented.

That is part of what Specs brings to his own story: other stories have already helped shape the person making the choice. “Cast what you know” reaches beyond the words of a spell. It is also worth asking what taught him to want that outcome.

How much of the difference you see belongs to the story—and how much belongs to when, where, and through whom you encountered it?

What is time to an immortal?

A dead man. A grey ghost. A message from an old friend—or a new friend. A debt repaid so long after the favor that the favor is almost forgotten.

Those lives and memories do not have to fit the order in which Specs encounters them. Boston arrives with a question. Fate recognizes something. Elsewhere—or elsewhen—someone remembers a favor.

Ask who came first, and you may be asking from the only place where “first” makes sense to you.

If time has no meaning, all time has value. A second of Joy is as valuable as a decade.

Grundy can return to a good memory. Its length does not decide what it is worth.
Solomon Grundy →

Instructions for the Engine

The message has long been on the wind.

Before Grundy was Grundy. Before Swampy was Swampy. Before not-quite-Lanterns had lost loves.

A whiff left lingering.
Words unspoken.
A mouth watering for strawberries.

It’s not spoken. It’s sung.

A message can reach someone who does not know they have received it. An action can carry it farther than the person doing it can see.

And Specs, still learning to read the map, can be part of the message that helped him find it.

What was that voice saying?

Connection is not omniscience.

You can see a strand. You may even be able to pluck it. You are still within the weave.

Metatron and Spectre can see more than most. Seeing farther does not make either of them the One. The view can keep opening beyond the place that looked like its end.

Think of an image that reveals another shape when your eyes change focus. The image has not changed. What you can see in it has.

All are Many. Many are One.

A soul is a particular meeting of spectra: shared material, a particular configuration, an individual experience. Seeing the connection does not erase the person.

How far would you have to pull back before you stopped mistaking your horizon for the edge?