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Cam studies. He studies madly. The next week elapses with him having very little sense of individual days. He doesn't want anyone to know anything special is up, so he goes to a movie with Renée and to a friend's house after school to play Nintendo games and Charlie gets his weekly phone call and he shows up to his classes and gets his homework adequately done. But other than that he studies. He wants to be fluent in this thing inside three months if possible. It's easier than Spanish, he's motivated, he can use it in everyday conversations as he asks passing animals and convenient plants how smart they are (dogs: smarter than goats; squirrels: about goat level; his friend's hamster: dumb as a rock; shrubs: way dumber than trees; indoor potted rosemary: just a step above grass) and chats with Grace, he's basically dropping himself in an immersion course with some inconvenient English here and there so he can interact with humans. He thinks three months is ambitious but reasonable.
He's not actually doing that many spells. He does wheedle tofu into tastiness on a nightly basis, and when he feels a cold coming on he looks up a spell about that, but he wants to know what he's doing before he gets going on what he most wants to be doing, because he wants to be doing big things. He swore to oppose death. He meant that.
Today he is preparing to oppose death in his backyard. It's threatening rain and he doesn't want to be all the way down the street with Leafy if the clouds open up. The jerk tree doesn't talk to him if he doesn't talk to it and it's perfectly serviceable as something to sit under, anyway.
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lifes_sake
lifes_sake
"What do you want?" Cam asks. Because he doesn't know. This is not how he would operate if he were anything horrible enough to invent death. If Cam were horrible and also powerful enough to invent death, everything that was not Cam would already be dead.
"What do I want," it says musingly. "Well, a little appreciation would be nice."
lifes_sake
"Bewilderingly enough, people appreciate the hell out of you, there are practically odes to death, people have to rationalize their way into sanity in the face of such an eventuality. There are all kinds of books where being immortal inevitably leads to misery, and stuff."
"Oh, it does," the not-a-rock says carelessly. "I should know. But that's not the kind of appreciation I meant. Not that it doesn't give me a special little thrill when people lie to themselves."
lifes_sake
"Okay, that's really not how I'm wired personally, so what do you mean, then, what do you want from me, what am I looking at here?"
"Did you know I also invented time?" it asks. "That's entropy's job. It gives the universe something to point at."
lifes_sake
"That's actually really interesting," says Cam, and he means it.
"You won't get that kind of thing in your propaganda," it says, meaning the manual. "But it's true. I didn't just throw it in there so I could feel special. It solved a problem."
lifes_sake
"Sounds like it. I am at least provisionally in favor of time."
"Without the ability for the Universe to distinguish one moment from another, you wouldn't exist," it points out. "You seem like you're in favour of existing."
lifes_sake
"Well, yes, but I haven't had very long to think about this problem and there might be a better way to distinguish moments than aiming the universe at entropy," Cam suggests. "Unless I think of one, having time-as-I-understand it seems like a reasonable approach."
"And what would you do if you thought of one?" it asks, amused.
lifes_sake
"...Write it down," says Cam. "And keep an eye out for implementation opportunities."
It laughs.
Its laughter is not very pleasant.
Its laughter is not very pleasant.
lifes_sake
Cam will be over here, wincing and running his fingertips along Grace's spiral binding.
"I think I like you, kid," it says eventually. "How's this sound? If I make you immortal, you swear off the run-around-causing-me-trouble part of wizardry and spend your time thinking up a better way than entropy to solve time."
lifes_sake
"For forever? Because that is a long time, in that length of time I might wind up proving it mathematically impossible or something. In fact, if you have already done the mathematical impossibility proof, that makes issuing an offer like that way more likely, unless I am completely misunderstanding your interests somehow."
"If you prove it mathematically impossible, I'll let you rethink the bargain," it says generously.
lifes_sake
"And does 'rethink' mean 'cancel and do something else with immortality', and if I do think of something, does it happen?" Cam asks slowly. "And for that matter, do I have any particular reason to consider you a trustworthy negotiating partner, 'Iggy'?"
"I'm not going to make you immortal so you can spend the rest of eternity getting in my way," it says. "That would just be silly."
lifes_sake
"What do you want? Why do you care about doing the things that I'd be inclined to get in the way of?" exclaims Cam.
"I'm proud of what I made," it says serenely. "It's not very nice, but it gets the job done."
"It's all the same from where I'm standing," it says. "Without death, there's no life. Nothing moves forward. Complex life requires death to survive. Do you want to know how many things died to feed and clothe and shelter you for the handful of years you've lived on this cute little ball of dirt? It's a lot."
lifes_sake
"That number would in fact be mildly interesting since I could extrapolate it for grassroots activism later depending on how things go. But I don't mean, like, grass, though, grass is stupid, I mean people. By which term I include trees and so on, as of a week ago. And if you tell me we need death to power evolution my opinion of your creativity is going to take a nosedive; evolution happens when things run around dying and breeding and nobody's minding the store."