The Quiet Hour, Again

The clock said what it always says. Fifteen past three.

I have not written about the hour in a long time, because it left me. For most of the years I was silent, I slept through. No calm, no ringing, no page. I took it as a sign that whatever had been opening in me had closed, and I let it stay closed, because I had seen enough for one life and I was tired.

It came back the week I started writing again. I should have expected that. The replay trains on the day, and the day was full of this.

But it came back different, and that is what I want to set down while it is fresh.

The calm was there, as it always was: the house silent, the world silent, the running commentary in the mind gone. I got up, found the notebook, sat in the chair by the window. The pen began to move. And then, perhaps ten minutes in, I had the sense, unmistakable and unexplainable, that I was not the only one in the calm.

Not in the room. In the calm. As though the quiet were a place, and someone else had stepped into it.

"You took your time."

I knew the voice the way you know a voice from a dream, which is to say completely and without any ability to describe it. Robprim. Not the words; the words are my translation. The packet of knowing arrived the way it always did, all at once, and what it contained was something between a greeting and a reproach.

I asked, the only way I know how to ask in that state, where they had been.

"Where you left us. You stopped coming. We do not go where we are not invited; that is the whole of the difference between us and the other side."

I asked if they had seen what the world had built.

There was a pause in the calm that I can only describe as amusement.

"We told you about the fabricator. You wrote it down. You were the one who did not read it."

Then the ringing began, faint, at the back of the skull, the old signal that the door was closing, and the calm thinned, and I was alone in the chair with a page that said, in my own handwriting, a sentence I do not remember writing:

The gold was the prototype. Ask what the production model is for.

I have sat with that for a week. I have some idea of what it means, and I am going to spend the next several entries finding out whether I am right. If I am, then everything on this site since the beginning has been pointing at a single question, and the question is not how to escape the machine. It is what the machine was built to become, and whether we get any say.

The hour is back. I do not intend to waste it this time.

Part of VIII. The Terms of Consent