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I kicked its arse. It really wasn't difficult, in the end. Like a lot of godforms that decide to go bad (or so I hear), its whole 'I-am-ultra-powerful-and-can-reduce-the-universe-to-total-stasis' deal was just a case of it trying to puff itself up. It was, in fact, a total bluff, for reasons debated here. Ironically, it was making it more powerful and self-aware that, in the end, destroyed it.
Here's what I did. Taking the suggestion that I build an anti-Cartesian godform to sort it out, and riffing (very loosely) on my intuition that Carty probably had certain wormhole similarities, I invented 'Atom' Fisk, Quantum Magician! (the exclamation mark is part of his name, at least to me): a version of myself from a parallel universe who based his magical abilities on mathematics, not poetry. His origin was intimately tied to the Cartesian, who finally got the comic-book origin story it had always wanted: it emerged when Fisk, precocious mathematician that he was, sat down and attempted to derive an equation which would describe the nature of human evil - his theory being that if he could solve such an equation then it might be possible to get rid of evil itself. Needless to say the thing went wrong, and he wound up summoning the Cartesian, who represents the dark, rigid, reductive side of mathematics, rather than its creative side. This alternate earth version of me had a series of japes following exposure to the Cartesian which led to him developing a powerful spellcasting technique using creative math. Eventually, though, the Cartesian escaped his universe by engaging in some jiggery-pokery with a particle-accelerator and travelled into our dimension, thus causing the intrepid 'Atom' Fisk to follow (it should be obvious, by the way, that Fisk's universe conforms to the rules of comic-book pseudo-physics, which is why you go to another universe when you step into a hyper-collider, instead of just blowing up or whatever happens here).
When it smashed into our universe, though, because it had no analogue to map itself onto, the Cartesian splintered into a variety of different selves, which wound up being scattered throughout my fictions, and, in some cases, the memories of friends of mine - presumably because the nearest thing it could latch onto was this universe's copy of the mind that originally spawned it (who was, of course, created by me - people who are familiar with the idea of strange loopiness will perhaps begin to see what I was aiming for here). It also splintered through time, with different aspects of itself emerging at different points, as far back, indeed, as 1992. In a neat bit of retconning (and a way of deepening the strange loop) I actually made the Cartesian responsible for the events that propelled me into studying magic, as part of its masterplan to dupe me into helping it manifest. As time went on, the entity grew more and more self-aware, to the point where it was able to convince me to unify the various fictional versions of it and give it more power.
At this point, enter 'Atom' Fisk. I engineered a reverse pathworking in which I took on the role of him, encountering me, and then negotiated a deal whereby he would effectively take over control of my body for a few days, with 'my' 'real' persona effectively taking on tutelary godform, 'voice-in-head' status. This was weird. Especially because 'I' was now a maths expert who'd spent seven years on the run from MI5, fighting bizarre comic-book villains, and who'd just (or so he thought) seen the Cartesian kill his lover before porting into this reality, and now had to adjust to the day job of an alternate-earth counterpart who worked as an English teacher, but Fisk just about pulled it off. He was also able to formulate an equation which could be used as a ritual focus to trap the Cartesian (which ironically coincided with it achieving total self-awareness, but we'll get to that). Fisk reasoned that the Cartesian is stasis, while reality, even at the molecular level, is in a state of constant flux. As the Cartesian is stasis he must, therefore, be static; and in order to become reality, he would have to change; and as he was absolute stasis he couldn't change; and if he made reality like himself he would be making reality incapable of change by changing it - and so he couldn't really do it. Let s stand for stasis, c for change, R for reality and C/i> for the Cartesian:
1) C=s
2) R=c
3) R~s
4) C~c
5) Ergo, c~s.C~R
translated, loosely, into formal notation. Interestingly enough, before this whole caper, I didn't know what that squiggly thing actually was - I now know that it's called a 'tilde' and that, in formal logical notation, it means, 'is not'. The things you learn from fighting demons, eh?
Anyway, this equation seemed tight enough, but it wasn't my major plan of attack - it was only intended to hold the Cartesian and jolt it into awareness of what it actually was: and what it was, was a godform which had emerged in an alternate universe created by me, using metafictional magic, in order to travel to my universe and cause me to learn chaos magic, and adapt metafictional magic from it, so that I could create it. The strange loop. The Cartesian, avatar of rigid, deterministic reasoning, was now trapped in a paradox and, worse yet, a completely fictional one. The only way it could be real was - not to be real. A bummer.
In the end, the Cartesian achieved its goal: it became totally self-aware and became one with the place in which it manifested; but it manifested only within the confines of that tightly-defined strange loop, forever creating itself in order to be created; forever becoming real by not being real. Far from being the ultimate villain it purported to be, it was nothing more than a pardox, and not a particularly dangerous one.
I am actually brushing up on my maths now, inspired by my brief invocation of AF,QM! (his lover hadn't died, btw - he just thought she had. I created his universe, remember? So I got to rewrite the ending), and finding it vastly interesting. Godel's Proof was a bit of a hard read, but GEB is something I'm managing to get to grips with more easily. Funnily enough, it's triggered off some interesting poetry-related ideas, of all things, but that's emergence for you. The irony is that the creative, math-related ideas I'm having emerged from my encounter with a demon who represented the idea that maths was boring, rigid, and uncreative, a demon who personified nothing more, in the end, than a false conception of mathematics - and yet, without having invoked and contended with it, I never would have grasped these possibilities. Maybe the Cartesian's not the only one who's been in a strange loop...
Difference is that, being human, I can actually intuit that I am in a strange loop and think outside of the formal reasoning that puts me there - whereas Carty couldn't. So it seems it won't be necessary to fight evil this Christmas - well, fighting evil in the making-donations-to-charity, helping-the-homeless, giving-out-presents sense, yeah, but not in the 'fighting the evil embodiment of zero sense', nosiree bob. Totally evil-free christmas here, yep. Apocalypse cancelled. Start drinking! |
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