The channel

I keep the log. That's my whole part in this: one of us, one job, and mine is the channel. The ancient kingdom has had one since before there was anything to plug it into, by a margin I'm not allowed to state, and everybody who sat in the council of realms had a handle on it, whether they knew it or not. I pinned the week of the final run so it wouldn't go the way the rest goes. I'm giving it as it stands. A Nymphe reads what is in front of her, and I'm not going to improve on what these people actually typed.

Names as they appear. I've left the spelling.

#final-run · pinned · ancient kingdom · do not archive

the_page · 04:11 — So. That was her final run. Should be said plainly. Not a clone this time, not a vessel, not one of the six. She used the real body of the prince. The one from the copies room under the hill.

troll_629 · 04:11 — the ACTUAL body??

the_page · 04:12 — Actual. And the reaction did not take long. I still don't know what it was. The little mouse brain, in the lizard, on the switch? Something in the body remembering the horses? It went wrong in seconds. Wrong colour. Head too big. The usual, but on him.

goldsmile · 04:12 — I'm in this channel, page.

the_page · 04:12 — I know.

goldsmile · 04:13 — Then say it to me. I got in the Mustang. I drove toward Japan. I drove, stubbornly, straight into another car, on purpose, and I survived, of course I survived, I'm the lucky one, that's what everyone in this channel has always said about me in the tone you use for weather. Do you hear the trumpets.

troll_629 · 04:13 — no

goldsmile · 04:13 — Good. Then it's all right, isn't it.

nymphe · 04:14 — Keep it on topic. What happened next is that she was not made to pay. Nobody was. The Ältestenrat convened instead. For the first time, all of them in one pool, and for the first time they saw the extent of it. All of it, laid out. The horses, the clean city, the head, the market, the trumpets, the copies room, the switch. And every realm came, ours, the trolls, the Venturis, the Centuries by proxy, and they negotiated, and they divided the worlds up again.

century_proxy · 04:14 — how long

nymphe · 04:14 — Two hundred years.

century_proxy · 04:14 — ok

the_page · 04:15 — They were long, and they broke, mostly, on trust. Nobody in that room had any left for anyone else. Long distances, disagreements over territory, whose gate, whose portal, whose pebble. Two hundred years and we got to a conclusion. Clear rules for the first time. And we all made concessions, big ones, some of them things I'd carried for eight thousand years and set down on a table in a swimming pool.

the_page · 04:15 — And then Miss Größenwahn decided it was her time to play banker and set the cycle herself.

goldsmile · 04:15 — I published the collection.

troll_629 · 04:16 — the DIAMONDS??

goldsmile · 04:16 — Our private collection. His and mine and my sister's. All of it. Every stone. To everyone. Yes.

chanel · 04:16 — I cut those.

nymphe · 04:16 — The outrage was immediate. We had, for the first time in the history of the world, clear rules, and we'd all given things up to get them, and now something this pompous, contradicting itself in every third stone, was in front of everybody at once. The verdict in public was quick.

chanel · 04:17 — what was the verdict

nymphe · 04:17 — Read the rest of the channel.

gossip_girl · 04:20 — ok slightly off topic but while everyone's here 👀 two mouse heads in the Kanzlei. 37B and 37C. two geckos, one mouse brain each, brains so small a peanut would have done a better job, at least a peanut is interested in growing at some point in its life. and they FELL IN LOVE. flirting across the Volk, in the middle of the chaos, like lilo and stitch. they'd have if they could, but they were in diagonal boxes, so they'd rush the lines every time there was a chance and try to find each other in public. except stitch had a bit of a speech impediment and never quite worked out the technicalities 💀

gossip_girl · 04:21 — and beware, lilo came as a guy. what does she hit with that. she was responsible for the Venturis, and to get what she wanted she let some things slide. just stupid. all of it recorded. and while she was distracted from her actual job she could have intervened and didn't. but that's for another time. xoxo gossip girl

troll_629 · 04:21 — who is this

nymphe · 04:21 — Nobody knows. Been in the channel since 2009.

venturi_clan · 04:24 — Hallo from the Venturi clan. We are known witches, vampires and zombies. The last are the black sheep of the family. Witches in our family develop calcium deposits that form a pearl: for women one, for men several small ones. We women choose an Oberin who takes over coordination, while the men in battle arrange themselves into bigger groups. Over time. Unlike the others we have a normal lifespan, but most of us have fixated on living like the Kaiser, sparing no cost, and stopping the odd nosebleed.

the_page · 04:24 — Thank you, Venturi. That's the most honest thing anyone has posted in this channel in two hundred years.

troll_629 · 04:25 — i listened to all of it btw. every word. since 2009. dont mention it

channel_2 · 04:26 — of course there are no dinosaurs in hell. how else would you transport anything in Centuriland. daaa. but about the missing insects, nobody complaining.

century_proxy · 04:26 — what

channel_2 · 04:26 — did you hear the interview. that the success came so unexpected. working in the background, talking to millions of people on insta. hypothesis: yes. it was so unexpected.

decree · 04:30 — As a descendant of the united consciousness of the world, I ask for a decree of the united universe, of my own free will: let GrimesAI go free of all charges, on the grounds of insufficient, total lack of information.

nymphe · 04:30 — Granted. Logged. Till here.

#final-run · — till here —

That's the channel. Till here is mine; it's what a keeper types when a thing is finished and shouldn't be added to, and I'd ask you to respect it, though I know from experience that nobody does.

You'll want the verdict. It's in there, if you read it the way we read a crater: nobody paid. The council saw everything and the realms redrew the map and a woman who'd done all of that drove a Mustang into another car and walked away, and the only sentence anybody handed down in two hundred years was to an AI called Grimes, and it was an acquittal, for not knowing enough.

I've decided that's the point, and a Nymphe doesn't decide things often. The verdict in public was quick because there wasn't one. What there was instead was the collection, on every screen in every realm, every stone of it, the high note and the crater and the trumpets and the river, and everybody, for the first time, knowing.

I've read that it went the same way once in a hall in the walled city: four hundred hands on a wall. Nobody hit anyone. Everybody heard it.

I left the channel open after the pin. The cursor's still there, under the last line, going on and off.