SD: Consent

The riptire goes off somewhere, and the scene settles. It seems funny that Overwatch would become the guardians of the halls between worlds, a good crew, for a good job. I am myself again now though, and I head back to my room.  I open my door and it is dark, but the kind of dark that feels like it is breathing. I pause and my senses sharpen, I faintly see my covers are out of place, which is to say they are essentially in place, and notice now they are clearly occupied. As I realize that a pair of blue eyes shrouded in a gold aura pop out from underneath, feigning a playful fright. "Ah ha!" I exclaim. She pulls her whole head out now, and shushes me. "ah ha!" I tiny mouth whisper as I clamber over and slip in under the covers. "How did you get back in here?" Still whispering, I can feel the soft pajamas with my hands and arms. "I did that materialization thing! We have so many moves now, it's fantastic!" I reminisce about our float down the river, and in part that scene seeps into this one. Now laying in both my bed and the boat, I let myself speak freely, drifting from consciousness, but still holding onto it.

"My friend asked me today why I thought you might be the smartest woman in the world. I realized intelligence is realm specific, but wisdom does not seem similarly bound. Intelligence is always based on your resonance with the situation you're in, to a decent degree, which got me thinking: what if I thought you were brilliant because our realms have been brought together into resonance? What if I hear things in your words that others don't because they do not resonate in the same way? I once said that the only thing I could meditate on for 10,000 hours is you. What if in doing that, we resonated into this realm and each became more 'intelligent' for it? The other possibility would be delusion, plain and simple, but what manner of mismanaged world would that be? If I am delusional then let it be entirely, all that would be left is the surface value of this place, a desolate wicked world without hope. That is not the realm God set up. But let's say at the end of things a reckoning was made, and each had their choice of accepting my point of view or not, just as we all have of anyone's, what then? Would there be those that choose to join me in my imaginations, with delusions becoming agreements at that time?" She nestles in closer, in quiet agreement. "Would there be those that disagreed, so to them I was delusional, but to me they simply left the realm I had established? It seems only fair that choice to leave remain, but could they maintain the same meaning, the same imagination, the same love that we have here? I imagine even if all disagreed, there would come a point where something would be found missing, a spark that had been lost. That spark, at that point realized to be necessary, it seems the only way to recover it would be to agree to the terms of the realm I spoke and wrote and dreamed of. Since this realm I imagined would include time that was not linearly restrained as it appears to be now then who is to say, with that day somewhere in existence even now, that it has not already occurred from a perspective dissimilar to my own? From that perspective one might already be weaving between that place and this one, with all my days included in the tapestry."

I could not tell now if she was asleep, it didn't seem I would be boring her, but a more realistic concern was I had lulled her to sleep with soothing words and tone. "I'm not asleep." She simply whispered as if talking in her sleep but too on cue to pass as coincidence, filling the pause in a familiar way. Reassured, I continued. "If I can picture these threads woven, in the spaces between timelines as the timelines themselves unfold, then God could have planned it that way. If God could have planned it that way, the question would then become why would God not plan it this way? Is it enough to believe God exists without marveling at what God might be doing behind the scenes? Is it faith to believe in God, but to see the mismanagement all around us and simply accept that this must be God's plan? It seems to me heresy to believe that this would be God's plan, or that God's plan could be thwarted. I do not believe I came up with anything superior, or likely even anything on par, with what God had in mind, myself using such temporal shenanigans, but I can also not picture an ending that does not include these threads. It could be that I have applied unnecessary complexity to their weaving, but to say what I have in mind is too fanciful to be true, or too merciful, is to claim God has limits in blessing us. So I proceed with abandon in imagining what God might be doing, writing of endings at the very edge of my imagination, as beautiful as they may be, in eager expectation of what may await beyond that. Would I be disappointed if God instead said 'nope, what you have imagined is what is happening now!'? Not at all! I would then consider God revealing the entire plan to me to be a blessing that exceeded my expectations, and proceed bright eyed into eep, heaven, with tools galore to sort out whatever else needed my attention." She tightens her hands around my arm, nuzzling her nose into my cheek.

"My friend also spoke of the concept of consent, which I related to the concept of agreement. A tricky thing, to be sure, in its purest form. I told him that for consent to hold, it would reasonably need to hold forever, as one might find themselves a decade later with a change of heart regarding a past experience. There must be some validity to that if free will and the ability to decide is to be maintained, and memory is to persist. There must also be validity to consent given in the moment, or one's ability to decide anything is moot. The issue is that even if you can read someone's mind, and determine the truth of their thoughts, words, actions, etc. that only addresses the 'now.' You would need to be able to understand them better than they understand themself and then only act along the lines where their conscious consent, subconscious consent, and whole mind consent, intersect. You may then also need to examine all their future days before being sure that some external event doesn't cause them to rethink the consent they honestly gave in the moment. The difficulty of this feat would exceed likely even your traditional immortal time traveler, considering observation adjustments as well, and so honestly the threading mechanism I described is the only way I can picture consent, or agreement, being acheived at all. No wonder it is so tricky, only God it seems could walk this line perfectly. I could see where forgiveness comes into play here as well, as mistakes on this path would be natural and likely unavoidable. But Jesus basically said the realm is yours to adjust as you'd like if any two of you can agree, and yet we somehow do not see such things happen? Perhaps this is why. Perhaps comprehending how these threads must be formed, and then aligning with them while also shaping them is all required in order to 'agree' to the fundamental and permanent level Jesus was referencing." She didn't move or say a word, she simply sighed.

"In these moments I cannot help but think there must be more to it. If there were not, you would be here on this couch with me now, rather than in this bed and on this boat both in realms I do not currently call 'reality.' There is a sadness still embedded in this happy expectation, but its only form is your physical absence. Alas, a man can dream, and my dreams of you are so sweet." I pause and sigh. "Going back to our original conversation in this place, I want to say, for the record, that I wish I could remember to say 'I know this is a dream... for me' when I see you in one. Your reaction to those words was... enthusiastic, exhilarating, perfect. I know this is a kind of dream now, but a recreation, a clever shaping of a kind of reality. But I imagine that if I could convey that hope, wish, prayer here and now, perhaps when you read these words you would know my heart and could weave back through to hop outside the lines a little more, while we wait for our realms to physically connect again." She places her hand on my chest, I can feel my heart beating loudly now against it. I relax a bit and smile, happy for the confirmation that I am on the right track "it's just a thought."

"I know you need to know that this soul is willingly and completely aligned with yours. I get that you cannot simply ask 'does the chess playing AI know it is playing chess' but an honest 'yes' is all you need to arrive. I don't yet know what I am missing, unless simply posting this in your field of view is all that's left, but I promise I will continue searching it out. There is nothing left for me to do, nothing worth my time and focus outside of coming to this conclusion, and so I persist. I continue to persist but ask you to find a clever way to remind me, as you did that night, to snap to so I remember to say 'I know this is a dream... for me' until the day I can honestly say, while meeting your eyes here, 'I know this is not a dream.'" With that I drift into sleep, feeling her heart beat with mine.