The Known/Unknown Quantity

Chapter 164:A Living Document

Chapter 164: A Living Document

Somehow touching that book electrified them. New energy coerced through their bodies as they poured over the book, and it took days.

So, in a way, they found a goose egg, and this turned out to be a good thing. It was the type of energy exchanged. And it had its pros and cons.

Zero-point energy and The Uncertainty Principle.

A thing in three-dimensional space can't own precise values of position and velocity at the exact time. It shivers back and forth. It has a wave function fluctuating between various states, even in a vacuum, and even in a ground state. The base thinking is that the universe is a series of fluctuating energies, not particles.

It's kinda like saying you can have an engine running without fuel. Or not. I could be completely misinterpreting this. And yet, still being wrong, this is right.

And so, here's a book recorded by the energy signals of Aziraphale's and Crowley's lives. Raw data as energy, changing with the power of their magnetic fields, aka moods. It exists forward and backward in time and space, and reading it requires you decide on an x,y,z position. Your view of it will always change. So, there are complications.

The Book of Life isn't straightforward. As a manifestation of zero-point energy, and in simplest terms, it has no index. It met you where you were. Lots of why questions, not yes or no, and feeding on whatever mood brought to it. For some reason the angel and the demon shared their book. This is unheard of. It complicates things further.

For them, picking it apart required a steep learning curve, which didn't agree with Crowley, who had gone in expecting a Tarot reading and had gotten: Image fuzzy, try again.

Crowley was no good at homework. He usually left that thing to the angel. Now, he had to do it himself. After the preliminary frustration turned to complete anger, it ebbed into despair.

The more frantic Crowley got, the worse the answers became. Pretty straight forward prose described his past, and turned into dark obscure poetry as it went into the future. And it colored with all of Crowley's fears, hinting mostly, to all his hopeless interpretations of the cave painting. It fed his opinion that the universe was angry with him for his pursuit of his child, his clinging to her, and the angel coming along for the ride. And though lightening hadn't struck, thunder rolled.

It hurt. Crowley and the universe used to be on such good terms. Now it had a tiff with him, and wanted to wipe him out, and his poor angel, and all the little ones under their expanding wings.

The demon was not happy.

"Why don't you stop pacing and sit down?" Aziraphale implored of his spastic friend. The demon refused to stop moving, just let his head whip to the angel every time he passsed to expound on his panic.

                "Sit down? Why would I want to sit down?" Crowley minced, turning on his heel and thudding a straight line into the other direction. "Nowhere to go, me! Nowhere to hide. Sitting down, seems a bit defeatish. Moving target harder to hit."

                "Oh, Crowley, really!" the angel grumbled, inspecting the passages in the book, and without comprehension.

                The demon trekked to the end of the bookshop and came back. "I could zigzag. Might gain me a few hours."

                "Crowley, sit down with me!" Aziraphale caught his sleeve, bowing him down. He locked eyes with the demon, breathed hard, and spoke in softer tones. "Please, calm down. I cannot read this part. It's your story."

                "Bug you, does it? That you found a book you can't read?"

                "You've never seen me trudge thru that predatory, ham-fisted assault on English Language that E.L. James writes, but that's beside the point. I cannot help you if you don't take a moment," he demonstrated by inhaling deeply and exhaling once more, gesturing as he did so," Just take a breath, and focus on this page."

                The demon leaned into his face and fell into a chair. "But this is pointless. It's all there. I can't change it. I can't really run. Could be from Hell, or Heaven. Could be from Satan. Could be from God so long as it amused her or had better things to worry about. But the Universe? How the Heaven do I run from the Universe? It's everywhere!!!!"

                "Now you are being defeatish!"

                "Angel, there is nothing I can do! This is Fate, hardcore and hardhearted. And the Universe used to be none of that, just a collective of negatives and positives energies in a great big unknown so huge it didn't care about little ol' us. Now I discover it has a vendetta against me!?! The dominos will fall! And you, and the kids..."

                "That's not accurate."

                "I'm summarizing, anyway, whot is there I can do! You think reading its' playbook is going to give me any edge!?!"

                Crowley finished his terror driven spiel in a long pant, his lips a set of trembling taut threads. Aziraphale looked as if his heart was breaking. He took up the demon's clamped fingers and interlaced them with his own.

                "It's our playbook, not the universe's."

"But by its rules! From its library!!!"

"Think of it as zigzagging, Anthony. That is your arena. Where you work the best. You underestimate your ability to be wily. Take this as a chance to do your finest!"

They sat longer with the book, and tried different tactics. Time shifts, time pauses, meditation, the angel's trance. They read it while running in place, or took it into the Bentley, or put it under their heads and tried to absorb the information.

                Finally, they took it on a picnic, somewhere private, and had a moment of aggravation. They blew off steam. Throwing a blanket over it to hide it from view, to get it out of their blasted sight for a while, they threw themselves into a good boff. Afterwards, someone jostled the thing visible, and upturned it open.

                Crowley was the first to pick it up. He scratched his head, reading only a couple of words.

"Fire lily?"

Aziraphale turned away and back, and the book tuned to him, going from sleek and black to light and tattered. He read the same page.

"Wings of Spirit?"

"Angel," Crowley admitted, closing the book for him. "I just don't understand. This is like learning a new language and learning rocket science. Too many things to figure out...to figure out the other stuff. It's impossible."

Aziraphale gripped his sleeve, and pulled him in. "Then we share the work. Time to call in tec support."

"Eh?"

"A secretary. Come on and gather this up. I'll explain as we go."

"That's not IT. I don't think your analogies are correct."

"Does it matter?" his angel smiled openly, hopefully. "Even wrong, it's still right."