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“You are what they call the ‘Consciousness.’”
“Is that so?” It asks. Su doesn’t even know how he should define this entity before him - it is both everything and nothing, both nothing and something, both comprehensible and incomprehensible, both vast and tiny. “Your kind intrigues me. So insistent on confining me to a single label.”
“We would be unable to comprehend you otherwise.” Su defends, but It chuckles.
“Aren’t some things better left misunderstood?”
Su opens his mouth to object, then thinks of a boy with ash-gray hair, bright blue eyes, who’d once been one of his closest friends.
He’s not sure he wants to understand Kevin’s intentions anymore.
“I can feel your doubt. I can also feel your acceptance.”
“Because both always exist. It’s just which one is the predominant emotion.” Su realizes, and It claps its hands - or at least, that’s how Su interprets it. Hmm. Perhaps the Consciousness is messing with him, adapting its mannerisms to help him understand.
“Very good. You know much already.” Finally, It places another chess piece down, and Su analyzes the board before them (him? Them? He has yet to see the form of the entity that keeps him company for this years-long, perhaps decades-long game of chess they’ve had) once more.
The chess pieces are both tangible and not. Both real, and not real. Both imaginary and quantum.
Su has yet to determine where exactly he is.
“Your thoughts stray.”
“This is a curious place.” He only responds. There is a group of his pieces that are at risk of encirclement in the far corner. There is also a group of his pieces that are slowly being backed away into the side of the board. He wonders how the entity would react if he did not play by the rules.
“You seek a truth.”
“I seek an answer.” Su says simply, placing his piece down - a gambit, one that he is sure will fail, but he does not need to win this battle to win the one thirty moves ahead. “I will judge for myself whether or not the both truth-and-lie is a truth in my eyes.”
“You surprise me at every turn, Enlightened One.” The entity places another shimmering piece on the board, ready to capture his collection of pieces in the far corner he observed earlier. “I have not been this entertained in eons.”
“Not even by others of the Previous Era?”
“Previous Era?” Su cannot see the powerful and omniscient being before him, but he gets the impression that It is tilting its head curiously. “Your Era was one in many. The cycle has gone on for millennia - no, much farther than that… old enough that your kind has yet to coin a term for it. You are simply the first to preserve records of an age past.”
“I suppose that is both an achievement and a condemnation.”
“Very good.” The mass of stars before him seems to twinkle, before Su’s eyes, and he startles, just briefly. In his time at this plane of existence, nothing has changed beyond what he has moved. At times, he wonders if time passes at all - but when he’d asked about it, the entity had simply said that time held no meaning.
“We are everywhere and nowhere, all at once.” It had explained. “We are all in the past, present and future. We are nothing. We are everything. There are more of my kind - I am simply one of the only that has deigned to observe this universe in particular.”
On some days (hours. Minutes. Seconds. He doesn’t know anymore, and likely never will know) Su thought that it is ever so paradoxical.
“Nothing is paradoxical about any statement I have told you, Enlightened One.” It had said in response to unspoken thoughts. “One thing can be both true and false at the same time.”
Su muses to himself as he sets down another piece. This time, It takes longer than usual to respond with a move of its own - he has just given up an entire army, nearly, of pieces on the board.
The flame-chaser likes to think that he is twenty-nine moves ahead, but perhaps he is simply sixty-four moves behind.
“Is your kind separate from you?” Su asks.
The Consciousness is silent.
Su does not say anything as It places another piece, claiming the translucent, glowing stones on the board for itself, nor does he say anything as another one of his stones slip from his fingers onto the intended destination, ready to start the conquest.
“A very good question, Enlightened One.” The Consciousness mutters, and it almost sounds proud. “The answer is both yes and no.”
If Su were not fifty thousand years old, if he were not a pioneer from the older ages, if he were not here at all - he would’ve thought that these conversations were utterly absurd.
But he is not the carrier of the Signets of Bodhi for no reason.
“You are not a separate entity.”
“I am not.” It agrees.
“And yet you are distinct. Parts of a whole.”
“A crude simplification. But you are correct, in the broadest of senses.”
“So currently, I am communicating with thousands of minds.”
“Millions.” It corrects. “An infinite amount.”
“I had a friend who would be at your throat by now. If you had one.” Su recalls fondly. “Her name was Mobius.”
“Another one of the pioneers of your age. She was rather ingenious.” The Consciousness sets down yet another piece. “In theory, she could’ve lived forever. But the Truth would not have allowed it.”
“The Truth is not one singular statement.”
“No,” It agrees, “it is not.”
Su’s hands grasp the air, and just like that, another stone is in his hand. He does not think too much before he places it down. He has it all under his control.
Control, he still has to learn, is an illusion.
Slowly but surely, as the Consciousness places piece after piece after piece, Su realizes his mistake. Before long, the already-crowded board is completely full, and upon counting Su finds out, with sinking dread, that he has lost.
“Ah, a shame.” The Consciousness muses. “It appears that you have lost this round.”
“‘This round?’” Su inquires, but he does not need to ask much longer - in a blink, the board is suddenly four times bigger than it used to be, and he is looking into a vast and far bigger battlefield.
He has only lost a quarter.
“You have only lost a quarter.” It tells him, and Su’s eyes are already darting around, strategies running through his head a million per minute. In an almost amusing way, the Consciousness makes its move - and Su thinks, again.
It goes like that.
Millennia after millennia, eon and eon, eternity after eternity.
“He does not know.”
“He will learn, one day. And then I will tell him.” The Entity says to itself and others and everyone and no one, and it smiles, hidden amongst the stars, as it does so.
“Until then, this playing board will keep expanding - forever unable to lose, perpetually unable to win.”