The Immense Journey

Of late Iris had not known contentment, so she had decided to leave for the night. Her mind was not on Olivia, however, but Amelie. Despite how their relationship had ended and the myriad mental issues both had, there was stability to it; Amelie was needy and Iris had needed to be needed. She had felt a dependence from Amelie, cultivated it so that Amelie would not leave her, and for all of it she had left Amelie herself. But relationships are no unidirectional ecosystem: she had recalled Amelie shaming her for not "looking after her more", and Iris felt again caught in that language of masculine obligation and need.

She found a local lake she might Timeline beside. As a teenager she had focused Phantom upon a single spot of vegetation and reverted thousands of years into the past, pulling from the opening of a remote era its fauna, those receded physical forms that by Revenant could converge again in observable existence. Now she focused Kairos upon a single patch of lake until its webs were fully extended, then began reversing time, skimming through a mountain she supposed she might meet again in the future. The plants became leafless and odd and stiff, their textures molding in the streams of past geographies forming around her, until she found a dry eternity where she could pull out a patch of water.

It was a pond of reek and corruption, where the red light of an oxygen-starved atmosphere stood between water weeds. Overlaying this water was a thin film of slime that scientists believe, by some unknown impetus, can produce life, although no dissection has succeeded in extracting from these constituent elements the prose that rests in a writer's ear nor the music in the mind of a conductor. The conditions under which higher orders of consciousness form, themselves a shell over layers of base instincts, remain elusive, and it is unlikely that a key will ever twist open that house of life.

As Iris observed it, she hurriedly stiffened the edges of her Timeline so it would not leak into another era. She continued to quiver her extended wave of time, observing the fluctuations of the ecosystem around her. Over tens of millions of years had these apparitions of cellulose and water twisted themselves into several unique organizations. Only from the standpoint of ageless spider and host could she see which adaptations would wither away before successful reproduction, or what specializations had become woven into that generalized set of traits that became mandatory for survival.

These fish had been perfectly adapted for their own environments, yet in their movements, reactions and reciprocal causations, would they again compose an environment uninhabitable for themselves. The process of evolution is survival, yet its own reasoning; life at unease with itself.

Iris became disturbed, and as she glanced up, she wondered if she might similarly find herself caught in this stratified chronology, observed by some unknown creature of no resemblance to her origin, if what she had thought essentially Iris was a weave of dust that would become some rudimentary function of a future self's eye, a living creature that flowed with little consistency from one age to the next.

Again she observed these fish. They would touch, in passing, the edges of her Timeline and that modern ecosystem for which they were unprepared, then shrivel from it as if some primitive expression of disdain, but they were blameless. They had traversed, through the help of another, a dimension that they were not physically equipped for. They had adapted to all problems presented to them and believed that the stream of time culminated with themselves, projecting only their present selves into the future, or a figure she had hoped might greet her at the shore of these more difficult human regions, until the sight receded and she realized that there were no waves.