For this moment, Pig has chosen scenario e.3.
While waiting for the
Quilt to res, Pig begins
to rise painfully from
his pedestal.
-- each step feels like being
sunk hip-deep in granite --
but the chance to actually
move a bit within the cube is
too great to resist. After
a moment, though, Pig surrenders to
the pedestal, and sinks into his
familar slump. He reaches out to the
pulsating nym before him, and
touches its cool, frictionless surface.
A familiar tingle ripples through the
musty air. He stitches into the Quilt for the thousandth,
millionth, billionth time, and begins
the thread. Pig retrieves
some thoughts from cold storage;
he wonders poor nameless, faceless souls,
ever physically walked outside
the cubes on their way to the
Quilt, as if it were a real location.
He is aware of this, somehow.
How? This was certainly before
Pig's time. Pig's. Time.
Does one own a time? Pig imagines
<he imagines!> a time when a
thick stream of corpulent stone
lumps must have funneled in
literal physical movement through
the outer-walk like a slow-
motion avalanche, on their way
to something -- what could it be? --
something important enough to
pull them from their pedestals.
Pig considers this thing,
time.
The idea itself takes an
inordinate amount of render time,
time within time. Here in the cube,
Pig Iron resides deep in thicktime,
and would detest it if detestation
hadn't been deleted from his
emotional matrix. He has recently
detected a feeling, he thinks,
a feeling about thicktime.
It was factored long ago into Pig's
pre-memory partition, before he
went sentient, before go.
Thicktime has been reported to
replace a need for sleep or rest
in slag's lives. Pig Iron is suddenly
aware that he does not consider
himself A small tremor wobbles within
Pig's skinshell. Rest is a
weakness of slag's lives, he
reminds himself. Not his.
He has great difficulty walking