Chapter Six: Cause

I finally saw the cause of my misery and pain. I finally saw the conspiracy's core, the thing that moves the world around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, setting everything up just right.

I was looking for DEATH again. I wanted to ask her so many questions, questions that plagued my mind and made me restless and sleepless. I looked for DEATH and I found something worse.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye. I do not know if I could see it if I tried looking directly upon it, but it was out of the corner of my eye that I saw it and it was in the corner of my eye that it stayed.

It was in the outline of a woman. The figure of a woman. But it was just the outline. A stark white outline, like a chalk drawing done in the middle of the room. And inside the outline was...nothing. A blank white nothingness.

I stopped what I was doing and just waited. I waited for it to move, for it to walk forward on its nothing legs and reach out with its nothing arms. But it didn't. It didn't move at all. And I knew: this was the cause. The primal cause, the cause of all things. The conspiracy in the cracks, all of it.

This outline of nothing. This woman in white.

At that moment, I felt my fingers move without me. They sought release, to type words into a keyboard. I didn't want to move, but my fingers wanted to type, to write something out. Something wanted to be born in letters and sentences, but I was fixed in place. Finally, my hands found a pen and one wrote on the other with frantic scribblings.

I glanced down at my hand and then glanced back up, but the outline of the woman was gone. Or perhaps it was still there, but I could no longer see it.

I looked down at my hand again to see what my fingers had written. There were just two words and I, unfortunately, had no idea what they meant:

NEWCOMB'S PARADOX.