-Spencer- Pages of Theory

Y’know, sometimes we cling to the most stupid things.

we’re all irrational and in a state of denial, because we don’t have the time to properly grieve to deal with what’s happened.

i’m really no better in that regard

but i think I’m tired of leaving my messes to be explained for me. I can do this myself. As long as I have one last fucking breath left in me, i can do this myself.

 

Page theory is something you’ve all seen thrown around occasionally; Elaine did a write-up but I felt that maybe i should be telling explaining this myself. i understand it best, after all.

Let’s get something straight first.

Page Theory isn’t mine. I wrote it, but it’s not mine.

The first time I heard anything like it was one night with Matt in the desert, looking up at the stars. It’s his. I stole it from him but that hardly matters because he’s dead, and took the credit. None of you knew him. I figured he wouldn’t have minded, wasn’t that kind of guy. Wanted to help. Always, always wanted to help. Helped me after I ran, after I saw Him for the first time in my life and didn’t feel worship, but fear. But Matt was there.

He was fucking brilliant. You all would’ve loved him. They say personality is a learned quality but Matt somehow knew how to be kind and loving and utterly insane all at once despite the cult trying to beat it out of him. He ran at twelve, straight into the fucking desert, and survived for eight years all by himself. Him and Father.

They didn’t realize how good he was; just assigned him to be a lower echelon because they were too stupid to see how smart he was.

Matt had a stutter, and they thought he was useless because of it.

They were wrong.

They were wrong about me, too; thinking I was so fucking.. .a rising star, they said, it won’t leave me alone, they won’t…

it was Matt who gave me a real, proper name

it was Matt who told me to look up at the stars and think about how the universe worked

it was Matt who told me to never stop running

it was Matt who threw me into The Path, even though he claimed to not be able to use it

it was Matt who took the easy way out

 

… Matt told me that when he was out in the desert, it was hard to imagine anyone else existed. That he thought that maybe… the known universe was like an inbox, a framework.

In that framework, your view of it, your perception of the world, like an ever-changing snapshot of a whole universe.

Then I came into the picture, and my snapshot got layered on top of Matt’s. Our snapshots, our pages, interacted with each other freely. The rock on my page was the same as the rock on his page. But sometimes, we saw Him; I’d slowly see the stars swirl into nothing and Matt would just collapse to the ground and the black shit that ran out of his nose smelled awful and then He would be gone as quickly as he arrived. That was when our pages de-synchronized, and Matt was pretty sure that was the “Tall Bastard’s” fault.

We’d sit and talk then, because we didn’t want to talk about what we’d just seen and sleep wasn’t a possibility. Matt would talk about “cities” and “towns” and even “countries” and how all these people lived together in one place, how there must be SOME out there who knew about Father, how their pages must even be different from ours, how maybe even whole worlds were different. If our experiences with Father were shared but unique, did that mean that even the people we hunted, our targets, had pages as well?

It was a month afterwards before Matt tried to flesh out the idea of Loops. this was after we had stumbled upon a small one in the desert and tried experimenting with it. It was Matt who figured out that Loops were blank until someone filled them with something. It was Matt who tried to craft without any experience, trying to write over the empty space with something new. It was Matt who theorized that the Loops were the tiny spaces in between each page, that the miniscule areas could vary in size and flexibility to revisions and changes. It was Matt that figured out that you could tie the Loop so someone and let their own mind fill the gaps like some sort of infinite feedback reacharound.

Not bad for someone who didn’t even know how to read. They never taught him how, he said, because it wasn’t worth the time.

It was the night before everything went to hell that he told me in hushed tones about what he thought about Father, how he functioned like… a nail going through all the pages at once, how a nail isn’t supposed to be through the pages at all. How he wasn’t sure how the pages and the spaces got formed in the first place, but how maybe exposure to Father caused you to form your own page, how he thought The Path was the edges of the pages, so you could hop from layer to layer with ease. How maybe just because we were told that we were to be something from birth, that didn’t mean that we had to be that.

 

… i’ve tried to build on this, tried to find some answers, but Matt’s stuff is the best framework I’ve got. It explains so much; why we all can see Him at the same time in different places, how the Path shuttles us around, how some of the stranger, supernatural happenings can, well, happen, how M’s rules don’t work for everyone. A place like the House is a complete anomaly; how can there be a constant in a blank space…?

I don’t know.

I don’t know why the forest is suddenly invading or why the Loop is suddenly on the offensive. I don’t know why people that are dead should not be here walk through the halls when I wander.

i need more time.

Fuck. I… fixing this comes first. Then Doc can cut me open and we can all celebrate with tea and crumpets.

Not much longer.

I promise.