A short story from 2017

Born into this world by a lion. The lion bears, eager to have you partake in it

Drops you off with an unintended rough throw, thus communicating that you have been

brought here but must stand on your own. But you fall through the floor because it

is of a wholly different substance than your mind, but not your body which remains,

your mind going down into the basement many stories down, in a different building.

They are twin towers though, and the knowmes have an elaborate system of ropes and

pullies and chains of command to coordinate between the two, or so they say, reluctantly,

after first denying that you ever came apart to begin with. As if this was

something unintended, some embarrassing mistake on their part. The knowmes come

in fours, or maybe twos, they are hard to tell apart, at least at some temperatures. None

of the thermostats in the labyrinthine basement are synced anyway, but this still seems to hold

true, as you walk you see them change.

The opposite of the remainder they wail, the opposite of the remainder.

You don't remember the bit about the lion, but one day the whole story was just there in your mind,

feeling like it had been there longer than forever, before your mind existed, and it struck you as right.

The others had built an embassy to negotiate with the knowmes and they stopped believing in lions

years ago, depending on what part of the basement you are counting from.

Stand on your own stand, and stand the stand in opaque vacuum background.

Is it falling? How can you tell?

"The world operates in bi-cycles" Ambassador 1 profess, "so the knowmes say".

"The cycles are chimera, only the frame is actual" Ambassador 2 counters. "And the knowmes speak not,

they move their mouths and your ear produce the sound."

Most of the ambassadors only listen with one ear, they are busy counting knowmes.

They spread sheets of evenly lined paper all over the basement, and put little orange

and turquoise stickers on the knowmes as they count them. "You put a sticker on it and say you know it,

if it is orange or turquoise, but really it was neither or before you tried counting it."

This pronunciation aligned with all of the best numbers, but as they took it into a count all the paper

scrambled and folded and tore into two pieces, four if you count the now exposed undersides.

Were the others there on the back of the lion?

They break a thermostat to measure the fluid inside, and to everyones surprise it's not fluid but a cascade

of tiny thermostats that flow out of the shattered instrument, all showing different temperatures except a few

but that was probably just a coincidence.

"This proves my point" says everyone.

But no one had a point, they all just had parallell lines.