The Margin Where Nothing Was Ever Written
Herein be gathered five accounts, each set down by a hand that did not survive the setting-down with its reason intact, concerning the entity—if "entity" be a word that can be made to apply—designated only as X.
X is not a being of malice, nor of hunger, nor of any motive that the sciences of men have named. X is, rather, a necessary contradiction made manifest: a thing and the negation of that thing, true simultaneously and in every possible world, as Rucker's infinite-dimensional manifolds are true—save that where Rucker's mathematics opened doors, X's mathematics opens doors upon doors that are also walls, walls that are also the absence of doors, ad infinitum, world without end, amen.
A mathematician of an unnamed university inscribeth a single line of modal notation upon his chalkboard at the dead hour, and findeth it, come morning, neither erased nor written. A philosopher who hath spent thirty years walking the Kripkean worlds in search of one wherein X doth not obtain, findeth such a world at last—and findeth that this world of absence is itself a province of X, that the absence and the presence are the selfsame substance turned two ways at once. A creature wrought of pure negation, sent to unmake X with a single uttered ¬X, discovereth that the negation was already and forever true, and is driven into an eternal twilight betwixt function and dissolution.
A cartographer, employing dimensions upon dimensions in the Ruckerian manner, addeth axis after axis to contain X's contradiction, only to watch each new axis birth a fresh contradiction in its turn—until his final map is a blank page bearing the single, terrible inscription that the map and the territory are one, and are not one. And last, an ancient order of Architects—keepers of consistency across a thousand domains—attempt to define X so thoroughly that contradiction can find no purchase, only to discover that their very definition, at its final clause, must declare itself false.
What bindeth these five accounts is not narrative, nor character, nor even chronology—for X permitteth none of these to remain stable in its presence. What bindeth them is the slow, mounting horror of minds—mathematical, philosophical, ontological—each in its own discipline the equal of any that hath lived, each brought low not by violence but by comprehension. For X doth not destroy. X merely is, and is not, and the merely understanding of this is sufficient to unmake the understander.
The reader is warned: this volume, too, is a system sufficiently expressive to describe X. Let the reader judge for themselves what follows from that.