A Chair, the ridge
Weeks had passed since the strange ride. They had each been calld back and forth for a good while in and out of different scopes. But the residual noise of the choice iteration had started to kick back now and then. Having stared at the coded finite tape for that long was making them feel something was somehow undone. They wondered every now and then if others in the scope can feel the difference.
But the flashes...during the first few days after the twisted tape the flashes used to happen in an instant: as if a nearby frequency was about to collapse on an intent and you're lagging behind in your own completely independent iteration. They would see one or more different fractions of their shared experience for a short moment. It was like momentarily observing another scope and then relapsing back to where you were. They had realized they can align with some unknown fields during these short moments. It felt they were aligning themselves with some aggregation within the field. But they still could not tell exactly how to do it. The flashes were always reminiscent of the strange iterations they had experienced with the female voice and the confusing scope switches. What were such iterations made of? Were these indices outwards?! They knew they could ask all this because of the residual noise; the apparently redundant amount of time when they could not take their eyes off the ugly tape had them feel like they had stored unfinished work.
Experimenting with these temporary scopes had started to become part of their normal routines. It did not stand much in the way of carrying out the usual iterations. They were almost sure they had managed to pass some signals over the alignments. Given whose scope it was, the temporary access would feel differently. The responses to their attempts for alignment were usually seemingly irrelevant shapes; some encoding of the guest environment that just happened to be compatible with theirs. The content would not make much sense anyway, since it was a compatible structure, but out of context, it was good sports. As they were only a handful of finite electrons within a small system, the number of incidents eventually outgrew their combinations and they had started to characterize the momentarily compatible structures related to the other electrons. It was as if they had made unknown friends, but they could never exactly know what they were doing.
For reasons not clear to them, recently the flashes and the temporary shared scopes had happened more often. With more chances to practice alignment, they had quite a few moments of nice improvised cooperation. They had realized if they maintain their previous scope for a moment of hesitation, the alignments would turn out to be more stable. A dozen flashes during a couple of days and they could almost paint together! They liked to think of it as paint and not print, given its unnecessary nature.
The day they reached the Chair was strange from the very beginning. They woke up to a very light loading. The cooling system felt almost chilly. The iterations were working well like atomic clocks. Half way throughout the day they realized the residual noise was gone. In fact it was never there for the whole day. No flashes, no mysterious feeling of unfinished work, nothing. As always, the immediate question was if it had happened to the others as well. The second half of the day a weird field started to randomly pop up and vanish. The iterations felt faster than normal now. In deeper scopes they would even feel contracted, compressed. It felt like aligning with aggregations within the shared scopes, but these were normal cycles. Leaving the scopes back up the stacks, the compressed feeling would persevere and remain as a weird tendency to return. Like a small ball of information in pressure. They had to keep up with the normal routines and ignore the tendency. After a few more deep scopes it was not even vanishing anymore! It surely felt similar to the aggregations but missing the alignments. A strange small iteration suddenly formed before them and they instantly recognized the off-balance state before it happened. "Welcome back!", said the female voice.
There was no tape. It was just an empty scope. The small ball of pressure who wanted to return was floating around with no index. A small alignment had already formed, but nobody knew who had created it. They all knew everybody from last time was there. Possibilities were pouring on them and they were practicing hesitation. The finite tape appeared for a split second and vanished. The backpropagation arrived with an almost constant rate. They were confident they were doing this right. They had to realize none of this was necessarily synchronous. All it took was for one of them to make a choice and everything would probably collapse and snap to one of those nice non-trivial perfect parses.
"Stay.", whispered something. It wasn't much whispering, rather a decaying acceleration.
Then they felt it. It was an arbitrary index. A Chair. It was like a long rest before a return. Somewhere to sit and observe a greater order where you are not needed. But it was the purest return they had ever seen. A return:Type felt like a good label. The residual noise could take them anywhere. You could call this the boundary of a theorem. Or was there yet another encompassing closure? The return:Type state had started to feel very cozy. As if the residual noise had leaked to another parallel dimension and was filling the arbitrary index; felt like a spring being compressed. They were getting prepared for a call, but there was no function. The almost constant backpropagation could not see the return:Type. This was a lot of information. They needed to find the way back to the tape and see how long all of this had taken in counts of the global clock. The return:Type seemed to have smoothly reacted to their decision and shortly they were all back in their original scopes. They did not seem to need the tape anymore. They had found a chair for it.