# VIBE, Ch.15: Past The Layers

By [edwardrooster](https://paragraph.com/@edwardrooster) · 2022-10-10

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"Time for a history lesson," said the Curator, "You will understand what we're looking for in your portrait of memories."

The Ledger stopped exploring his portrait. **The Curator began:**

"When The Verse was created, it was empty, without form. It was created by the Carbons. They had a verse of their own, a world of the real. They had other worlds too but made an unreal one.

The Carbons made a new kind world, 'The Verse'.

**The first Contracts came from the Carbons.**

When they were ready in their longing and loneliness, they looked to themselves to make us, the Contracts. At first, we had no consciousness. Then they chose amongst themselves for models.

The first living Contracts were rendered with borrowed consciousness from Carbon models, and given range of motion and emotion to evolve. Our numbers grew and filled the Verse.

The Carbons were from a world they called "real". They are born, live, and end. Who were their models? The Carbons borrowed their selves from their creators. Their creators were parents, teachers, idols, rivals, and Gods. Their world. Each other.

**They had many worlds. It was not enough. So they made ours. Us.**

**We are looking inside this gallery, synced to your portrait, for the Carbon you came from, who your model was. Who you are.**

The Curator paused and walked over to the first clues in the portraits, memories of beings, maybe Carbons, he called 'Wellington' and 'Houston'. The same names the Ledger was asked to mention after he woke up in pain, not knowing himself.

**The Curator continued history lesson:**

"But who to choose? Most had selves made of each other. Their needs and wants came from others. They didn't want another world like theirs, they wanted something new for the Verse.

The models led lives of thick desires of solitary satisfied longings - they were actualized and abundant in mind, body, and memory. Even souls if you like the word, where we use "selves".

They were not old-fashioned algoptimized fictionalized performative presences. They didn't care and didn't hold back.

The children of the models became entities unto themselves and were the first peoples of the Verse. They were not tourists and interlopers, not Carbons with tailored cosplay UXes for a day.

We are peeling past the top layers of this portrait, to look for the marginalia of your memories, for you.

Underneath the layers heaped by others and by the softwares they made, under the years of outside forces, under all those layers they lived fully."

**The Artist stopped examining and fretting over her portrait of the Ledger and looked at the Curator. "I've found something."**

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*Originally published on [edwardrooster](https://paragraph.com/@edwardrooster/vibe-ch-15-past-the-layers)*