Pram was melancholy about his choices. He was a colossus, becoming so because his father exhorted him to think big. His father, he knew, hadn’t meant that in the sense of his body, but Pram delighted in vexing his father by being literal.

That was Pram’s only choice about his life body that he made, eschewing being a female, remaining a heterosexual male, dismissing opportunities to become another race other than Indian, which alluded to his family’s far origins on the Indian sub-continent on Earth. None of them had been back to there since his grandparents left Earth. Relatives did remain on the planet. He often connected with them virtually.

So this was how he’d thought it had gone. This was how the author had written it. But then the writer had realized more of the concept and story. Pram had gone from being large by technological choice to amuse himself to being large as an advantage in combat.

Which, as a character, intrigued Pram. The writer had created a cause and effect paradox about his choice. He was large in one reality but that choice carried over to other reality due to entanglements. Pram understood; he wasn’t certain the writer fully understood it. That, though, was the writer’s problem. He was just a character.

Then the writer had started playing other games with him, introducing him to Chronos. Chronos! Where did this come from? He knew who Chronos was – actually, Chronos the Fourth, or something, although Chronos took pains to explain to him, “I don’t know how many of us actually exist. There are multiple universes in my story, just like in the novel he’s writing about you.” The point was that Chronos was from another novel. While all the characters from the different novels and short stories knew one another, they didn’t socialize, and there wasn’t any reason for the two of them to meet. Yet, here was the writer, amusing himself by introducing Pram to Chronos.

They were in a dark, chilly bar, watching a baseball game taking place on another planet. The game was being streamed in real D. They could more fully immerse themselves, like most of the bar’s patrons chose, but didn’t. Because of his size, Pram couldn’t fit anywhere comfortably. Chronos, inhaling shots of whiskey and beer chasers, noticed and wandered over to chat.

The ballgame became forgotten. They talked about the novels they were in, contrasting the stories and pondering the similarities. Lack of choices in life obsessed the writer. In several of his novels, humans just had no idea what was going on. They always thought they knew and thought they were in control, and made choices according to their body of desires and knowledge. This was because human nature to adjust perceived facts to fill and diminish vacuums of information. Imperfect, they often forgot, ignored or discarded vows, or rationalized an intellectual compromise about their behavior.

“Why are we doing this?” Pram asked.

Sinking a shot of Macallan, Chronos looked off toward the ball game as someone got a hit, triggering motion and cheers. Pram waited. He expected Chronos to know and answer, because Chronos was a demi-god, the offspring of the God of Time. As he thought that, though, Pram knew the answer for himself.

The writer was just practicing writing, playing with prompts in his head, readying himself to sit down and write again. He was learning to write by imagining situations and searching for the setting and details within himself, trying to understand how to resolve scenes and move the story further. Between writing novels, he’d made this scenario up as an intellectual exercise as a writing fix. As the writer said, he was always trying to learn how to write. He meant that he was trying to become a more expressive, insightful writer and story-teller, so he wrote every day, afraid that if he didn’t, he would lose the meager skills he’d acquired. The writer had been sick and unable to write for several days, although he’d tried. Now that he seemed well enough to actually write, he needed to write something. Otherwise, he might get stopped up.

The exercise calmed, relaxed and reassured the writer. Now, creative excess spent, he could begin editing and revising the novel’s first draft.