Chapter 3: The Long Walk Through the Doubtful Woods
The universe is full of big questions, but sometimes the biggest questions are the ones that make your heart feel heavy. As time moved forward, Johnnie found himself trapped inside a labyrinth of deep uncertainty.
A shadow of a thought had crept into his mind, and it wouldn't leave. What if, he worried, the television screen went dark because of me? What if my counting, or my watching, or something I did made the big clock stop and took Jemima away?
When a mathematician gets an error in their equation, they can't rest until they find it. This question became a heavy weight in Johnnie’s pocket. He thought and thought and thought, turning the worry over and over like a rough stone. He walked and walked and walked, his shoes retracing the same paths, trying to find the missing piece of the puzzle.
He walked past the old houses, past the bakery with the masked baker, and out into the quiet, rolling hills where the horizon stretched out forever. The sky above was grey and vast, offering no easy answers. The thoughts in his head felt like a storm of numbers that just wouldn't balance. He felt very small, and very lost in the middle of a giant, complicated system.
But Johnnie knew that the only way to understand a long path is to keep walking it. You cannot find the end of a line if you stop in the middle.
Then, right as his legs were growing weary and the cold wind began to blow, a brand-new kind of thought occurred to him. It wasn't a worry; it was a beautiful geometric rule.
If I can just keep myself going, he realized, and if I can somehow keep my feet moving in the right direction, the shape of the world will work in my favor.
He looked out at the great, curving landscape. In a world built on deep and beautiful structures, paths do not just wander aimlessly into nothingness. If you maintain your trajectory—if you hold true to your vector and keep your momentum—you eventually cross lines with others. You reach a point of convergence.
"If I keep going," Johnnie whispered to the wind, "I won't be lost forever. If I hold the right direction long enough, I will eventually bump into someone who knows the map. Someone who can help me see the truth."
With that new rule bright in his mind, the heavy stone in his pocket felt a little lighter. He adjusted his coat against the breeze, took a deep breath, and took another step forward into the great, wide world, watching the horizon for the first sign of a friendly traveler.