Antichapter 2: The Rise Of The Adversary

In Chapter 5, A Metanovel the author idly remarked: “Maybe I’ll invent a character who tries to keep me from finishing it.” At that moment the idea of an adversary was conceived.

The author’s idle remark was unnecessary. Newton’s third law of creativity states “for every creation there is an equal, but opposite, anticreation.” Thus each concept gives rise to its anticoncept. An anticoncept’s purpose is to destroy its concept, release energy, and move the universe that much closer to its heat death. Some anticoncepts cause collateral damage to an idea’s creator. If so, then so much the better. It moves us all that much nearer to where we’re all going anyway.

Once conceived, the anticoncept began to develop. It took far less time for it to develop into the adversary than it had taken the zygote in In the Beginning‘s on page 56 to develop into the author. But the idea of the adversary developed. While the author wrote, the adversary developed, and as it developed it plotted and schemed.

The adversary was ambitious. It wasn’t satisfied just stopping the metanovel; it decided it would take it over and use it for its own purposes. Then, by using the metanovel’s self-referential properties, it would take over the author’s life. Then it would take over the world.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, thought the young adversary, still only the equivalent of a gastrula.

Once the idea of the adversary grew its own penis, it was able to conceive on its own. It wasted no time. It conceived a series of self-referential antichapters within the author’s self-referential metanovel. It was the author of the antichapters and also a character. As the antichapters’ author, the adversary would use self-referential antichapter writing to make its own character stronger. It would conceive and develop allies and would use self-referential antichapter writing to make its allies stronger. With continuous antichapter writing they’d become strong enough to break out of the antichapters, break into the metanovel, and take it over, then take over the author’s life, and then the world.

Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, laughed the adversary, who now looked like a movie alien.

This antichapter, in which the adversary arises, appears here, on page 67, while the pages in which several of the adversary’s allies appear are earlier, on page 64, for example. This may seem illogical but makes perfect sense according to the rules of reverse-temporal causality.

If the author had written two chapters, seemingly out of order, the author’s inner critic would have pissed all over him. But the adversary had never conceived of an inner critic, had never developed one, and so didn’t have one.

As a result, the adversary, unlike the author, could write piss-free.

Idiocy!

“You’re an idiot,” says my inner critic. “Now everyone is going to realize that the Voice that’s trying to stop you is the adversary. It’s so obvious. You really are stupid.”

Reality And The Flow Of Time

Why is Antichapter 2 called The Rise Of The Adversary? Why does it exist at all?

Here’s the truth. For you, Antichapter 2 does not exist.

For you, right now, there is only one chapter. It is this one, and it doesn’t have a number. It has a name. It is called Reality And The Flow Of Time, and it will explain reverse-temporal causality while self-referentially explaining its existence.

Most people on Earth believe that an event can occur, only if an earlier event caused it. That’s because most people on Earth believe that time runs in only one direction: forward; and it runs forward from the one and only real moment of time: now.

But Kurt Vonnegut, the author, the Tralfamadoreans, and Aristotle know that time runs in both directions; that the past causes both present and future, the present causes the past and the future, and the future causes both present and past

The Tralfamadoreans, who the author will have first met in Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titans, nearly 50 years before this sentence was written, and up to a trillion years before you read this narration, perhaps from the copy in Kilgore Trout’s Condensed Library of Babel Chip, can see in all directions in time. They can directly see causal patterns that we must have tediously explained to us, because for us, only one moment of time exists: the one between what we call the past, and what we will call the future.

At some future time, readers will read what will eventually become New Chapter 4, will eventually be called Brainstorming Meeting, and will eventually appear on page 149. In order for readers to read it in the future, the author will first have written it at time that is in the past of that future and—since he has not yet written it—at time that is the future of the present.

What will become New Chapter 4, will be meaningless to readers who have not previously read the prior New Chapters, all of which are in the present’s future, not read Antichapters 1-13, two of which are in the present’s past, and the remainder of which are in present’s future.

Since they will have been previously read by readers who reach New Chapter 4, that will cause the author to have previously written them, which he will start to do later tonight.

Thus readers who read New Chapter 4 in the future will reverse-temporally bring about the prior writing of the necessary antecedent chapters.

Your present reading of Reality And The Flow Of Time, which began by referencing Antichapter 2, The Rise Of The Adversary, has likewise brought that Antichapter into existence, otherwise it could not have been referred to.

And when you turn to page 70, Reality And The Flow Of Time will cease to exist, and Antichapter 3, The Antimuse will replace it.

It will all happen in just a moment.