Fabric

No one remembered the first morning.

Historians argued about empires, about the first cities, about the origins of languages, but not one of them could answer the simplest question — what does all of this stand on.

Children in schools were taught that the world had always been the same.

Cities grew where they were needed.

Mountains stood where they had always stood.

Seas washed the same shores since time immemorial.

No one doubted it.

There was no reason to.

After all, every morning the sun rose in the east, trees shed their leaves, people loved, lied, were born, and died. Reality was stable. Solid. Immovable.

At least that’s how it seemed.

There was one strange phenomenon.

Sometimes the world changed slightly.

Not earthquakes.

Not storms.

Small things.

One morning people would swear that the old cathedral had always stood in the city center, even though it hadn’t been there yesterday.

The next day the whole district would remember a river that hadn’t appeared on any maps a week before.

Sometimes the constellations changed.

Sometimes — the history textbooks.

Sometimes people remembered a childhood they had never lived.

The strangest part was that almost no one noticed these changes.

It seemed as though the world didn’t just change.

It changed the memories about itself along with it.

The few who tried to prove that yesterday everything had been different eventually began to doubt themselves.

After all, if millions of people remember one thing, and you alone remember another, which of you is really wrong?

So people learned to stop asking.

Reality was whatever the majority agreed on.

Everything else was called madness.

No one knew that deep beneath the cities, beneath the mountains and the seas, there was no bedrock.

Something else pulsed there.

Not matter.

Not energy.

A vast living fabric.

It did not create the world.

It listened.

Every human thought settled into it like a raindrop into a lake.

One thought meant nothing.

A thousand — almost nothing.

Millions of identical thoughts left a scar.

And scars eventually became reality.

No one could say which came first.

The human who learned to believe.

Or the fabric that learned to listen.