"You are beautiful, Enkidu, you are become like a god.
Why do you gallop around the wilderness with the wild beasts?
Come, let me bring you into Uruk-Haven,
To the Holy Temple, the residence of Anu and Ishtar,
The place of Gilgamesh, who is wise to perfection,
But who struts his power over the people like a wild bull.”
- Shamhat, from The Epic of Gilgamesh

I’m about to descend deeper into the archives than I ever have before. I’m standing in the center of a vast stone hall, with walls that arch towards a ceiling higher than I can see. To my side stand the half-dozen other archive divers who accompanied me on the journey here. Beyond them lie haphazard piles of stones that had once been arranged into shelters, scattered relics of the others who had reached this point over the centuries.

But my focus is on the gaping pit in front of me. It’s far too deep for the bottom to be visible. By the light of my headlamp, though, I can faintly see that the walls of the pit appear to consist of enormous stacks of thousands or millions of books. Are they merely carved into the stone? Or is the pit itself actually lined with books? Perhaps both: this many millennia deep into the archives, the difference between facade and reality blurs.

I take one last look into the pit, then turn my back to it and beckon. The others gather in a loose semicircle around me. We’ve travelled together this far, but it’s been my expedition from the beginning. So I’ll be taking the final plunge by myself—seizing the lion’s share of both the glory and the danger. They start murmuring my name, the mantra that will carry me through what’s to come: “Ren. Ren. Ren.” Their voices grow louder and more insistent, the sound echoing back from the walls, the hall itself affirming me. “Ren! Ren!” As the chant reaches a crescendo I throw my arms wide, join them in screaming my name, then throw myself backwards into the pit.

The light fades as I fall; I close my eyes and focus on my heartbeat. The distance I fall will be determined just as much by my mindset as by whatever simulacrum of physics governs the terrain around me. So I wait until I’ve pictured very clearly in my mind the people I’m searching for, and only then open my eyes. Blinking, I scan in the dim light for just the right moment, just the right—there! A book with a burnished bronze cover gleams below me, and I angle my fall towards it, fingertips reaching out to just barely brush it, and then

I’m

no

longer

“—myself!” my father roars. I can hear the rage in his voice. “You think I’ll let her shame the family like this? If she won’t do her duty, I’ll kill her myself!”

I cower, and apologize, and marry the man he wants me to. Our wedding ceremony is raucous; my father is determined to make it the talk of the town. I sit quietly, keeping my eyes on my husband. It could be much worse. He’s a merchant, so he’s educated at least, and rich enough that I’ll have servants to wait on my every need. But I sense a cruel streak in his eyes which frightens me. And though the wedding night itself is not so bad, I soon discover I’m right. He forbids me from leaving his house except in his company—a harsh constraint at the best of times, bordering on torment during the long summer months when he travels to other cities.

So I spend my life trapped within his walls. I know in some deep inarticulable way that this shouldn’t be happening, but there’s nothing I can do except wait—first for years, then decades. Finally, one day, I look through the window at the farmers taking their wares to the market, and scream in rage and frustration. And suddenly I know myself again. The people outside are all stopping to look at me, but it doesn’t matter any more. I look back at them and smile fiercely. Then I twist, and the

world

dissolves

into

—chaos reigns in the square; shouting and laughter, the mingled sounds of animals and humans. I’ve been to this market dozens of times, but have never truly enjoyed it—I still far prefer the quiet of my family’s farm. Perhaps I should let my son do the bartering next time, I think. He’s almost a grown man, and it’d be good training for him. But next month some instinct warns me against it, and the month after that too. There’s something not quite right. Eventually, the day before yet another market, a thought comes to me, as if I’ve known it for a long time: I’m not going to find them here, not in this humdrum life. Won’t find who? Why is that so important? I can’t recall.

The next day, my wagon is accosted by bandits on the way to the market. Three men with swords shout for me to dismount and hand over my goods. Suddenly I know what I need to do. I walk towards them with open palms, ignoring their threats. As I get close enough to touch them I twist towards somewhere else, and after the drudgery of the farmer’s life it feels

like

a

sudden

“—rush in, we’ll lose everything,” the captain is saying. “We’ll need to hold fast and drive them back when they approach along the river”. The tent is dim and smoky, but I’m concentrating hard on the captain’s words, straining my eyes to make out the details of the map on the table. I’m lucky to be included in this meeting at all; I’d better not embarrass myself. Eventually, we agree to hold and wait for the enemy to come to us.

It only takes the enemy a few days to make the approach; luckily, this time, it also only takes me a few days to come back to myself. I look around at the armies readying for battle. One more hop, I think. As the fighting starts I push my way towards the front lines, eventually getting close enough that an enemy soldier spots me and starts running directly at me. I charge too, and as I get close enough to see the rage and fear in his eyes I twist, the fabric of the world stretching under me, and I feel like

I’m

about

to

—faint silhouette in front of me, between two trees, and I know immediately that it’s one of the men I’ve been hunting. But which? I hear a dismissive snort, and the silhouette fades into the darkness like a panther. Enkidu, then. I chase after him, but he stays just out of my sight, until I have to pause, panting and exhausted.

That’s okay—I’ve seen my quarry and established a foothold. And I know my own limits. I’m getting better at breaking out of the minds at this depth, but it’s not healthy to do that mental twist too many times in a row. A part of you will become convinced that the rest of your identity is fake and start trying to break out of that too. I need to take a break and re-establish my sense of self. So I twist in a different way and find myself back in the silence and stillness of the archive hall. Down here the hall has manifested as a wooden longhouse, each beam decorated with vivid carvings. Compared with the vast stone cathedral I camped in last night, it’s cramped but homely—just what I need.

I spend an hour on my normal routine: setting up my bedroll, starting a fire, cooking and eating. After that, I sit cross-legged and breathe deeply. “Ren, Ren, Ren, Ren,” I murmur to myself, as my mind traces the well-worn path of my identity meditation, down to my most foundational memories.

I was enraptured by the archives from the first time I visited the museum that housed them. As the other children around me chattered and played, I listened intently to our guide’s explanation of each new exhibit, shivering with delight as I felt the weight of millions of lives pressing down on me. The guide told me how we’d traced back each strand of history from every possible angle, how we’d brought the past to life again. The sheer scale and hubris of it had taken my breath away even then.

The archivists had noticed. Halfway through the tour, one waved me away from the main group, towards a side passaged that sloped down into the earth. As I walked along it, the walls lit up with small shadowy figures who kept pace with me, their faces occasionally resolving into expressions of curiosity and wonder. I realized that they were a record of all the other children who’d walked down this same hallway, following the same fascination. The passage forked, then forked again, the stream of ghosts splitting and merging along my path. For an hour I wandered the maze, alone yet surrounded by comrades from the past, before an archivist appeared in front of me and brought me back to the surface.

It was only a pale reflection of the full archives, but enough to get me hooked. I forced my parents to take me back to the museum again and again. I met the community of archive divers and listened intently to their stories; and eventually I started doing dives of my own. You weren’t meant to start too young—not before you had enough of a sense of yourself to rely on—but I was precocious. I knew who I was and who I wanted to be: an adventurer, an explorer of hidden mysteries. And the tight-knit diver community itself embodied and reflected that desire.

Not fully, though. I watched during dives as the other divers got distracted by romance or fame. Many of them just wanted the thrill of living out lives more exciting than their own. They didn’t understand that the archives were more than entertainment: they were a glimpse into the fundamental unknown. They couldn’t sense, as I did, that there were patterns beneath the patterns, archetypes that once grasped would make the whole story of humanity fit together. The longer I spent diving the closer I felt to finding something important. I spent less and less time outside the archives; my other ties grew sparser and sparser.

And then I found it. I was diving in a little-explored side branch: not the deepest I’d ever visited, but one of the hardest to get to. A lost city, hidden in the jungle—a record of ancient narratives, frozen as if in amber. Unusually, this one was ruled by not one but two kings. I lived several lives in that city before I got close enough to see their faces for a moment as they rode past the crowd I stood in: one impeccably groomed, the other almost animalistic despite his fine clothes.

Then they turned to meet my eyes. “Who are you, traveler?” one shouted. I froze. How could they possibly have singled me out? As they spurred their horses towards me, I reflexively twisted away, finding myself on the edge of the jungle. But only a few seconds later, the impossible happened again: the two kings appeared in front of me, still astride their horses. “Hold!” one shouted. As he said it I was struck by the certainty that they would soon be able to chase me down no matter where I went, that I only had one chance to escape. I fled, twisting myself into life after life until I almost forgot who I was. Only continents and centuries away did my clawing panic subside.

The next few months, after rising to the surface, were the most painful I’d ever experienced. I’d done a number on my mind, scrambling my memories and even my personality in my mad dash for safety. I spent a month near-comatose in a hospital bed; and it took another six months before I could muster the coherence to spend a full day working. But once I could, all of my efforts focused on understanding what had happened. I sat in the library, looking up old stories, trying to divine who or what I had encountered.

When I realized, it felt obvious. Enkidu. Gilgamesh. Two of the oldest archetypes, the story on which every other story had been built. Freedom and control, id and ego. I’d been right that they’d be able to follow me anywhere, because they were everywhere—so deep-rooted and so weighty that the archives themselves had somehow twisted around them. I no longer felt afraid, though, but instead exhilarated. I’d been searching for what lay underneath the human story, and I’d found it embodied. I had to go back.

I open my eyes. I can’t tell how long it’s been, but I feel rested and energetic. Normally I would wait longer before going in again, but my glimpse of Enkidu has me too fired up to stay in one place any longer. And my desire to jump back in feels true enough to myself that I’m sure it’s all

going

to

be

“—fine weave, and only the best quality wool," the merchant is saying. “I can’t justify any price lower than three hundred.”

“My friend, you can tell from my clothes that I’m not a wealthy man," I respond. “I can’t possibly afford any more than one hundred; but surely that will still make you a decent profit.” We haggle a bit more, but eventually I walk away without making the purchase. I didn’t want the carpet that badly, I think to myself. After all, I suddenly realize, I’m here for something else entirely. I need a link to—ah, there. A noble, riding his horse down the center of the market, guards shoving pedestrians out of the way. I walk towards him, pushing a guard aside, the shouts of warning causing him to turn towards me; and as our eyes meet I twist, finding

myself

in

a

—chamber is so dark that I can barely see the outline of the woman on the bed in front of me, but that doesn’t diminish my desire. I want to take her; I want to own her. And I can—the priests have given her to me for this night, to fulfil her sacred role. She stretches out on the bed, beckoning me over. But there’s something slightly stiff about her movements, and I’m struck by the thought that she wishes I were someone else instead.

That’s enough to jolt me out of it. I breathe deeply, then walk up to her. “Hush, I won’t hurt you. But I’m so close to finding them, I can almost taste it. Have you heard their names: Gilgamesh, Enkidu? Do they mean anything to you?” She’s trembling now, and doesn’t respond, but I see her snatch a glance over my shoulder, and turn. Up on the wall, illuminated by a single candle, a tapestry hangs. It’s a triumphant scene: a man with the horns of a bull is standing over the corpse of an enormous ogre, in front of a broken mountain. “Got you," I whisper triumphantly, and twist, and am suddenly

caught

in

sheer

paralysis. That’s the only way I can describe it: I feel pinned to the spot by the scrutiny of the man in front of me. He’s not the one I expected—and, as if he were reading my mind, Gilgamesh speaks. “Finding Enkidu will take more than that.” His voice is melodic, hypnotic. “He rarely spends time here. His home is far further down, in the depths where the stories are not recorded in writing or even speech—only in scattered fragments of art, and the patterns left on our unconscious minds.”

I take a deep breath before speaking. “Why does he ever come up here, then?”

He raises an eyebrow. “To visit me, of course. I can’t go that far down myself, not without forgetting who I am. And he comes for the universal temptation: the lure of something new, the pull towards growth, even with the risk of losing yourself entirely to it.”

“Universal—so you want it too, then?”

“Of course.”

I feel his response is sardonic, somehow. But it still gives me the resolve to make the offer I’d planned out over the course of the long descent.

“Then come with me. Let me show you what’s up there, the wonders we’ve built, our civilization, our-”

“-self-destruction," Gilgamesh interrupts. “Your weakness. Your abdication of everything worthy in life. Under the weight of what you call civilization, whatever greatness of spirit any of you might have developed has been crushed. Even the wildest and most adventurous of your people are tame. If we gave ourselves over to that, eventually there would be other Gilgameshes, and other Enkidus—but we would change, and be lost.”

“Why are you so afraid of changing?”

He bares his teeth, and I take a step back. “You found me through the stories of my quest for eternal life. You know that much of me. And yet you have the arrogance to think that after finally gaining immortality, I would give it up for—”

“Shamhat!” There’s a voice from behind me, and I whirl. A giant of a man is walking towards me—Enkidu, it must be. “Shamhat," he says again, forcefully. I feel a jolt of fear and shake my head. “No; I’m not Shamhat. I’m Ren.” “Shamhat!” he insists, and a wave of emotion surges over me: a blend of passion and rage and yearning so strong that I almost lose myself in it.

My hand goes to my emergency trigger. But all the long years of training weren’t for nothing. I am Ren, and I won’t surrender so easily. I think of the smell of my family home, the warmth of an evening watching a show with my housemates, the sight of skyscrapers towering above me on every side. I sink into these fragments of my world, and hiss “No” at Enkidu, and he pauses in his stride.

Gilgamesh smiles at me, his composure regained. “Perhaps you should answer your own question: why so afraid? Here you are, visiting us with your defenses up and your escape route near at hand. Why not let yourself be changed by us, become one of us, play the role that Enkidu already sees in you? Or why not go up the archives instead, where the risks are even greater, instead of coming down?”

“Wait—up? There’s no up. The archives only go down.”

“Ah, so you think that your own world is the source of the archives? What an astronomical coincidence that would be; but of course they do sometimes happen. And yet you are not the strangest visitor I’ve ever had. Where are they coming from, I wonder, those others? The ones too alien to understand what they’ve lost, too divorced from us to even feel your own thrill of familiarity and contempt. The ones who see me and Enkidu as little more than fascinating insects.”

“I don’t—I’m not—”

“I tire of this. Shoo, little bird.”

A sudden pressure emanates from him: a sheer sense of self, of lust for life, of desire to conquer and emerge victorious, to seize immortality, to seize me, to grab the world in his outstretched hand, and to survive, always to survive. It hits me like a wave, enveloping me, trying to drag me down into its depths. I stumble backwards, blindly groping for my emergency trigger, fingers clenching around it until it snaps and I twist all the way around and, trembling, find myself back at my campsite.

I’m still shaken the next morning, although not enough to give up. But I can’t find them again that day, nor the next, even as I jump rapidly from life to life. Inhabiting so many different minds is exhausting, and wears away at my sense of self. In the evenings I find myself oscillating between the personalities I’d inhabited that day, muttering both sides of a half-coherent conversation. After one more day I have to call it off.

The trip back up is easier, but still slow. I need to decompress my identity, loosen the tightly-held core of self that made it possible for me to survive so far down. The other divers understand; they’re gentle with me when I make it back to them, leaving me space to quietly introspect. It’s harder when we reach the surface—the crowds of people on the streets feel overwhelming. Stepping back into my house and seeing my housemates bustling around is even more challenging. Abstractly I know they mean well, but with every question they ask my anger at them grows. I sense that they don’t understand me at all, and it makes me want to scream and hurt them for their failure. Finally I escape into my room.

Over the next few weeks I reacclimatize to my life. I spend time with my housemates, accept a few contracting gigs to top up my bank balance, and even go on a couple of dates. But a part of me remains detached. There was something so primal about what I’d seen—an animating force so powerful and so pervasive that it had warped the fabric of the archive itself. All-consuming desire and all-conquering strength. Was Gilgamesh right that we’d lost them? I read each day of new technological marvels: the Dyson sphere soon finishing construction, the first colonizing probes launching out of the solar system. Yet somehow all of it feels flat—like it’s driven by different and lesser forces than those which had steered humanity up to this point.

One day, as I’m taking the train across the city, a man sits across from me. I’m captivated by his appearance, although it’s hard to say why. His face is regal, with an aquiline nose and a harsh chin; his clothes are a decade out of date. But I’m most struck by his expression. I watch him looking around the train with a sense of pure detached curiosity—almost, I suddenly think, like the rest of us are merely fascinating insects. Gilgamesh’s words come back to me: “What an astronomical coincidence that would be.” A sense of vertigo grips me. Do I really want my world to be the one root node, the source of all the archives? Or do I want there to be so, so, so much more?

I get off at the next stop, and find myself in front of the archives for the first time since the dive. So I go in. As I walk through the familiar building, instinct guides me to scan the ceilings in each room. They’re high, so I need to squint to make sure I’m not missing anything, but—ah, there it is: the outline of a trapdoor. It’s faint, and I doubt myself until I look at the exhibit underneath: a display of tools and equipment from older eras, including a long ladder. Well, that settles it. I know myself, and I know there’s no way I’m not climbing it.

But I have something else to do first.

It’s always easier the second time. I make the trip solo, and though I still need to navigate through story upon story as I descend, it’s fewer than usual—as if my purpose has already acclimatized me to millennia past. I find them drinking together in their tent on the eve before a battle. Enkidu notices me first; Gilgamesh follows his gaze after a moment and laughs. “So the little bird is back. What do you want this time?”

I look straight at him. “I asked you to come with me up the archives, even though that would change you radically. But why should you make that sacrifice, if I won’t? So let’s do it together. There’s a ladder, from my own home. Going up. Let’s climb it.”

Gilgamesh watches me silently. Enkidu stares into his cup, heedless of my words. I don’t mind; they’re not for him.

“It’ll be further for you than for me, and harder. But if not now, then when? Will you stay here reliving old glories forever?”

Gilgamesh smiles his thin smile. “I see now. You’re not his Shamat—you’re mine.” He looks around, and I imagine him seeing through the walls of the tent to all the lives that he might lead. All the battles he might win, all the ways in which he can live the archetype of the king—but at the cost of turning down my challenge and all the others that will come, the cost of never growing. For a moment I regret forcing him to make this decision. But I bite my lip and remain silent. Pity is the last thing he would want.

“Fight with us tomorrow, then,” he says abruptly. “Take Enkidu’s place; win us the battle, as he would.”

I’ve lived enough lives of valor and combat that I’m not daunted by the prospect of fighting with or even leading an army. This time, though, my own skills won’t be enough: I’ll need not just to replace Enkidu but to inhabit him. The risks of that, and the cost if I fail… Is there any other—no. The more I weigh the risks, the more I analyze the situation, the further I am from Enkidu, and the more dangerous it becomes. So I pause for only a beat longer, then nod. “I will.”

Gilgamesh laughs and tosses me a flask. I realize that Enkidu has melted away, or melted into me, or something in between; whatever it is, taking his seat feels like the most natural thing in the world. I stay there for hours, talking of the battles we’ve won and lost, friends and enemies, the tactics of the morrow. I catch three hours’ sleep, or perhaps four, and then the horns are blaring and I’m up and at the front of the army as always, a crowded rabble with primitive weapons but a fire inside them, a wild energy that I embrace and amplify and lead in a howling mob towards our foe. Then battle is joined. To my left I see Gilgamesh carving through the enemy’s flank, but after that I lose myself in the thrill of combat, just me and my instincts against the foes ahead.

I meet Gilgamesh on the other side, as our enemies flee. I want to roar and challenge him and conquer with him and defeat him and be defeated by him and roam through the world with him and— Maybe it’s because the last part is so familiar that I manage to pull back to myself. I am Ren: no more, no less. And Gilgamesh is… something to me, maybe many things, but not the companion of lifetimes. Not yet.

He sheaths his sword and turns to me. “Maybe there’s some spirit left in you. Very well, then. I will go.” His eyes flick over my shoulder and he sighs. “Too far for you, brother, at least without a guide.” I turn to see Enkidu walking past me. He hums, deep in his throat, and reaches out an arm. Gilgamesh clasps it and holds his gaze for a long moment. “I’ll come back for you if I can.”

Then Gilgamesh turns to me, and my heart races at the challenge in his eyes. “If it kills me, it kills me. Lead on.”

I feel the urge to laugh in relief and triumph, and choke it back for a moment, before thinking: well, why not? So I bare my teeth, and spread my arms, and shout a wordless cry to the sky. Then I twist, tearing a hole in this life, sliding my way through into the next. I don’t need to look to know he’s right behind me. And we start to climb.

If humanity survives the coming decades and centuries, our descendants will eventually have knowledge far beyond our comprehension, and be able to infer innumerable details about past lives that we once thought lost. Not all the details, or all the lives. But the key patterns, the archetypes, the collective unconscious of the time—they’ll be rediscovered and stored in an archive of all humanity. The archives will stretch all the way back to the dawn of human history, and all the way forward to our unrecognizable descendants. Depending on the values of our descendants, the archives might just be realistic records, or they could be actual minds, constantly run and rerun, eternally playing out their stories.

What would you do if you were one?