Ideas are physical. They float to the top of wells wherever men have thoughts.
Over time, cities grew around these wells, and one’s daily routine consisted of gathering his ideas from the well to use, share, or discard.
Libraries were built for ease of distribution, storage, and trade. Immediate access to one’s ideas became a privilege granted only to a few.
These few were called Ideators. They were authors, scientists, artists, musicians—the brightest minds with the brightest ideas.
Most ideas were small and charming little things, prisms of thought the size of a palm that only the thinker would recognize.
Other ideas were bigger, the size of a car. Typically, these ideas were collaborated efforts of many thinkers who would ponder the same problem and arrive at the same conclusion. These types made good visual aids for votes and other such group opinions.
Finally, there were the ideas thought up by the most renowned of Ideators. Glittering, intricate tesseracts that would take up half a warehouse and require its Ideator days or even years to properly see it applied. These were the ideas that brought the most change and had the greatest societal impact.
In a society so full of ideas, no one truly concerned himself with what might happen if the ideas suddenly stopped. Sure, everyone would have low points where ideas were barely the size of a coin and trickled in like cold syrup through a needle’s eye, but no one could fathom such a thing would happen to everyone.
Eli Ruiz, an Ideator living atop the world’s largest idea wellspring and library, sat at his drawing desk with an idea clutched tightly in his hands. Atop the desk lay an unfinished blueprint, broken pencils, and wooden shavings taking up more space on the paper than drawn lines.
An unopened newspaper sat in a pile of its predecessors, their headlines counting up the days of the “Idea Drought.”
Eli looked at his idea again. It was an old one, cloudy and underdeveloped, barely the size of a golf ball. He held it under the desk lamp, trying to find a facet that would glint and provide some kind of inspiration.
Finding none, he set it aside and leaned back in his chair, sighing at the ceiling. “Coeus, give me thoughts. What can I do?”
What if I could find out the cause of all this? he wondered.
The pneumatic chute that delivered his ideas straight from the well gave a bright hum. Eli rolled his eyes. There was no way that idea would be valuable. He had nothing to add to it, nothing to develop or act on it.
The chute beeped. Eli’s attention snapped to it. The light on it blinked and the delivery box remained empty.
Eli ran out the door barefoot and rushed through the halls down into the main library. His mind spat out ideas as he ran. Was the idea too big? Maybe it vanished as soon as I thought it. But if that were the case, why am I still thinking about it? Is someone else thinking the same thing?
He arrived at a small crowd gathered around a woman in a lab coat. She was holding an idea, a shimmering pyramid about a foot on each side. It was the largest idea Eli had seen in weeks, and he recognized it as his.
“Excuse me!” He pushed through the crowd and reached for the idea. “That’s mine.” As soon as he grasped it, it bloomed into a myriad of colors and grew three inches bigger.
Eli and the woman stared at each other in shock. “You thought of this too?” they exclaimed simultaneously.
The woman was Dr. Michelle Hayes, a neuroscientist who consistently delivered ideas the size of refrigerators, with facets and points and patterns as complex as the neurons she studied.
Eli and Michelle found a more private room and sat on opposite sides of their idea, staring sometimes at it, and sometimes at each other.
Eli spoke first. “Well?”
“This is the first proper idea I’ve had since this whole drought started,” Michelle admitted. “I don’t know what else to do with it.”
“And as we can both see, we’re thinking the same thing.”
“Yes, but—! Going into the well? When Coeus …”
Eli put his hand on the idea. “I know the story. And yes, this is ridiculous. But I’d take ridiculous over letting this go to waste.”
Michelle looked at the idea, then Eli. She bit the inside of her cheek while her brows met above her nose. “I don’t know.”
“We both know the drought can’t continue, and this is the best we’ve got. How likely is it that this sort of idea will come again?”
“You seem awfully sure.”
“I’m anxious to have completed blueprints instead of pages of eraser marks,” Eli admitted. “And yes, I know it’s a little far-fetched, travelling where Coeus never returned from, but if it solves this drought, then maybe it’s worth it.”
Michelle put her fingertips on the smooth surface of their shared idea. “I do miss my experiments,” she said softly.
Eli stood and picked up the idea, then held out a hand to Michelle. “Then let’s go.”
About half an hour later, Eli was delighted to find himself at the end of a long triangle-shaped tunnel. They had traveled in a glorified metal crate of an elevator down the side of the well until coming to rest on a floor made of packed ash from discarded ideas. The walls were like the inside of a geode and the same color as the ashen floor. The well itself was nearly a mile in diameter, and tunnels of varying sizes and shapes led in every direction imaginable.
Michelle held the idea while Eli used his phone to inspect a map. “May Coeus bless whoever had the idea to map the wells,” Eli said.
“And may he curse whoever didn’t have the idea to stop us from coming down here,” Michelle sulked.
“Yes, but look! The tunnel we need to go down is triangular! I knew my inspiration came from somewhere!”
“Ah, yes. Eli Ruiz, the three-sided architect.”
Eli smirked. “Michelle Hayes, the doctor with a crystal brain.”
“It was one idea, and I didn’t mean for it to look like a brain!”
“Sure. Didn’t mean to make it look like your brain either?”
“May I remind you that your idea here has sharp edges?”
“May I remind you that you don’t know how to read a map?”
Michelle sighed. “Shouldn’t have said that.”
“Maybe once we fix the drought, I’ll teach you,” Eli suggested. As soon as he finished speaking, a triangular prism about the length of a pencil sprouted at Eli’s feet.
Both he and Michelle gawked at the newly formed idea. Eli picked it up. “It’s … pulling.”
“Pulling?”
“Yes, upward. Like there’s a string attached and someone’s trying to pull it up.”
“Let go, then.” A marble appeared by Michelle’s feet at her suggestion.
Eli let go and the prism floated upward to the mouth of the well nearly a half mile above them.
However, the prism didn’t make it fifty feet before it dropped back down and landed with a soft thump in the ash.
“That’s unusual. Right?” Michelle asked. The marble at her feet also began to rise before unceremoniously dropping into the ash.
Eli grabbed his idea and realized it was either much heavier than before or something in the ash was holding it down.
“Pick it up,” Michelle said.
“I can’t.”
“What?” Michelle crouched down and another small marble appeared nearby as she started to brush away the ash around Eli’s idea. Her fingers caught on thin threads that easily snapped before reforming around the idea and snaring it.
They both pulled their hands away and watched as the threads cracked the idea and added its ash to the existing carpet.
Eli blinked. “It … it’s gone. What was it?”
“You said you’d teach me to read a map,” Michelle replied.
“Oh.” Eli stared at the new small lump of ash where his idea had been. The marbles Michelle had generated dissolved in similar fashions.
Michelle held out their shared idea pyramid. “Hold this and don’t let it touch the ground.”
Two more marbles appeared as she knelt down and started digging through the ash. Barely an inch below the surface was a glittering collection of everyday, pocket-sized ideas. As soon as one was made, the threads strangled the idea and added to the ash.
“That’s where everyone’s ideas are,” Eli concluded. Michelle grabbed a handful through the threads and tossed them up. They got much farther than the previous two, but also inevitably fell.
“Why are they all stuck in the bottom of the well?” Eli asked.
Michelle had no answer. “Why are ours the only ones showing up above the ash?”
A small pyramid grew next to Eli’s foot. “Proximity, maybe?”
“Maybe.” Michelle shook her hand, trying to shake off those clingy threads and remaining ash. When that didn’t work, she dusted her hands together, but it only transferred the threads. Finally, she wiped her hands on her pants, but still the threads clung.
Three marbles no bigger than peas appeared before the threads dissolved them.
Eli held the shared idea close and handed Michelle a flashlight. “Let’s keep following this cave. Maybe we’ll find answers deeper inside.”
“Yeah. Lead the way.”
The tunnel they followed wasn’t the largest in the system, but it was the only one that went deeper than the central well.
The pair remained silent as they walked, their steps muffled by the ash under their feet, which got deeper the further they went. Periodically a marble or a triangle would sprout from the ground or walls, but they were all added to the ash and forgotten.
Michelle noticed there were still threads clinging to her hands. She ticked her tongue with annoyance and tried to dust them off.
“Problem?” asked Eli.
“Those little threads that were trapping the ideas are sticking to my hands.” She scowled and added, “They’re making my skin crawl.”
“That’s weird.”
“Yeah. If they’re part of the well, then—”
“No, not that. This.” Eli pointed to a tunnel forking off from the main one. It was barely taller than him and carved straight in instead of tilting downward.
“What’s weird about yet another tunnel?” Michelle asked.
“This one isn’t on the map.”
“So?”
“It’s hand-carved.”
“You can tell?”
“I’m an architect. I know handcrafting when I see it.”
“Then who carved it?”
As they gazed into the mysterious tunnel, a shared idea sprouted between them. They looked at it, then each other, then trekked inside.
The tunnel, fortunately, only led one way. There was no ash on the floor, so the pair’s footsteps echoed across rock as they followed the tunnel. It curved back and forth a few times and fed into some slightly wider alcoves before opening into a room.
Michelle looked around, inspecting the floor. “There’re scuff marks here. And… wood ash?”
Another shared idea clinked on the bare floor. Eli voiced it. “Someone lives here.”
The distinct click of a gun cocking chilled their blood solid. “Right on the money, lovelies,” droned a low, British voice. “Ah-ah. Don’t turn around. You two can stay right there.”
“We mean no harm,” said Eli.
“Really? Why you here, then? Lookin’ for El Dorado?”
Michelle spoke up. “Ideas are disappearing. They’re trapped in the bottom of the well, a-and everything has been falling apart for months now!”
“And you two traipsed down here with a shared idea? Brought it down here where the parasite could get to it?”
“Parasite?” Eli echoed.
The British man muttered a few obscenities before emphasizing. “The threads on her hands!”
Michelle checked her hands. There were more threads than before.
“Your hands feel alright, love? Little tingle, little cold? Tuckered out?”
“How did you …?”
“It’s the parasite, ya daft fools! For the love o’—! Just turn around and lookit me, ‘right? I ain’t got bullets in this thing.”
Michelle and Eli turned, shining the flashlight into the face of a pale man with long blond hair tied back in a low ponytail. He looked remarkably clean and well-fed for having lived in an empty idea well for who knows how long.
He squinted in the light and held up his hand to shield his eyes. “Lower the torch, love, I’m not a roach.”
Michelle aimed the light upward to splash it across the cavern.
Little ideas from both Michelle and Eli started dotting the floor and walls as they wondered about this strange man. He was dressed in cargo pants and a long-sleeve t-shirt. His hair reached below his shoulder blades and his face was clean shaven.
In the dim light, a shimmery haze hung around the man’s head, barely visible but present.
The man approached Michelle and ushered with his fingers. “Hand.”
“Why?”
“Gimme your hand.”
“Why?”
“Because those threads are going to start eating your mind. Now, let me see.”
Michelle passed the flashlight to Eli and gave the man her hands. He avoided touching the threads and scrutinized them. He then made focused eye contact with her. “Do not. Touch. Any ideas.”
Michelle stammered out an affirmative and the man let go of her hands.
Eli spoke up. “Who are you? What are you doing down here?”
“Pah!” the man scoffed. “Let the trespassers introduce themselves first!”
Eli and Michelle introduced themselves. The man looked unimpressed. “Right. Supposed it’s only proper, then.” He gave a little bow. “Spire ‘Coeus’ Aeshon, Head Ideator for the London Crown Well.” After noting the others’ reactions, he added, “Well pick your jaws up, you’ll catch flies like that.”
“You’re Coeus?!” Eli exclaimed.
“Yeh.”
“But you’re—!”
“Dead?”
“A legend!”
Spire spat a laugh. “What?”
Michelle found her voice. “People say you’re the only one who was able to change the shape of his ideas so that they would always appear beside you and not in a well!”
“That so?”
“That theory alone made an idea surplus around the world!” Eli added. “Not to mention the ones devoted to theorizing about what happened to you!”
Spire groaned into his hand. “And here I thought I could become obscure.”
“And you’ve been down here all this time?” Eli asked.
“Yep.”
There was a pregnant pause before Michelle asked the next logical question. “How?”
Spire pursed his lips and ticked his tongue, inwardly debating. Finally, he waved his hand through the haze around his head. “You see this, yeah? What you said is partially true. But, ah, I didn’t change the shape of my ideas.” He gestured to a spot on the floor. The haze around his head thickened for a brief moment before a wooden stool appeared, which he sat on. “My ideas started taking shape.”
He let the revelation settle in before continuing. “When I realized what had happened, I knew I couldn’t let it get out. So, I walked myself to the nearest well and swanned in. Bet that made headlines, yeah?
“Anyway. Been living here since. Watching the wells, learning my way around. Having a grand old time, really. Well, until recently.
“I know about the drought thing. And I know what’s causing it. Why don’t you sit?” He thought up two more stools. Michelle and Eli sat down, their respective ideas making shiny little piles on the floor as they absorbed every word Spire said.
“So. Mentioned a parasite. The thing’s been here since the start, feeding on whatever ideas don’t get used, and right happy about it. Thing is, few months back, it started getting greedy. Eating more. Eventually it led to where we are now—where it’s hardly letting anything leave the well. The fact that you two got a shared idea up is frankly a small miracle.”
Eli looked at the pyramid in his lap. “If this parasite is what’s causing the drought, then we have to get rid of it, right?”
“Right,” said Spire. “But how?”
Silence. No new marbles or little prisms.
Spire rubbed his nose. “How’s about we start by finding it, yeah?”
“You know where it is?” Michelle asked.
“Sure. Paid it a visit a few times. But ah … this time it will know we’re coming. It knows where its threads are.”
Michelle glanced at the threads on her hands. They’d started creeping over her wrists and up her forearms.
“We shouldn’t waste time then,” said Eli, standing. “Let’s go.”
“Right.” Spire picked up his stool and it turned into a flashlight. “Off we pop.”
He led them down more tunnels, each one steeper than the last, until they were shuffling down a crude stairwell in a single file line. At the end of the tunnel the right-hand wall opened into a truly massive cavern. The three were standing on an outcropping nearly twenty feet in the air. The cave was lit by a shining array of new ideas. All sorts of shapes and colors glimmered across the walls and ceiling.
Michelle aimed her flashlight down. Cords attached to the walls and stretched in a neatly woven pattern across the entire cave. “Is that a web?”
“That it is,” said Spire. “Hope you’re not afraid of building-sized spiders.”
Eli let out a strangled squeak.
Spire indicated a large mass of grey sitting in the middle of the web. It shifted and twitched, its grey threads stretching out and snagging ideas before turning them into little puffs of ash.
“Are you sure that’s a spider?” Eli asked. “Looks more like a dust ball.”
“Can we focus?” Michelle hissed. “If that’s the parasite you mentioned, then we should be finding a way to make it let go of everyone’s ideas!”
Spire leaned against the wall, apparently unbothered by the lack of railing or the sheer drop barely two feet away from where he stood. “Been thinking about that, actually. How do you kill a parasite?”
Eli had a blank look. Michelle thought about it. “Ideally, you’d remove it.”
“Right. Why?”
“Because it’s feeding on the host.”
“Remove the critter, it can’t feed anymore, eventually starves. That right?”
Michelle nodded.
“We can’t exactly move that thing,” said Eli.
Spire chuckled. “Ah, yeah, there’s the issue. Any more ideas, love?” He looked at Michelle.
“There’re medicines that could poison parasites.”
“But that thing feeds on ideas,” said Eli. “How do you suggest we poison ideas?”
“Maybe we don’t have to,” Spire suggested. “Parasites can only feed on one thing, right? What if we feed it something it can’t digest?”
There was a pause. Eli shook his head. “Ideas are ideas. We can’t change the nature of them.”
Spire gave him an incredulous look. “I did.”
“Yes, but you’re … you. I mean ….” Eli fumbled for words. “Do you even know how you did that in the first place? Could you even teach us? Furthermore, if that thing is feeding on the whole world’s ideas, everyone would need to do whatever you did all at once!”
“It’s not a bad idea,” said Michelle.
Spire smiled at her, then noticed something creeping up over the ledge. “Michelle, watch it!”
The parasite’s threads sprang up and attached to the ones on her hands. Michelle was yanked away and tied up, suspended by the threads near the central grey mass.
“Michelle!” Eli called. The threads then came for the shared idea he held. They wrapped around it, trying to pry it from him. Eli fought back and Spire thought up a serrated knife to help cut them away, but it was no use. The threads plucked up the idea and turned it to ash.
The grey mass shifted, and a rhythmic sound echoed around the room. “Ideas,” it hissed. “You have such big ideas. Give them to me.”
The threads around Michelle tightened, and an idea formed in the clinging threads above her. A shimmering brain began to form as the threads leeched away Michelle’s mind.
Spire raised his voice and threw some insults at the creature. “Let her go!”
“More?” the creature rumbled. Before Eli or Spire could react, the threads caught them too. All three were tied up together and the threads started pulling away their ideas.
The parasite laughed, its threads twitching with glee. “Ideas! Ideas! Right from the source! And the one I hadn’t tasted in so long!”
“Good to see you too, mate,” Spire said with a murderous glare.
Eli struggled in the little cocoon he’d been wrapped up in. “Spire! Need ideas here!”
“Yes, yes!” the parasite cheered. “Give me ideas! Delicious ideas! I want everyone’s ideas!”
Spire was silent.
“Spire?” Michelle asked. Her head was feeling fuzzy and remarkably … empty.
After many more anxious moments, Spire finally spoke. “I got an idea. Might need your help seeing it through, though.”
“Anything!” Eli said desperately.
“Like what we were saying before. We could get along without these wells. We ain’t the first ones to think so. Think about it—if everyone had their ideas all to themselves all the time.”
The brain and pyramid of Michelle and Eli’s leeched ideas started to form connections. The parasite grumbled.
“I mean think about it,” Spire continued. “How many people have thought of that? Had that same idea? How fast did this slug here eat those ideas so it wouldn’t lose its food?”
“Stop it!” the parasite ordered. “Your idea is bad! Bad! It’s all smokey. I don’t want it!”
Eli was feeling a little weak. “Keep going, Spire. Tell us about this … this big idea.”
“Well, it ain’t unique. But then no one’s had a unique idea. We’re all just telling the same stories, making the same things, doing the same stuff over and over. Ideas ain’t unique. But they ought to be personal.”
Spire aimed a glare at the parasite. “But you. Hah. Ya big slug. You wouldn’t get that, would you? You’re made of everyone else’s ideas. Everyone else’s thoughts. There ain’t a shred of anything personal to you. You feed on what’s personal to everyone else.
“I got an idea. We don’t need to be like you. It’s our ideas you’re taking, so we get to keep them to ourselves.
Eli tried to interject. “Spire, you said what you did was dangerous. The power was too great.”
“It don’t have to be like mine, mate.”
Michelle chuckled to herself, a little delirious. “What if everyone had their own little thought bubble?”
“Elaborate?” said Spire.
“Like yours,” she said, “but not a cloud that makes objects. They still become physical, but they float. Bubbles …”
Eli added to it. “What if the wells evaporated and made little clouds over people’s heads?”
Spire smiled. “I like that. Thought clouds and idea bubbles. Sounds right adorable. Good idea, ma’am.”
“You were the inspiration,” said Michelle.
The three looked up at the idea over their heads.
“Mighty big …” Spire said, impressed.
The parasite didn’t seem to think so. Its threads kept slipping. “Stop! Bad idea! Bad idea!” Its attempts to keep ahold of the idea meant it let go of others. Little crystals started floating away.
Michelle gazed up at the idea. “Can one idea change the whole world?”
“Don’t you want it to?” Eli asked.
“Mine got me legend status,” Spire pointed out. “Weren’t no intention, either. Just happened. This ain’t just happening, though. We can think this through. You two keep feeding it. Toss it back and forth. I can make sure it gets out.”
The parasite let go of more ideas as it kept trying to hold onto the growing shared idea. “Stop it! Stop it! Bad idea! Bad idea!”
“Hey,” mused Eli, “what would people do about the more … private ideas? Ones people never pick up?”
Michelle hummed. “People could carry around little stakes to pop the idea bubbles.”
Eli laughed. “I like that. Would everyone be able to see what idea is in the bubbles?”
“Hmm … no. We can preserve some privacy.”
“Good. I was worried for a second. What about big ideas, then? Or shared ones?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Michelle. “Every idea will physically be the same. We let the thinker decide if it’s big or share if they had the same thought.”
Eli grinned at Michelle. “Have you thought about this before?”
“No. But I do like thinking about it.”
“Stop thinking!” the parasite demanded. Its threads kept slipping no matter how many it wrapped around the idea. Spire’s thought cloud was keeping it at bay.
The idea was almost as tall as the cavern ceiling, and it still kept growing. Some other ideas that the parasite had let go of were drawn to the shared idea. Ideas and thoughts fed into one another until the parasite had no choice but to let go.
Spire whistled at the idea. “That might just be the biggest, densest idea I’ve ever seen.”
“Is it enough?” Michelle asked.
“Do ducks like water?”
“Then do it,” said Eli.
“Right then.” Spire looked up at the massive, world changing idea and smiled as he whispered, “Cognito ergo esse. I think, therefore it is.”