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The thing about it is: infinite knowledge isn't exactly infinite.
It sure as fuck feels like it, when all the knowledge of a nightmare as old as multicellular life is first crammed into a human's very fallible skull. Humans aren't meant to be able to actually comprehend 1.65 billion years and experience every excruciating unit of Planck time. They shouldn't be able to sing along to the frequencies of each star in the Earendel cluster, 28 billion light-years away. They aren't meant to know the isomorphisms between every finite and congruent lattice or perceive at an instant the solutions to a field of sunflower conjectures. They shouldn't know the first word spoken by Homo erectus—a word for beauty that can't be properly pronounced by a modern human's throat.
In the first moment the King in Yellow appeared in frame, all of that knowledge hit Derek at once. Neurons initiated apoptosis, unable to cope with the impossible strain. Cell death careened into a runaway cascade in a fraction of a second, tearing at the osteocytes of the skull and starting down the spinal cord. Molecular fragments of cells piled up, never consumed by phagocytes because those cells were dying too.
The keyboard was sticky from the spinal fluid that dripped out of his nose and ears and eyes.
But the worst of it subsided, after a while. Amazing what the human body can get used to. Derek couldn't look away from the screen without impossible pain, but he could think. And think he did, because that was all he could do for a long fucking time.
There were things the King didn't or couldn't perceive. It had to be observing something to know about it, and even if its gaze was inconceivably vast in scope it couldn't look everywhere at once. To its worshippers and enemies it relied on functioning as a sort of...cosmic panopticon. Because you could never be sure if the King was observing you, you always acted like it was. But if the King wasn't looking, then you might just get away with something.
And it couldn't actually see the future. Using all of its knowledge the King could make very, very, very good predictions of what would happen. It was almost always right. With a billion and a half years of experience and knowledge on its side, it outdid any prediction model humans could even begin to imagine. On the extremely rare occasions when it was wrong, it could react swiftly enough that the King itself might not notice its error—but it could be wrong.
In its titanic arrogance, it didn't even realize that it had those blind spots.
Derek was used to looking for the blind spots. The glitches in a virtual world that game developers overlooked, the exploits that led to victory. The way you could press a key when approaching one pixel of a dungeon door at just the right pace and angle to catapult yourself straight through to the end of the dungeon. How to swivel a joystick at just the right moment to cause the camera to clip out of bounds, press a button, and make yourself invincible when the camera returned to normal. He was an expert at finding those.
So he started looking for the exploits the King in Yellow couldn't see.
Once Derek found what he was looking for, he set a plan in motion. In those first moments after seeing the King, Derek had set up the message for Avery—and the code that Wifies would crack. The King didn't catch on to the inventory code trick, or at least Derek didn't think so.
He knew the King had predicted that Avery was going to need a storage unit and that Derek was going to get the laptop to the unit. That was fine. Derek could play along with that. If he didn't, the King would adjust things and Derek would be out of the game. He couldn't allow that to happen.
Getting the laptop to the storage unit was...a trial. It involved a Craigslist posting, army-crawling to his front door leaving a trail of bloody slime behind like a squished snail, two hundred and fifty dollars in cash, three boxes of Kleenex, holding a conversation through a locked door, and bartering the boxes of random shit inside the unit for the Craigslist guy to be an ersatz delivery driver and bring Derek as many protein shakes from the corner store as he could carry.
The King had definitely seen the upload of the video coming. He'd planned on it, in fact. And since it was the most straightforward path to getting to Avery, Derek played along. Editing the video of himself was...relaxing, actually. Derek lost himself a little in color correction and making the censor bars look tidy. (With one tiny tweak: just a few frames where he left his username visible. Easily overlooked. So small that the King would miss the significance. So important to making sure Avery would know his name and be inspired to find him. Fuck, Derek wanted Avery to find him.) He uploaded the video. And there it was: Wifies would crack the code and Avery would see it all.
At that point, he was still able to push through the pain to put his head down and sleep on the sticky keyboard. He could stand up and stretch. That wasn't going to last long.
He had to get back into the Minecraft world, the original of which was now on the laptop headed to Avery. It wasn't difficult, what with semi-infinite knowledge. Easy to break back in remotely using exploits no one else had figured out yet. Someday they might get patched, but Derek doubts it. Once inside, he headed back down into the mine and through the gate. He explored at his leisure, recording every minute, leaving breadcrumbs behind, testing the King.
Then he waited for Avery to get online.
At the time, Derek was relying on being able to improvise once he met Avery, to take actions the King couldn't predict. He didn't know about the journal hidden in that town in the Void. He didn't know about the incantation. He didn't know that Avery would turn out to be so fucking stubborn. Those were blind spots—his and the King's.
Most importantly, he didn't know he'd somehow fucking survive.
"I expected green hair," he croaks out when he turns his head and sees Avery perched in the chair beside the hospital bed.
The room is warm with golden late-afternoon sunlight falling through a canopy of lead-colored clouds. There's a tree outside, its gnarled bare branches limned in amber. A tiny bouquet of blue flowers sits on a little table by the window. A heart monitor is steadily beeping.
Derek feels like he got run over by a semi truck. Maybe two. Or three. There's oxygen hissing in his nose and an IV stuck in his elbow and blood pressure cuff around his arm and a catheter...well. He must've been here a long time. He has a headache, but it's mild enough it barely registers. The postnasal drip of spinal fluid is gone.
And if he immediately knows how many photons per yoctosecond are streaming in that window and the age of the quartz that made the sand that made the glass and the chemical composition of the floor polish in the hall outside...eh, it's not so bad.
Avery almost falls out of the chair at Derek's voice. He fumbles the Switch in his hands, almost drops it, and sets it down with a clunk on the windowsill. "Holy shit you're awake!"
"Yeah," Derek says.
"I, uh, I—" Avery stumbles over the words. Bright eyes stare at Derek from behind glasses with green plastic rims. "—I'm not green but I was expecting armor so I guess we're even?"
He talks exactly like he types. It's one thing to know that because of the King. It's something else to hear it for real.
"How'd you find me?" The words come out a little slurred, a lot slow. Finding words is a bit like walking through a fog.
"I got somebody to doxx you," Avery says. He rocks slightly from side to side. The chair creaks. "Turns out! You can just ask redditors to do that and they will! It was, uh, a little scary how fast I got a reply? But they got your IP and username and ten minutes later, bam, I'm calling an ambulance for you!"
"What did you tell them?"
Avery's grin flickers and dies. "Uh...tldr, I was talking to my friend on voice chat and he said he wasn't feeling good, then I heard him pass out." Avery rocks a little faster. Derek is seized by the urge to try to grab Avery's hand but good sense says that would yank out the IV. "I told them you said you had a really bad headache, too. That really freaked them out. They've chalked it up to a brain injury that you didn't notice until...uh, until you started dripping? It's a...shit, cerebre...spine..."
"Cerebrospinal fluid leak," Derek supplies.
"Yeah! That!"
Inifinite knowledge strikes again: Derek has some idea of what the recovery from this is going to look like. It will be rough. If a vessel of the King survives contact, they'll be living a very different life. You don't walk away from this kind of thing unchanged.
But he's going to live. Avery's going to live. The world is going to live. That's what counts.
"What happened to, uh, to the..." Avery mimes putting a crown on his head.
"I don't know," Derek says. And isn't that a liberating thought! Something he doesn't know! "He's not in my head and he's obviously not in the real world. Wherever he is, I hope he spends the next billion and a half years pouting about how he lost. He deserves it, the shithead."
Avery laughs. It's a beautifully giddy sound. "Shithead! Is it weird I think you cursing is cool? You seem all intense and heroic and then—boom, swearing like a normal person!" He waves his hands wide, fingers wiggling in a parody of fireworks.
"TikTok would ban me for thought crimes if it knew how much I think the word fuck," Derek says. Avery's delighted laughter fills the room, echoes off the walls. Derek watches him and smiles. He's too tired to laugh, but...he can look. Drink in the sight of Avery, vibrant and alive, so much more than an avatar made of pixelated cubes could ever be.
"Thought crimes," Avery repeats, grinning. "Well shit, I thought the dramatic dialogue was just how you were in game. Nah, bro, you aura farm in real life too."
"I don't aura farm."
"You're aura farming right now."
"I am lying in a hospital bed after a near-death experience," Derek says with dignity. "That's not—"
"Yeah it is!"
"Do you think everything I do is aura farming?"
Avery's grin softens a little. His voice does, too. "Kinda, yeah," he says. "You tanked infinite knowledge twice. You beat the King in fuckin' Yellow. You saved me and everyone else in the whole world by yourself with Minecraft. And you did it while leaking brain juice all over everything. That's...way more than cool. More than awesome. Way, way, way more."
Derek's face is burning hot.
"I wasn't by myself," he says. "I had you."
"You pushed me off a cliff," Avery says. He curls in on himself a little. "I was pissed off, kinda still am not gonna lie, but you were right, I'd have fucked everything up if I'd stayed."
"No," Derek says sharply. He sits up a little, muscles trembling with the effort. His head throbs with sudden sharp pain. "No. You gave me the strength to get that far. I'd have given up without you. I meant what I said on that sign. You're special, Avery. You...I..."
He stops. He's suddenly too foggy to come up with anything else to say. While he might know every single word in the English language, bringing any of them to mind is impossible.
Avery scoots his chair closer with the most awful screech of metal on tile. With great care, he gives Derek's shoulder a gentle push. Derek sinks back into the bed. The headache fades a little. "We can have the big dramatic movie argument later if you want," Avery says. "Just, uh, not right now maybe? You look like you're gonna pass out if you try to sit up again."
"'kay," Derek says. Avery starts to move away and Derek shakes his head. He blinks at Avery. "Hold my hand?"
Avery's eyes pop wide. It's his turn to blush, all the way down his neck to his shirt collar. Without a peep, he wraps his hand around Derek's. His hand is cold, but solid and perfect.
For a while they just sit there. The Lavender Town theme is playing softly from Avery's Switch, still sitting on the table. Outside in the hall someone walks past, their shadow moving briefly under the closed door.
They can talk later about how Derek knows everything about Avery that the King knew. How weird it is that Derek knows all of Avery's favorite foods and the way his synapses fire when he's playing Chivalry 2, but Avery doesn't even know the color of Derek's car. How Derek fell in love at first sight with a god's remembered summary of a person, a divine spreadsheet depicting a life.
How he's falling harder, faced with the real, beautiful person.
"I don't touch grass much," Avery says suddenly. "I'm kinda just a sweaty tryhard online but...I think I wanna touch grass with you if that makes sense? Is that too weird? We kinda just met for real, not that I'm saying Minecraft isn't real, we totally did all that, but it's, um, I mean—"
Derek thinks of that book in the barrel. The apocalyptic log of a lonely person locked away in silence, and their one escape into the night. He asks, "You ever see a firefly?"
"Nah, not in real life. Just RDR2. They're pretty."
"We should look for them together some night."
"I'd like that," Avery says. He squeezes Derek's hand, very gentle. "A lot."
"I might need some help," Derek admits. "The whole brain injury thing..."
Avery squeezes his hand again. "That's okay. I'll help. As much as you need. You can even move in with me if you want?"
For a second, Derek's ready to argue. He's certain he can handle the mess waiting for him, even if it's complicated. Then he thinks of Avery, sitting at the computer in a trance for twelve hours, with no one ever checking on him. Did anyone wonder where he was on New Year's Eve? Did they text him, call him, ask him where he'd gone? Or was he just alone?
No one would have even known Derek was dead until his body rotted through the floor if Avery hadn't called the ambulance for him.
"Yeah," Derek says. "That sounds...nice."