Chapter 7: ARC ONE

DVINSK 1912 / DAUGAVPILS 2042

They could understand thought before this, and where power could be found.
But isn't it funny that they didn't understand biology or taxonomy?
It's hard to remember, especially when you're so selfish, keeping track only of what's relevant to you and your dearest.

It took Bylight for it to understand it.

That was a strange little set of vignettes, wasn't it? Do you think she gets it? Do you?

On one hand, she's beginning to see everything as text. Isn't the dream of a rank 7 to be able to read and rewrite the world?

In this world (and it's not the only one, dear reader), someone with sufficient power, light, or colour can choose the fate of another. Anyone who looks in the right way at another, has enough skill or fire to back their wishes at a top can give choices, or decide given choices. They don't even have to be an esper. They just have to be at the top.

It's pretty cool, right? Like a choose-your-own-adventure game or a quest!

Oh, I don't think Hannah knows what those are, ahaha.

She's kind of sad, really, but so am I.

(I'm a better person than her, so it's totally fine.)

Her thoughts came at you quickly, didn't they? She didn't tell you much about our world until history became Relevant to cruel winter, nothing about her monochrome day to day life. Reader, what if you were playing at home? What if you were the one taking the choices? Surely you'd be thrown off? Feeling defeated, "I don't understand the controls, what's the FUCKING point of playing this. I'm not invested, it doesn't matter, it's ir-Relevant."

She's chosen a silly little war, hasn't she? In my dorm, me and my roommate play the classic game of Free Will against Determinism. My dear roommate, who has nothing and wants everything, plays Determinism's side for some godforsaken reason. Or a god-ordained reason? She has a little bit of a god complex. All this world has been in part awarded to me, rightly or wrongly, it's just how this world works, but she thinks it's all hers? She's actually worse than Hannah, it's awful. And I have to stay with her for the next four years.

(They split partners at the end of the Baccalaureate; you have to choose to keep them, but again in this world you can never really be sure who's making the choices, and once two people are tied so thoroughly is cutting the knot so easy? My roommate's such a pest. Should I take the K-system to Abu Dhabi for some mosquito coils?)

There are certain advantages to the game of Free Will against Determinism. Most importantly, it tells you your nature or the nature of humanity and human civilisation, how far you should go, how long you should be willing to suffer, and how to spend your life. A lot of psychic wars are like that, the one Hannah and that teacher (and the people behind her) are having included, right? They're wars between concepts, wars about how to think, but the war I've chosen is the substrate of all that.

Hypothetically, if there was a world without psychic power, without the grafting of concept and perception to physical laws, and most importantly without the strange rules dominating choice, then you could say "we'll live life as if we were perfectly free, carry out judgments and execution as if we were perfectly free, there's no point in actually worrying about it." You could confidently say "I experience free will so it exists" or "God determines mankind's actions perfectly and serenely at the beginning and we carry it out to the end" or "God gave mankind free will, He wants to see you deviate, judge you as worthy or unworthy" or "assuming free will is as silly as assuming God exists" and then laugh and go, does it matter? I'll carry on.

Carmen can't carry on, you know? I just can't. And neither should you, because there is no world without psychic power.

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"Actually I can't ensure that my friends have perfect and undying obedience to my cause using my brain waves?"

Then you definitely don't get it, and even Hannah gets this bit without my flat's secret knowledge so you should probably be worried!

Tamara, 04. "Phones are psychic power." The ability to communicate instantly, to share snippets and recordings of reality is so trivial it doesn't need to be considered or begin to prove my point. What about the ability to access information from anywhere, books, journal articles, reports, statistics, such that anyone can begin to develop any skill without trekking physically to a master, even if there are very few autodidacts who can do it all on their own, most are idiots. I don't think that's convincing either.

What about all the labour you command? Suppose you can afford six horses...? No? That's just the modern economy, that's capitalism, that the neoclassical school presents all of the modern economy as merely a gestalt of fleeting desires means nothing, indicates nothing to you, certainly nothing supernatural, doesn't verify the ramblings of a crazy girl in a crazy and 'fake' world... fine! I'm shy, I'm socially anxious, I get neurotic around people I don't know. I won't judge you, I won't challenge the scientists, I won't finish or belabour my point.

I hope I'm not nothing to you, though. I'm so desperate, maybe I could inspire you to do something really bad?

Hah. Haah.

Fine.

In the view of this world that very definitely has psychic power, the question of free will and determinism decides the ordering of choices. Do they come from a single source at the top, a logical ordering of things, a rational set of rules in the maddening chaos, or do they come from the irrational clamouring and clashing of myriad Willed people?

If you know your alphabet, if you've been paying attention, then that's another I-R pair. Importance vs. Relevance, Hannah's stupid, selfish battle to protect a meaningless world from every single person who cares about anything. Have you thought about it? Tamara cares about her. She sees psychic power as a form of prophecy! She's totally fucked. Then, we can carry Irrationality vs. Rationality into that, which smuggles my conflict into hers, but also allows us to look at disordered thinking in a world permeated with psychic power.

(I'm so desperate, I have to ignore my anxiety and ask if you're really normal. Since you, or anyone from any sufficiently advanced world orders the creation or the death of an unimaginable amount of beings, like three-quarters of you feeling beings like it's nothing, travels across a country and commands [contractually, it's a kind of living] people to travel across the world every day for every little good, a power inseparable from you that dictates every aspect of your thought and being, a power in that sense is identical and contains identical potentials to psychic power. But I'm so fake and you're so real, I'm crazy, forget about it. Non-stick pans aren't psychic power, after all.)

We at the top can create and rewrite lists of choices if we're powerful enough, so, let's go back to Hannah, who has been forcibly reminded of her potential to do this, let's look at her daily life, other people's daily lives, see what she does, see what comes out on the top. But we need to take each day or actually every little cute moment of certain people's cute daily lives in two steps, an important one and a relevant one! An irrational one, because history is sordid, isn't it? And a rational one.

06i and 06r! I think it's super cute. I'm a maths student, sort of, like three quarters of the stuff we do in the Veritas line boils down to maths, doesn't it? In maths, we use i and r as series summation indices for when you're going through a list and adding things up, and that's precisely what's happening in this psychic war. We take a bunch of moments, we add them up, we demonstrate something, we repeat, sorry to everyone else who's faker and simply lesser than us! Rinse, repeat, endless stories, endless attempts to inspire something (don't look at me distrustfully, I wouldn't tell you to do something horrible...), endless tries at learning about the world.

Rinse or repeat, until we fall off the top.

Will Hannah stay at the top by the end of her and Amelia's trials?