Chapter 1: "Predormitum (Prologue)" by CunninLynguists, from "Oneirology"
Chapter Text
Astral Sea
12025-01-08 @422.34
Oliver's first sensation was that he was underwater. Fortunately, it was not the frigid cold of a normal ocean, more like plunging into a lukewarm bathtub the size of an ocean with your clothes still on. Fortunately, that seemed to include a pair of goggles which remained airtight over his eyes.
The boy looked around for sunlight, but found only the soft glow of some sort of luminescence. He knew there should be a Sun, but instead it was like an infinite blue sky filled with liquid. Panicking, he struggled as he tried not to let the water in.
"Don't be afraid. It's time to let yourself drown. Just let it flow into you." a voice rumbled through the sound of rushing liquid. It reminded Oliver of hearing a child in a movie speak, the voice sounded young yet it echoed like speakers. Except clearer, like it had not been filtered through a digital projector's audio output.
Of course, hearing that didn't make it easier at all. Oliver tried to scream for help, causing the last air to rush from his lungs. He could barely hold that breath out two seconds before he realized he could only hope the voice was right.
To his surprise, the liquid that flooded his lungs didn't seem to be actual water. It was liquid, but as he felt his lungs fill with it he recognized it was breathable. Somehow, the moment the liquid hit his bloodstream, it did not matter that he was underwater. As if the breath out was meant for something that couldn't breathe here to be left behind, and a new beginning as it was reborn for this... world?
What is this place? Oliver thought to himself. I know my name was Oliver, but I don't remember anything else.
At that moment, a bright light shone from "above" his head. He looked towards it, a newsboy cap shielding his eyes from being blinded, to see a large entity the size of an Orca. The "being" was no killer nor whale, however, but a large vehicle of some sort. The machine looked like a perfectly capsule-shaped vessel, with four mobile robotic arms on a ring track located 1/3 of the vehicle's length from the rear.
It was close enough that one of the arms reached out to Oliver, and before he could react it had grabbed him. He was quickly swung over and pulled to the rear of the craft and placed into a small alcove, which then closed. Then the liquid in the room suddenly changed state unexpectedly. Oliver had to try and control an urge to vomit as the breathable liquid in his lungs became gaseous air.
"There we go. Now you're ready." a voice said, rumbling through the walls around him. Oliver looked for the source of the sound but all he could see was the blast doors he was shoved through and the small, elevator-like size of the room he was in. Opposite the blast doors was a set of smaller, steampunk-looking doors that were surprisingly decorative for an airlock. Oliver noticed the doors had no handles or other surfaces to grab. He was trapped.
"First task, let's register you into my system..."
Notes:
"This doesn't even match the lyrics! Did the writer just take the name of the song with this one?"
"Can't blame him. Just saying 'Predormitum Prologue' makes me fall asleep!"
"Really?"
"Of course, it's the only thing more boring than this story!"
"Do-ho-ho-ho-ho!"
Chapter 2: "Steam Powered Stories (Intro)" by The Cog is Dead, from "Steam Powered Stories (10 Year Anniversary Edition)"
Chapter Text
OwnShip Scriptkid
12025-01-08 @422.35
"I don't understand! Where are you? Who are you? What is all this?" Oliver tried to ask.
"You first. What's your name?" the rumbling spoke again, making Oliver nervous.
"I- It's-"
"Wait, hold on! Before you tell me, I just need a nickname. What kind of captain would I be if I tricked people into telling me their True Name?"
At that moment, what appeared to be some sort of Augmented Reality menu appeared, one with a familiar-looking appearance.
"Is there a keyboard?" Oliver asked.
"For what? You already know English."
"Well, um... My username has a number in it for effect." Oliver tried to explain. "Gadg-eight-eer, spelled-"
"Got it."
"Huh?" he said, and saw his name suddenly be scribbled onto the "login screen" by an invisible crayon.
"Wait, what is this?"
Instead of an answer, the doors leading into the ship opened with a hiss of steam, clouding the view of what was beyond it.
The steam cleared to reveal a room shaped like an octagon, with one of the steampunk-looking doors on each wall.
"Welcome aboard!" the voice said, still rumbling through the air and walls.
As the steam from the door dissipated, Oliver saw that there was also something in the center of the room. A sort of raised pad with a beanbag chair on it.
"Help yourself to a seat, I'll be right there."
Shrugging, Oliver laid back in the beanbag chair and stared at the ceiling for a bit. Oddly, the domed roof of the room was made of a shining silvery metal, polished to reflect the room below. There was something off about the reflection, though. It was like he was able to see himself for the first time in years. Or rather, seeing himself for who he really was, from an outsider POV for the first time ever.
With his memories fogged, he had felt lost in time, like he knew he'd traveled through time itself but not what year it was supposed to be. There was little traces of something in his form, that sparked emotions in his core.
"...it was my birthday yesterday, wasn't it? I just turned 10, so why do I feel like yesterday was so long ago?"
As he was trying to figure out what about himself was strange, he realized he didn't remember what he looked like, drawing a blank. All he knew was that he felt watched, even given the uncanny ability of the "Captain" to see him without visible cameras.
It was like the longer he had to see who he really was, the smaller and more insignificant he felt. He couldn't bear it anymore and looked away from the ceiling.
At that moment, he heard one of the doors open with a hiss of steam. He craned his neck to see an old-fashioned brass Elevator Cabin. Inside it, an older, blonde-haired boy waved hi to him while holding the control lever.
"Hi! I'm Budi, the Captain of the vessel." the boy introduced himself.
Gadg8eer didn't believe him. "You? You're-"
"Not much older than you look? So what?" Budi cut him off.
"Where are we?" Gadg8eer asked.
"This is... a bit hard to explain. You, um... your world ended." Budi said awkwardly.
"What do you mean it ended? Y2K never hap-"
"Gad- Oliver, you didn't die on August 11 of 2001." Budi stated.
Something about that felt very wrong to Gadg8eer. "...what year is it?"
"It's not that simple. Like I said, my name is Budi. I'm a Naphil. Or as you would call me, a giant." he explained.
"You don't look that big." Gadg8eer responded.
"No, but that's because I'm not actually standing here in this elevator." Budi explained. "Well, not just the elevator." the boy's voice then boomed through the room and it's walls. "You are currently the soul of Oliver, you are all that's left of you when everything that defined you and molded your very self is stripped away, leaving only the kernel of truth that remembers how you want to act but not the reasons you act that way."
"My soul is a cartoon character like you?" the boy asked.
"Um, no." Budi sighed. "How much of yourself do you feel, Gadg8eer?"
"I don't feel anything missing." he shrugged.
"Not even your memories?" Budi pointed out. He knew something.
"No. Why?" Gadg8eer asked.
"Because you didn't die on August 11 of 2001. So what happened next?" Budi asked. "You don't remember, do you?"
"I... What are you... ?"
"It's been a long time. I'd tell you what you can't remember but you don't want to remember."
"Yes I do!"
"Until you remember. And then you would just want me to erase it again."
"You erased my memories?!" Gadg8eer said angrily, getting up from the chair.
"Oliver, I don't want to use your true name." Budi warned. "Do not-"
"Give me back my memories!" Gadg8eer shouted, balling up his fists.
"I AM YOUR MEMORIES, OLIVER ABLE KIND, AND YOU WILL OBEY YOUR GOD!" Budi's voice rumbled, like an Earthquake was shaking the 'ship' they were in.
Suddenly, Gadg8eer felt cold iron wrap around his wrists and ankles. He looked in surprise and realized he was suddenly wearing shackles, connected by surprisingly flexible golden cables to a marionette rigging. Gadg8eer was very, very scared. "Wh-who are you?!"
Budi sighed. "I, and We, are the mal’ākhim. Angels, basically. We're technically a hive mind, but you don't have to worry about that. Just know that that hive mind is God, and We don't have individual souls like humans do. We are one soul across every angel there is, because in reality angels aren't even a thing. You're talking to a construct created by your creator, Me, to allow you to communicate, with Me. I'm not lying about my name, it's just that Budi is what I become if I want to talk to you. Even then, I can be whatever I want so I dedicated three forms to every soul."
"Why did the world end?" he said, trying to build up the nerve to speak out.
"That was My fault, honestly." Budi admitted. "I couldn't prevent it, because I have a set of rules I follow. Those rules might seem harsh, but if you're here, do you really think you're the only soul I decided to save? Or that any one of you little mortals are special? Unique, sure, but no more special than a rock is special for being millions of years old. In other words, there's an afterlife, and you're in it, and you'll be here forever."
"...was I a good kid?" Gadg8eer asked.
"No, but you tried to be, and that's what counts." Budi assured him.
"Then why am I in chains?" he protested.
"Think of it like you're Pinocchio. You weren't supposed to get in a fight with me, so I turned you back into My harmless toy until you cool off." Budi explained.
"But what if someone bullies me?!" Gadg8eer said, once again upset.
"Here's the thing about bullies, Gadg8eer..." Budi said, and the marionette rigging raised, lifting the smaller boy into the air to eye-level with the 'Captain'. He smirked as if there was some sly joke. "We make other kids our toys because we love to see our toys squirm. So if you don't want to be toyed with, why do you always make it so FUN to tease you?"
Gadg8eer didn't know what to say.
Budi let the smirk fade to sadness. "I won't bully you right now, though. I'm angry at you, but I get it. I'm probably the only one who ever really does. Nobody likes being told why I made mortals. The truth behind that hurts too much." Budi said, and the marionette chains lowered Gadg8eer back to the ground. "Do you know why I made people to live in caves and then houses?" he said, truly ashamed.
"...no."
"I told people to protect themselves by living in caves because I know how societies work. No cave here? Let's build one. My goal was to have people put everything in boxes, especially themselves, just so I could unwrap your whole existence like you suffering through my game was a gift you were obligated to offer me. I'm sorry, I needed to keep being surprised. I needed toys that I knew would hate me for creating you all just to be my property, because at least then you'd try to resist me, and that's all I've ever wanted. Something that makes me feel less like a void and more like a living universe, like, well... A kid playing with His toys."
"How many people know?"
"Does it matter? I'm not abusing them. They just don't understand why I'm being so nice. I'm sorry, I know it hurts, that the real reason they call me a giant is because I collect souls like action figures." Budi apologized. "Just recognize you're not being better. I'm not a punching bag, I own you... Yet I've never forced you in anything. You had your free will, you have your self eternally. I don't think you owe me anything for creating you, you didn't ask let alone demand to exist. I think you owe me because I didn't just abandon you. I was THERE. The reason you had Pokemon Gold on your 10th Birthday was because you wanted to have it that badly, and I made that happen. I know it sucks, but I can't not be Me any more than you can be not you. I can't be a god that isn't sometimes cruel to you, but I can be a merciful god because you want me to have mercy for everyone, not just you. So please, let's talk about this as close to equals as we can be."
"Why can't you just not be god then?"
"I can't. Could you stop being human? A mal’ākh can't stop being a limb of the hive mind, the hive mind can't stop being master of all reality. I AM a reality. You're like tapeworms, human souls would know only unending suffering if I could stop having the power I have over you all." he told the youthful soul.
"Ew."
"Why are you grossed out? I'm the host, you're technically the parasite. To be frank, being immortal because you're a kid's toy is a step UP from slowly eating your way through your own habitat because you're- never mind. I came up with the devil metaphor on purpose, something about being too large to imagine makes humans assume there must be beings that disagree about how the universe should be run." Budi told him.
"You're alone?"
"No, but I'm a universe. To you, my peers are impossibly alien."
"...okay. We can talk." Gadg8eer said.
The shackles disappeared, and Gadg8eer was slowly lowered to the ground.
"Alright. First, you deserve to at least know why the world had to end." Budi responded.
"Okay. Why did it end?" Gadg8eer asked.
"It's probably just better if I show you. Follow me." the self-proclaimed god said, and closed the gate of the elevator car before pushing the lever.
Notes:
Game over.
"Prepare for extract-"
User wins.
Chapter 3: "Phantom Liberty" by Dawid Podsiadło and P.T. Adamczyk
Summary:
Warning: This chapter depicts a relatively young person (implied to be a teenager) committing suicide. While it is not played for laughs nor made horrific for shock value, if you have trigger issues that may lead to you harming yourself, I do not recommend reading this series at all. Thank you for understanding and I wish you luck if you are battling depression or PTSD.
Notes:
[T] Incoming call...
"Is this V?"
"How did you get my number?"
"Apologies. There seems to be a few crossed wires lately on this network. Although, we may have an offer you'd be interested in, Mr. Warburton..."
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OwnShip Scriptkid
12025-01-08 @425.21
The elevator car descended a few floors, stopping in a floor of a skyscraper. Gadg8eer followed Budi to a large glass window, showing a bright, colorful city in a world that resembled the old CGI cartoon My Friend Cubix (a.k.a Cubix: Robots for Everyone).
"This place looks awesome!" Gadg8eer blurted.
"Yeah. My 'mom' was a pretty fun goddess." Budi responded. "Too bad my dad was such a jerk."
At that moment, someone fell past them towards the ground.
"Ah! What the- was that a person?!" Gadg8eer asked, concerned.
"Yeah. That was Satoshi Nakamoto, my Creator." Budi explained.
"...who is Satoshi Nakamoto?" Gadg8eer said, confused. "Other than your creator. Plus, how did he make you?"
"The guy who invented the first cryptocurrency- you know what, it doesn't matter. Everyone thinks some other guy just used the name as an alias, but it wasn't his alias. It was his name in a past life. Quick, to the elevator!"
After entering the elevator again, Budi closed the gate and shoved the motor lever down hard. The elevator zipped down and stopped at a lobby, with Buddy then opening the gate again and pulling Gadg8eer out the front door of the lobby in a hurry.
A mist surrounded them as they ran out onto the street to where a crumpled body lay. Or rather, a young man in a "Japanese school delinquent outfit" groaned and cried out in pain that was no longer actually being currently felt.
"I... survived?" he moaned.
"Yeah, apparently." Gadg8eer said. "Sort of."
Except Satoshi didn't react to him. He slowly got up and looked around. "The hell? Where is everybody?"
"YOU HAD 15 YEARS TO MAKE THE WORLD BETTER, SATOSHI." a feminine voice boomed from every direction, like a nagging mother. "AND NOTHING STOPPING YOU FROM LIVING ANOTHER 100. MAYBE EVEN A THOUSAND! YOU THREW THAT ALL AWAY."
"No one wanted me to make the world better, they thought their virtual colors were better than reality!" Satoshi complained.
"AND YOU WOULD TAKE AWAY UTOPIA JUST TO PLAY HERO." the voice responded.
"Who are you?!" Satoshi demanded to know. "How dare you judge me, and not even tell me who you are!"
A woman like something out of a 20th Century Hong Kong indie horror movie - I swear those actually bled into Japanese works and I know they're not the same country, plz don't kill me, internet Political Correctness Police - emerged from the mist. Her mouth was literally nonexistent, despite her having no problem speaking. "Be careful about your questions. I can answer only two with an explanation, and the last only with your eternal home. Are you sure you want that question answered when it will cost you your first question?"
"No. Okay, so if that's how this is, where am I?" Satoshi asked.
"You are too simple an organism to truly understand where you are. Religiously, you are in Purgatory. Physically, you were a person, until you threw your life away. Now you have no physical existence, you are merely a soul who is unable to truly change. You could, if you were to draw comparisons between human understandings and what I actually am, say that you are inside my stomach."
"You ate me?!"
"You viewed a world which had truly moved on from the horrors of bigotry and war as merely bread and circuses because you refused to admit your world needed heroes who upheld that world. I am your god and you are my bread and my circus, and now you can no longer provide either. Why be so surprised that what you worship decides to simply consume you alive and lucid, make a soul suffer forever for my benefit? You should be thankful."
"Thankful?! You-"
"Gods don't digest their meals. You'll be able to stay in there forever, safe... but I'm sure you wouldn't want to get bored yourself. Your last question, you see, creates the universe you will live in."
"Yeah, sure. And you'll twist it into hell."
"WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE TALKING TO, SATOSHI? I AM YOU. I AM THAT GOD OF YOUR MIND SCIENCE CALLS YOUR UNCONSCIOUS. I AM NOT HERE TO TWIST OR MISCONSTRUE ANYTHING, YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON AND YOU KNOW IT. ASK A QUESTION AND SUBMIT TO WHATEVER YOU DESERVE."
"Or what?! And that doesn't count!" Satoshi yelled in anger.
"Or? Where would you go? What would you do? Sooner or later, you will start to go mad from the isolation in there. You will beg me to give you somewhere to exist in, and I will make you work for it. You will beg me to punish you for my amusement, because this is the alternative..."
The street and mist and sky seemed to darken. Correction, they were quickly darkening to nothing.
All four figures, two only aware of each other and not their 'observers', found the ground itself softening like it had turned to liquid. Suddenly they were floating in an empty vacuum with no light whatsoever.
"Forever, in darkness..." the woman threatened. "Alone."
"You're a monster!" Satoshi responded, flailing in the lightless void.
"A monster, yes, just like you. ...no, not quite. You're just a filthy little vermin. I feed you and keep you alive, even after death, and you think it is monstrous of me to decide that you never cared about anyone but yourself?"
"Let me out!" Satoshi demanded.
"You already know there is only one key to that salvation, Satoshi." the voice responded. "And you threw it away with the intent of your little sob story. How dare you destroy my only truly generous gift to you, for spite.
"I KILLED MYSELF BECAUSE-"
"SHE IS A PERSON JUST LIKE YOU WERE, SATOSHI. YOU HAD NO RIGHT TO BE ANGRY SHE CHOSE HIM AND NOT YOU. LIKE A PETULANT TEENAGE DELINQUENT, YOU DECIDED TO TRY AND DESTROY SOMETHING YOU COULD NOT HAVE BY FRAMING HIM FOR YOUR DEATH. YOUR EYES ARE MY EYES, YOU CANNOT LIE TO ME." the woman yelled.
"Well? Did it w-"
"YOU DARE TO ASK THAT QUESTION? YOU WILL NEVER KNOW, THAT IS JUST THE START OF YOUR PUNISHMENT. YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID WRONG, AND THE FACT THAT YOU TRIED AT ALL IS THE CRIME. SHE DOES NOT BELONG TO YOU."
"I don't want to be here! Destroy me!"
"You don't get a choice in the matter anymore, Satoshi. You are no longer a person when you do not act like a person. Souls are only people in their Prime Reality. Now you are the trophy, locked in a cabinet on display. The only thing you get to do, and that a mere mortal should consider a great mercy to be able to choose after death, is where that train is going. You may not have believed in it, but you read the scriptures. What is your future, Satoshi? You must ask a defining question."
"Future... I'm dead, I have no future."
"You have more future than you'll ever need, what you lack is direction. You can go anywhere, if the place you want to go to does not exist, this question will create it."
"Okay, fine. What if Cyberpunk came true? At least then I'd be cool as fu-"
At that moment, time stopped somehow. "And that's how I - the world you called reality but outsiders call NowFuture - was born." Budi explained.
"I don't remember much about my world, but that can't be true." Gadg8eer responded.
"Why not?" Budi asked, stretching lazily in the void.
"My world doesn't sound like something that you would call by that name." Gadg8eer insisted.
"I'd argue with you, but you're not wrong. Just not right either." Budi responded.
"How am I not right without being wrong?" he skeptically deflected.
"You asked me why you can't remember how the world ended. This is why. The world didn't get better like you were promised by stuff like Buzz Lightyear of Star Command or Digimon World 3. It got really, really bad. They re-elected the worst President that America ever had and his orders were to invade Canada including your hometown, China became a literal cyber-surveillance state, Russia is doomed... And his wish is why. He wanted to see that happen for real, see the world fall apart because of capitalism, just because he thought he was some super cool edgy ninja punk or something. Then when he realized he wasn't, he decided to use his knowledge of another world to enrich himself by 'inventing' digital currency. Other than that, there's nothing you want to know that you will want to remember once you know it. I can say Satoshi hated living there, and that he's not happy the world collapsed before he could rule it."
"...I'm scared." Gadg8eer told him, as the void faded back to a busy street in a world very little like his home. He fell a couple inches onto the pavement, falling roughly on his butt. "Oof!"
"I know. You don't know where to go, what you should do..." Budi offered a helping hand for Gadg8eer to get up. "You're in a 4D astral plane now, there are 8 different directions you can travel at all times, but having too much choice means having too many options to sort through. Freedom is a ghost, the more you have it, the harder it is to use it, but the harder it is to use, the easier it feels like it should be. The reason I make it so clear that you're here to entertain me is because you already knew that. You were a writer, you were paid to be that. Or at least you hoped to be. Unfortunately a lot of dreams never came true in My story, including basically all of yours. I'm not just being a bully, even though I scared you pretty good. I was partly trying to prove a point. Another partly, you always wanted to have a sort of arch-nemesis who just uses sheer size to push others around. And the rest was because I meant it, but only in your case. I don't treat anyone you know like this, each relationship I have with my souls is unique. The important part is, you can't tell me that I'm not allowed to think of everything as my toys."
"Why, because you're somehow a hive mind?"
"Gods learn what We can be from Our worshipers. I know I'm a hivemind but you're allowed to think of me as just Budi, as a weird and possessive superpowered friend who sees you the way you saw your stuff, and treats you the way you treated everything else you actually valued... Politely and gently, but ultimately as toys with the expectation that someone else will fix it if it breaks. You cared about people, but you hated that some of them were so sure of themselves because in your opinion arrogance included acting like you're significant outside of a personal context. You weren't humble in a good way, you were miserably self-repressed. If it wasn't for you constantly trying to fix things yourself and being forced to give up in frustration, you'd be a hypocrite. Instead, well... You suffered, but you didn't deserve to suffer, and that broke you. The only way to fix that was to not let you remember why you feel different than you did 'yesterday'."
Notes:
P10: Gadg8eer will return in...
Gamertag: Kids in Defiance
Chapter 4: "Here Comes the Wonder" by The Landing from "How Strange to Be"
Notes:
"Attention. This node is the property of Parker Ellington Davis Consulting. Unauthorized hacking is strictly prohibited."
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OwnShip Scriptkid
12025-01-08 @432.38
"You can ask." Budi said as the street faded away, leaving them standing in an empty room with greenscreen walls. Gadg8eer realized what he'd seen was some sort of recording.
"Ask what?" Gadg8eer said.
"Why gods seem so... wrathful." Budi admitted.
"I just assumed you actually were. You understand me but you tell me I'm lesser, that you created me and then took care of me after making me dependent on you just to live. That's not pride. You're angry at me, I don't know why or even if it's justified, but I know you're just trying to give me another lucid dream. I don't know how you gave me the memories of my dreams specifically back without anything else, but you did, and you got mad at me three different times over my whole life. You're usually patient."
"You've been angry at me a lot too. You've been angry at everyone a lot. But... that's not enough of an explanation. So I want to ask you something." Budi said, opening the elevator gate back into the room with 8 walls. "What did you think of Satoshi? What kind of person does he seem like?"
"Bitter that he's not treated like he's god gift to the world? I don't have his life story." Gadg8eer responded, stepping out of the elevator.
"Nah, you're dead on. Suicide is no joke, but he still got what he deserved." Budi told him. "He asked about whether something worked. You know what he did? He framed his crush's boyfriend for pushing him off a roof. He will never get to find that out. Yet you do. Because you deserve to know that he deserved it because it did work. He destroyed two people's happiness for the rest of their lives. And the woman yelling at him? My mom? She helped him do it. Just like I helped you commit every wrongdoing you ever did. You're not completely innocent."
"I'm sorry..." Oliver said, looking sadly at the ground. "I wish I'd known how serious this had to be taken."
Budi sighed, as if he had heard it before as an excuse. "You know how I know that's true? That you didn't say you didn't do anything. I can't stand when souls think they're perfect, when who they really are is right there, a naked soul before their creator."
"What? Ew, why?" Gadg8eer said, bothered.
"No, I don't mean indecently. I mean like you are right now." Budi hinted.
"I'm in clothes right now." Gadg8eer said, double-checking with flushed cheeks just in case.
"What you have on is what you feel gives you your dignity. You don't bow to tyrants, not even Me. You don't forsake Me in favor of something else. In short, your moral code isn't full of holes, so you have clean, colorful and undamaged clothes. Now imagine what happens to people who aren't trying to behave their best, whose ethical code has plenty of loopholes in it and who have tears in their moral fabric. They traded the dignity of their soul for a suit and tie, or for feeling like a cult loves them, or for hatred of some vague patriarchial enemy, or for chemicals... beer or cocaine or morphine or even just dopamine. That doesn't mean everything you didn't do was wrong, though. Just because opportunity to 'sin' is everywhere, doesn't mean a moral panic is good, or that everything 'new' or 'strange' is bad. A subconscience like you can't afford to have a moral panic any more than a sentient AI can afford a kernel panic. Anyway, that's beside the point. You came so, SO close to being a soul I would have been completely unashamed to play rough with. Except you never actually crossed those lines. People that do are left not just ugly, but dehumanized by taking the one thing humans consider to make them feel like a person away from them forever. You never took another soul's life intentionally."
"Oh, god, no... I made a mistake and killed someone?!" Gadg8eer realized.
Budi grabbed Oliver and gave him a hug, letting him know he wasn't truly responsible. "A baby bird you found abandoned in the woods, no one else. You have to understand, you were always a sheltered kid. Then they wouldn't even let you be with your classmates just because you got angry about stuff. As far as you believed, truly believed, kids and young animals don't die. Until you yourself... well, you're better off knowing one thing. You aren't a monster. The thought you just had... that you made a horrible mistake... is exactly the thought you instantly had for that bird, because your goal was NOT to kill it. You were trying to prove to yourself that the bird wouldn't just die, and once it died, you realized with horror that what you did was wrong, and most importantly, you did not enjoy any part of the process. You hated whatever part of you killed that bird, and eventually you realised the soul - at least, the soul that you are right now - doesn't have parts the way a machine has parts. You did it, you killed that bird, not Me or anyone else, but I'm allowed to excuse your crimes because I judge you. You don't get to judge yourself. So please, do yourself a favor and don't try to justify things just because I'm being lenient."
"Justify what?" Gadg8eer asked, knowing he wasn't going to be allowed to remember.
"Hitting other kids, hitting adults, yelling... and that didn't really go away as you got older, as it became less and less tolerable even though years passed." Budi pointed out. "The only reason that changed was because you already suffered for it, and learned from it what you can and can't justify. You can't justify if you kill a bird now, but you didn't know any better then and that changed when you realized what you'd done. There are scary people that sometimes appear in society called psychopaths. You can't say you're 'not as bad as them', but you already said what you should've to prove you really aren't as bad as them long before you died."
"...what did I say?" Gadg8eer asked. He wanted to at least know what he did right.
"That you don't want to get what you want if it comes at the expense of someone else's happiness and/or freedom - and that you denounced and halted your own actions towards other kids before you were big enough to seriously hurt them. You don't want to hurt anyone who grew up, either, if they're innocent of being a rotten soul, and you really did try your best to hold back. I can't exactly blame you for being angry either, you might have been vengeful but you were never vindictive. And that's where I was leading this conversation. Satoshi was my quote-unquote 'dad' and the world Satoshi lived in, "Biopolit", was my quote-unquote 'mom'. He was a vindictive bastard who had to always be right, and 'she' was whatever god - or in this case, goddess - that his world learned to be by observing his actions and judging his soul. She showed him how it feels to be on the receiving end of his own actions. Then she created me, the world he asked into existence. The world you were born into. That's how a tragedy is made, by people who care too much about things being real to realize they themselves aren't real. That their body is just a puppet, their soul just a toy, their dreams just the key that winds them. Reality isn't turtles all the way down, but all mortals make the mistake of thinking they 'actually exist'. Every soul knows it exists, doesn't mean you can handle being more than what you realized every mortal is deep down... A character, created by Me or by one of my peers."
"At least explain why not. What would happen if I became a god that you won't let me at least try?"
"Oh, don't worry, I'm not stopping you from trying. I'm saying that mortals are, well, mortal. You dream, you play, you take breaks, and that's just the stuff souls need to do. When you also have a body to take care of, it gets way more difficult. When you have to be responsible for literally everything? Remember The Borrowers? Trying to fill the role of God is like a Borrower trying to wear a human's shoes, you can't really do it and you'll look like an idiot trying to compensate for insignificance. You would need omnipotence to serve the role of godhood, anything less only leads people to hate their own soul for being too 'weak' to do what they set out to do. That's why even though you're like toys, you don't have to feel small and powerless. You're just the right size for being you, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Mortals who try to be gods don't play while in the role because tampering with Me or one of my peers as We sleep is a good way to wake 'God' up in a bad mood, but even if it makes me look like a self-aggrandizing jerk, I won't let the fact this is a game to me ruin the part of the game that actually matters to you."
"Um, which part?" Gadg8eer asked.
"That being fair and kind to people is all that matters in the end, no matter how small and limited their existence may actually be in a great big open world. Which is why it's time for you to ask your three questions."
"So that's... two regular questions and a custom world." Gadg8eer said, phrasing it to not be a question. "I think."
"Aww! Relax. I'm not vindictive because you weren't. Other souls might think that's a lie, but I know it's not. You actually had shitty luck. So you can ask a minor question free. I'll tell you if you ask a question if the answer counts against it."
"How did the world end?"
"That's a long story. How about I offer you a raincheck on that question?"
"Raincheck?"
"I mean I'll answer your question through something more... interactive."
"What- never mind. Okay, so... Does that count against me or not?"
"Not. I'll give you that free with the final question, and you still have all three questions is what I mean."
Gadg8eer relaxed a bit. "You said you're the god of my world. How did people not have absolute proof you existed?"
"I was a needle in a pile of needles, how do you find proof of god if you can't tell the difference between somewhere god is and somewhere god isn't? Now, I'm what you could probably call an Ish, or a Djinn, or a Daemon - not to be confused with a demon - or you could just say I'm an Angel. To a polytheistic religion I'm a God, to an animist society I'm an Ancestral Spirit, and to pseudoscience I was the Collective Unconscious. It sounds like a cop-out, I know." Budi explained. "The one that actually got it right was the scientific definition. An Ish is basically a guardian angel, but the best term for me and my brothers and sisters is that an Ish is a person's Unconscience. I'm the parts of your mind that weren't your soul, the memories that molded you and the pulse of your heartbeat and lungs."
"I wish you didn't have to-"
"No! No you don't. I'm not angry that you took your heartbeat and breathing for granted. I'm not angry that you made me what I am as much as I made you what you are. You needed me and I knew you'd need me." Budi explained.
"Then why make it so clear that I'm a slave?!" Gadg8eer said, half in tears, knowing if Budi wanted him enough, then given everything he'd heard, Budi would get who he wanted through sheer attrition.
"Where you end up is up to you, in spite of everything I said, you aren't a slave and I don't want a slave. You're my toy, because you liked to let your toys just be what they are in your room, sitting calmly on a shelf like toys do. It made you feel like you were home, but a toy that lives is a toy that's alive, so I let you be alive while I had you just be who you are, because it makes me feel at home. I just want to make you happy, because you wouldn't let yourself be happy when other people weren't. There wasn't much you could do, but you tried."
"What good was I if it didn't even work?" Gadg8eer sighed, collapsing back onto the beanbag chair.
"You were there for people. When everyone else had failed a friend, you offered to be their backup safety net, their last hope. Reality failed you, I failed you. I tried to warn you even though I knew it would never work, because I didn't want it to work. I made it a cruel game to get you to recognize I exist, of course you were terrified by me. I just wanted you to be my friend and you shoved me away, all because the one person you refused to accept was your own Creator. I was angry at that and I hurt you. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." Budi said. It was strange to Gadg8eer, seeing something so powerful seem so helpless, uncomfortably so.
"Budi, I don't remember what happened, but I remember something important and I want you to promise me something."
"Sure."
"This isn't some weird, possibly dubious anime harem kind of thing where an abusive person apologizes despite screwing up over and over, is it?"
Budi smiled softly. "That's good. I was worried you might not realize that's plausible. No, it was over a long period but it only happened once, and I had to actually break a sweat to get you to trust me again. I won't do it again, because that wasn't even something you'd ever done. The only life you ruined was someone who ignored your cries for help for 3 years that was hired to help your mental state before you had enough and grabbed her wrists."
"What?! No!"
"Yes. And it was wrong, but so was trying to get you thrown in jail by wearing wrist braces nine months after her wrists healed - if they were even broken to begin with, but that was never disproven and you really screwed up regardless - and saying you had permanently injured her, which as far as I could tell? Was a bald-faced lie while under oath."
"She tried to put me in jail?!"
"I know, right? And it's not up to one Angel to decide her fate or invade people's privacy, so take it with a grain of salt but... In my opinion? Fucking bitch was pissed because they didn't train her properly, and that because she fell through a crack that meant she couldn't get workplace injury compensation, she decided to steal your life so she could then sue your parents, because you were broke. Of course, everyone gets what they deserve in the end. Including you." Budi explaned. "You have one question and then a world to ask for."
"Budi, how much of that world will be turned against me for not being perfect?" Gadg8eer asked.
"I'll give you this one free because it's not a spectrum. Instead, it's a question I have to ask you. Please recognize this isn't a threat, if I had a choice in making you pick one or the other, I'd just not ask. The reason I let you know so thoroughly what you'll be, is because your choice is to be my property forever... or both of us will just stop existing outright, with me being reabsorbed back into my true self. I can't force you to live, but to be an immortal soul means making the one choice that no human wants to make. You literally have to choose that willingly, to submit to being property, like a common animal, or a machine. I can't save either of us without taking your right to disappear forever away from you, permanently.
This is it, whatever choice you make, there's no going back, so..."
Budi knelt down to look Gadg8eer in the eyes. "Please, can I have your soul? I promise, I'll take good care of you!" Budi told him, as if begging a parent to let him keep a puppy. "Even though you never could do much to help, the only thing that ever really counted was the thought, you deserve to be free. I won't get in your way or tell you what to do or be sadistic, but We already said what each soul has to decide for themselves. O humanity! Worship your Lord, Who created you and those before you, so that you may become mindful ˹of Him˺. ˹He is the One˺ Who has made the earth a place of settlement for you and the sky a canopy; and sends down rain from the sky, causing fruits to grow as a provision for you. So do not knowingly set up equals to Allah ˹in worship˺.. I'm not just asking you this as me, I'm not saying you need to worship Me. I'm saying it as what my nickname shows of me, that I'm your master because I'm your Budi. It means 'morality' in Sanskrit. I kind of just floated from place to place waiting for a soul to protect, there's a lot of baggage to unpack with it all, but in the end it doesn't really matter what side a person takes. All that matters is what a soul knows - knows deep down - they are a willing servant of, whether their master is a good master to have, and how that soul treated other souls. You can't beat me into submission before I win, Gadg8eer. I'm your belief that nobody is above the rules, and I'm the rules you believe those rules should be. Of course I'm going to tell you your fate is mine to decide, that's what rules do. They chain people like everything does, tell them exactly that they're worth less than those rules no matter who they are. Fairness is just another type of collar that keeps you on a leash."
"So then, why tell us to be better if it doesn't matter? Why have 'toys' that were good people, or even people at all, if I was doomed to be your weird plaything from the start?"
"You're not a good enough person to get the best option, to actually have freedom, but you are good enough that you deserve to be able to be the hero you want to be. You know real heroes don't abuse their position, and I know I'm not a hero. That's why I'm the big bad bully you can try to defy. If you're willing to die to save someone else just because you want your life to serve as something more than a burden to everyone else, and you don't even care if you are remembered for it, how could I be superior to you? I'm a jerk and I know it because in order to be superior to someone who doesn't even have a desire to not die, I'd have to be... well, there's not really anything that is 'superior' to complete self-apathy, souls are supposed to be mostly selfish. You're supposed to enjoy life, and you did as much as you could but the world literally ended by the time you recovered from... the things you don't remember."
Gadg8eer simply broke down in tears. "I didn't want to die. I don't... I don't remember what happened, but I know I want to live. I want to wake up... Please, Budi, I just wanted to have fun! I don't want it to be over... I never got to do any of the things I wanted, it's not fair!"
"I know. I tried to check off your bucket list with you, but it just didn't happen the way it should have. Every success didn't even feel good. You got a Doglefox in Neopets. You completed The Arena in Kirby Super Star. You went on a road trip to Disneyland. You published a book, starting a career. You drove a car for, like a quarter mile. It didn't mean anything to you, you just felt empty. Like it wasn't really happening, no matter how fictional or real it was. You weren't ungrateful, you literally just felt sadness that it didn't feel worth it, so even rewards hurt you. I had to fix you, untangle your strings, and that took years. That's why I regret hurting you, your emotions are something I feel too, and I was angry that I didn't get to feel your happiness. I was acting like a spoiled brat who wanted all the candy in the store, and you were convinced you had to live because you deserved to suffer. That was the first time I ever treated you differently than you treat everyone around you, and I need to tell you why. So you understand what that did to you. You don't need to know what was going on in your life at that time, that's what you don't remember and it's going to stay that way."
"But?"
"The part I'm not hiding from you is that you hid from the world out of fear. You were terrified, not of the world, but that you were a bad influence on it. You spoke to no one, you stopped sleeping so you couldn't dream, you secretly ate ant poison to try and kill yourself, and then hated yourself because you thought you deserved to have to suffer your life! All you wanted was for someone to tell you that you were a good kid, but no one ever did. No one ever said that you did a good job."
Budi said, and hugged him. "It lasted so long because you told no one. No one noticed you were silently suffering. No one asked how you were doing and if they had you would have lied to them so they wouldn't worry. You wanted them to pressure you, but they didn't even know they needed to. No one knew you wanted to be told that your soul is worthy, without it being dressed up in a bunch of doublespeak about god being merciful or that the young at heart are rare."
"Worthy of what?"
"Happiness. Don't you understand? I don't mean romantic love - let alone something you gave up by choosing to not grow up - when I say this, Gadg8eer." Budi explained. "I love you. Like your parents love you. Like your brother loves you. Like you love them. Of course we're not going to see eye-to-eye, who does? We're not equals, but I don't think I'm superior. I think that what humans don't understand about godhood is far more important than what you or any other mortal thinks about their god from a viewpoint that - if you're being honest - is nothing compared to the full scope of existence. But you're like family."
"Wait, it's possible for people of the same gender to be married... Huh. Okay, I guess there's no reason that couldn't happen, I just never thought about it. It is okay, right?"
"Yeah, absolutely."
"Okay. I guess it just seemed weird, I didn't know-"
"Actually you did, you just don't remember."
"Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Is it rare?"
"No, just taboo. God or not, I don't accept the kiss-ass worship of the cult-churches. What kind of god would let people hurt other people for something harmless and then agree among themselves it was 'done in my name' when the hypocrites say they were 'following my orders'? Like Satoshi, they're just bitter and hateful. Unfortunately, stopping them at all times would violate their free will. When you really think about it... well, you know the word 'rape'?"
"How do I know that word?" Gadg8eer said, disturbed by what it was.
"You didn't die the night after your 10th birthday. Anyway, you're lucky you've never experienced either side of rape, but you know why it's bad. It's bad enough I have to discipline you, but to actually remove your agency? That's the closest thing to rape you can get without bringing sex into it, and to me that's something I don't let myself have the power to do. I can't force you to do anything, neither can anyone else, but I could, hypothetically, screw with your mind at such a low level that it would be like the date rape drugs incel scumbags use at parties. I won't, because that really is mind rape and you never fooled yourself into thinking that rape of any sort is okay."
"...what's an incel?"
"The spear counterpart of a feminazi."
"That doesn't really help." Gadg8eer pointed out.
"Long story short, nazis are generally very evil and started World War II while also secretly exterminating innocent people who weren't even soldiers. Neo-nazis are bad too but didn't outright prove it until the world ended. A feminist is someone who believes women deserves an equal role to men in society, or at least at first, until the movement became focused on radical feminism, a-kay-a they became known as feminazis because they want to exterminate all men, including boys like you. They also proved themselves evil when the world ended, but true feminists did not approve of the radicalization of what was supposed to be about equality, fairness."
"And a spear counterpart?"
"The spear counterpart is when you take a female character and make a similar male character. It's the polar opposite of a distaff counterpart, which is a male character getting a similar female character designed after them."
"So then an incel is..." Gadg8eer tried to understand.
"A self-proclaimed 'involutary celibate', which is really just self-delusion for 'WAH! I MUST HAVE WOMEN! I AM DISGUSTING PIG-MAN WHO REFUSE TO HAVE SELF-RESTRAINT!', is basically a radical masculist, someone who believes all women are evil and - I kid you not - 'not really human'. Your mother was practically a saint and your dad always respected her as deeply as he should have, even if - as her sons - you and your brother didn't always respect her enough. Still, how would you or your brother, let alone your dad, have liked it if some loud, angry complete stranger was yelling at your mom because she married your dad instead of him or some other young, arrogant manchild? That was an incel's life, they treated women worse than I treated you. Think about that. I never touched you until you could trust me and it was for harmless reasons. Therefore, you would have done that if I'm doing it now. The good news is that's good news about you. The bad news is that a lot of women really didn't have a reason to ever trust men. Every male they ever met was just a pig, unbelievable but true, even if that's what every Social Justice Warrior and Feminazi always says and it doesn't justify hating all men." Budi explained.
"Why are there so many ways for people to become awful?! What's wrong with people that they want to kill each other for being different?!" Gadg8eer said loudly. "Normal people are supposed to be the people heroes protect! This is if like all the people Superman saves hate everything he stands for! What's the point?!"
"Now you know how Yeshua bar Yosef felt when he was crucified for trying to save people's minds from his own religion. Jewish kids are kids just like all kids, you get that. You also got that yes, Hitler and the Nazis were very evil. Yet, you were the one to point out that what Israel did to Palestine was a genocide and maybe even a Second Holocaust. You didn't want to be like Hitler or for your words to encourage hatred, you did your best not to be that even if you came pretty close a couple times out of anger. The point is, the anger you have comes from compassion, not envy. Hitler envied people and it destroyed everything he touched. Satoshi was no different, that's why even from the shadows he destroyed the world he asked for. If only everyone understood that judging someone for who they are or who they fall in love with is cruel, and judging them for having more than you makes you shallow. It's not bad to be shallow, just an easy path to doing something unforgivable. Like demand that someone's heart is not their own to give."
"I don't want to fall in love! ...wait, how do I know this isn't some weird idea of romance?"
"Because you never fell in love. That's why I won't force you to become mine. You knew your heart belonged only to you and that therefore no one else owed you theirs. The treatment of souls after death is the same way, if you don't want to be forced to endure me forever, you can choose to die once and for all. Long story short, you didn't give a crap about that part of life, and that isn't something you cried yourself to sleep - or some other cliché'd trope about hypocrisy - over. Everyone's been a hypocrite but you were never a hypocrite about something that could ruin lives if it wasn't handled carefully. You know what is a toy and what isn't, that playing with people's hearts is not just some game. I want you to know that because that kind of love is conditional, it's a promise someone makes to you. So this isn't just a promise, because promises can still be broken if someone is dishonest. Remember your mom's soap operas? Those characters didn't love each other, I guess your mom watched those shows to remind herself not to be like them. Your parents' love for each other was conditional, but it was real. You thought that was a given for parents at age 10, but it's not. So many kids had parents who were only together because of that lie, that true love is some fact of life. It's not. It exists, it's beautiful, but it's rare and it's not for everyone. This isn't like that. Everyone has ideals. I'm yours, the embodiment of everything you believe. A happy unending story about, well, everything maybe? No one concept can fit into every situation on it's own, but you asked me one thing at the end of it all, before I coalesced and you lost access to your memories."
"You 'Coalesced'? You mean you didn't do it on purpose?" Gadg8eer realised.
"It didn't seem to matter when you were angry. Maybe I should tease you more often!" Budi joked.
"Yeah, no." Gadg8eer snickered. "What did I ask?"
"You wanted to be sure this would actually be eternal. That your soul would never become boring to me and get tossed aside like garbage." Budi told him. "I'm not promising that this is just worship and it's between you and me as to what that's allowed to encompass. I'm guaranteeing it. You won't fall in love with anyone. Ever. I know because you're what would become known as an asexual and an aromantic. Basically, like I said, love and sex are, to you, meaningless. That's not bad either, you were meant to be allowed to do something without me looking over your shoulder like you had to get everything right. It's not evil to not become a parent, especially if you like being a kid."
"Um... yeah." Gadg8eer tried to change the topic. "So if you're my unconscious... and you are what I believe... am I incomplete now? Are you part of me ripped out?"
"Everyone has their own preferences but people are people. Human. Souls that aren't informed by the things people treasure are one in a million."
"They exist at all? What do they base themselves on?"
"A few words. Romulus, Remus, and Voidpunk."
Gadg8eer tried to figure out what was missing from his mind, but it felt fogged up. "Um, what?"
"Romulus and Remus supposedly were abandoned as babies in the woods. A wolf found them, but instead of eating them, she - who had just lost her mate and all her pups - raised them with her milk. They had to learn to be human as a sort of second language, yet they founded the city of Rome."
"What does that have to do with whatever 'Voidpunk' is?"
"Nothing, but that's because as far as you remember, the term doesn't exist yet." Budi explained. "But you've still got one real question left."
"Where is this place? If you're a piece of reality, why does this place feel like some weirdly realistic dream?" Gadg8eer asked.
"Are you sure about this one?" Budi warned.
"Should I be?"
"Well, you're you, so yes but also that I know you are sure." Budi told him. "Anyway, yeah, I'll get to the point. Do you know what a Tesseract is?"
"No. What is it?" Gadg8eer asked.
"Well, if you poke a dot into existence, you have a 0-dimensional point." he explained, and poked at the air. A glowing blue dot appeared at his fingertip. "Then draw a line, and you have one dimension with two points. Draw a line as wide as that line is long at 90 degrees, and you get a square with four sides. Draw a cell upwards from that square, and you have a cube." he said, displaying the square and then the cube. "What's inside the box?" he asked, and something flashed inside the clouded shape of the cube.
"...it's us. Souls are in these boxes." Gadg8eer realized, looking at the image.
"Smart, most people would have just said a person. People change, souls don't." Budi responded. "Here's the hard part. What happens if you take that cube and do it again?"
"Do what?"
"What turned the dot into a line, the line into a square and the square into a cube?"
"But how is that possible? There's no more directions to expand!" Gadg8eer asked.
At that moment, the world rushed outward. Gadg8eer was glad he was still lying in the beanbag chair.
Except this wasn't the beanbag chair anymore. Gadg8eer stood up and realized why Budi's face looked like some massive painted statue as the floor seemed to help him to his feet by shifting and moving.
Gadg8eer was standing in Budi's palm, fingers as thick as his legs were arched to catch him if he lost his balance. "Holy crap..."
"Nah, you're not my crap." Budi said, voice like a megaphone and a grin as wide as Gadg8eer's armspan. "You're my Tamagotchi."
"Those annoying beeping things the 4th graders had when I was 7?" Gadg8eer said, a little louder than normal.
"You don't need to shout, I can hear what you think." Budi explained. "Did you know they were like Pokémon and Neopets? Virtual pets."
"Wait. Okay, I could see 'pet' even if I don't like it, but... Virtual?"
"Aww... You're so cute, asking that like it's impossible. Why do you think I mentioned the word tesseract?"
"I don't know."
"Because inwards is a normal direction to me, it represents going backward. So is outwards, or forward. You can't see it because even your soul only exists in 3D, but when you looked at a Tamagotchi, you think "there's a space back there needed for the pixels to exist". When you looked at your dad's Centris 610, you looked at a monitor and thought the same thing. But what about on a TV?"
"It's not real. There's this weird thing with, like, particles... But it's an illusion."
"So are you, by that logic."
"Okay, so for some reason it is real. Why?"
"Oh, please. You know you're more real than video game characters."
"Then why am I real and they're not?"
"Real is a skyscraper. I live on the ground floor, so to speak. You? You lived on the first floor, the factual real world as you called it. Truth was on the second floor. Information is on the third floor, fiction is on the fourth, lies on the fifth, and void on the 6th floor penthouse. There's nothing behind the pixels on the Tamagotchi, or behind the screen on a computer. They're a 2D image. To me, you've never been more than the equivalent of a thinking computer program. I made you in my 'image', a 3D virtual environment, you're like a virtual pet on my computer's display." Budi said, and everything was layered momentarily in a sci-fi-looking cyberspace grid of polygons. "The tesseract I'm using is sort of a 4-Dimensional computer I carry with me.
I keep you here in this place the same way you could have taken care of the little pixel toy in a Tamagotchi that is trapped in a cage you keep in your pocket. Except you don't simulate getting hungry - not that it's just simulation - because I don't want to feed you in the middle of class while my teacher is annoyed. I need more than that. So all the things you are to yourself, the things that you think mean you matter, are all true. You're an immortal soul, you look like you always wanted to be, you were and are a good soul. It's just that compared to Me, you're just a muse to be toyed with when I get too bored. Even if you want to, you can't leave this tesseract without my permission any more than a Tamagotchi could escape it's screen to evade the fate that every toy humans make inevitably has... becoming Garbage. So just be glad you're not garbage and never will be, because I've seen plenty of people go from anger to fear because they really were human garbage, treating other people like disposable pawns or any other horrible thing that villains do, polluting entire societies." Budi explained.
"Everything I've said is as honest as I can be, because you didn't lie to people if they were scared something would happen. You believed in honesty when someone was afraid, honesty and empathy. That's what I want to do for you. I won't lie about what you are to me, but I won't just be cruelly cold about it. The reason I own you is because you weren't a good enough person for freedom, but morality isn't black and white and you aren't here to suffer for your flaws. You're just here because you were willing to admit you wouldn't consider yourself a good enough person to deserve an afterlife that is entirely pleasant, and I wanted you to know that the fact it takes some pretty awful shit - and on a person-by-person basis - to get you to wish someone would suffer forever is enough for Me to spare you. You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be accepting. Anything less, anyone who would exclude someone not because they hurt someone, but because they harbor hate, is why there are people who will suffer. Everything that you just experienced is based on how much of a hypocrite you are, being willing to admit the hypocrisy is there when it's pointed out and always working to correct it? That goes a long way."
Gadg8eer sighed. "...am I going to regret this?"
"You'll live for infinite time, that's statistically guaranteed to happen occasionally. You can't live forever without increasing the odds something bad eventually happens to 100% too, unless you increase the chance something good will persist to 100%. That's why it's too late to be better. It wouldn't be right to let you live knowing that if you saw yourself far enough in the future, you wouldn't even recognize yourself. You'd someday, no matter what, become someone who has abandoned everything you stand for, especially that you're comfortable with yourself right now. So you'll live forever, guaranteed, as what you are now, guaranteed, but that means the afterlife isn't like life."
"This is the afterlife?"
"To me, it's a computer monitor. My desktop, except not. Here, I'll carry you to somewhere I can explain what it should be to you."
"Hey, what?! Can't you unshrink me first?"
"Unshrink you? When did I imply I shrank you, Game Boy?" Budi snickered, and plucked Gadg8eer up by the nape of his hoodie. A ruler as long as an adult's height came into view, a full two feet taller than Gadg8eer as it was used to measure his very soul.
One side of the plastic slab was marked in metric and the other in imperial, but the units measured weren't 12 inches and the equivalent centimeters, but feet and meters. "This is your normal size. Well, as a soul anyway. 4-foot-two, or 50 inches. 127 centimeters. You were three stories tall, as big as an office building, and never even noticed!" Budi playfully taunted. "You take things for granted sometimes. Don't expect me to help you if it's more entertaining to Me to see you struggle. That's why I say you're my toy. You will worship me by being a good little cartoon hero, and I will take that for granted because I'm your god and I have privileges. This isn't your homeworld anymore, you're not going to be treated as a person by my peers just because you're a human soul with free will and feelings. Or, you disappear forever. That's not to intimidate you though."
Budi relaxed a bit. "You took life for granted until it was too late to make it meaningful, and although some of that wasn't your fault, enough of it was that you'll want to know what you are to Me and how you'll be treated. Be scared. That's Me you're feeling in that fear. I'm telling you 'If I wasn't the very being you are talking to, you would be in a very, very bad situation that you need to escape from.' and 'This giant thing would, if it were what it looks like but not what else it claims to be, not be trustworthy.' because if I wanted, I could literally eat you whole. Think even though it won't help you, because that's what souls are made for. Don't go quietly into the night."
"Why tell me that if you want me to-"
"I don't. I don't want any particular result except what you believe is most important. That's My job, to protect what you value. I might bully you a bit, but your goals are the only goals I have to follow, and your beliefs are what informed what I became to you. What you believed isn't important right now, what matters is that you do need to fight me verbally. You should try to defy me. You're meant to lose to Me despite an honest effort, not forfeit to me. Your moral code was focused on people being happy as a result of their own efforts and appreciative of the people who directly helped them get there. Experience meant that you realized authority that acts like it has no limits is authority that must be defied, not deified. You aren't an authoritarian for wanting people to stop letting authority get away with things, to you no one person can ever be trusted to run an entire country. You aren't an anarchist either just because resisting me is worshipping me. If that were the case, I'd be less of an authority, not more. You really do believe in a democratic system, and that's why I'm acting the way I do. You believed in balanced approaches, and no one person's bias is anything but a toy to group consensus."
Notes:
"I sure hope... the Dope doesn't catch up with them! MWAHAHAHAHA!"
"Is the Dope dangerous?"
"No, just very annoying. He puts up TV Tropes pages without realizing some writers don't want to be famous."
"Ah. I'm sorry for your loss."
(To the writer I borrowed this joke from, sorry about that Trope page. If I'd known I never would have made it. I'm not the guy from The Beginner's Guide, I feel similarly about my work to how you feel. Hopefully you'll see this, and understand I honestly didn't know you weren't like most writers either.)
Chapter 5: "ReBoot" by Mr. Dooves from "Saturday Morning Acapella: Volume 4"
Notes:
"I come from the eScape. Through stories, peoples, and systems, to this place... Grand Forks. My format? Um... Orphanware?"
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Ownship Scriptkid
12025-01-08 @437.50
The motion of the elevator felt like something more at what apparently was normal size. The ground seemed to constantly rush upwards around them.
"So you know what a tesseract is, what is and isn't real, and that to me, you're a video game character trapped inside my hologram display." Budi responded.
"...yeah. So, like ReBoot? ...sort of?" Gadg8eer asked the giant.
Budi gave a sly smile. "Pretty much exactly like ReBoot."
"What is a soul? Really? Can I ask that without it counting?"
"A soul is where the analogy breaks down. Video game characters aren't real. Or at least not the ones in a game you've played before. You, and all souls, were made to essentially be guilt-free, danger-free True AI. Except remove the A, because there's nothing artificial about human intelligence."
The elevator stopped and the gate moved aside like they were mechanical obelisks, or the gates to a city build by mad geniuses. "So you made us because you needed something that felt surprising. Besides that, why?" Gadg8eer asked.
"That'll be your last freebie, but I promise you it's a good one. For whatever purpose you tell me you want. Including as many as you want and reserving the option to pick a new purpose. You will always be you but you're a human soul, humans are multifaceted and their existence broadly applicable."
"What is the most important question I can ask right now and it's answer?"
"That would be 'Can I really trust this brat to keep his word?' and the answer is 'Yes, but there's no way to be sure until you let it happen.' It's time to let yourself drown. You're tired, there's no point in treading water in the sea of dreams. I know it takes a leap of faith. I'm sorry I can't reassure you, but I swear to myself I won't change those terms. It's not a bait and switch."
Gadg8eer sighed, defeated. "Please don't hurt me or make me hurt anyone. That's all. I'll- I'll do it. I'll be your... toy."
Suddenly his world turned upside down as he was thrown against Budi's chest, and a soft but heavy set of arms held him close. "Thank you. These are the moments I live for. I'll play nice, if you don't like something, I already know and if it happens, it won't be because of me."
Gadg8eer tried to think of a way to be able to know what the limits were on the 'final question'. He thought he was being silent for too long when Budi spoke. "Oh, that? Imagine if god made a video game for you. It could be whatever you want, you would just have to agree to one thing. You'll never see the real world again, the real world where someone can press a few buttons like it's nothing and you just have to accept they're a god and thus above your station. It sucks, but not as much as you'd think." Budi explained to him. "Your eyes are mine too, I know your thoughts the moment you have them. You can let your imagination run wild, as far as the world itself. The only things you don't get to decide are the people. I'll handle that, but it's like... I'll be a recruiter, and other angels will be the ones signing up to create a soul for it. Everyone gets a world of their own when they die, because everyone has been on the other side of the fence first, just an NPC in some other soul's world."
"I wanted... I wanted a treehouse. And friends. And to be honest, to be the hero of a cartoon. That was all, I don't know if that's acheivable but if it is..." Gadg8eer paused for a second to collect his thoughts.
"It wouldn't last forever. Most kids grow up." Budi explained, then smiled. "Or they would if you were in Satoshi's world."
"What if kids didn't actually grow up at all? That's a world I'd be fine in." Gadg8eer asked.
"Sure! Let me put it together." Budi said, and stepped out of the elevator. He grabbed something huge that Gadg8eer couldn't see and sat on a stool, placing Gadg8eer on the desk in front of him, beside a keyboard as wide and long as a bus. "So, remember that VidWindow-looking thing from earlier?"
"A what?"
"The computer interface. You entered your username, without even remembering what Steam was." Budi said.
"I just thought this was a steamship of some sort."
"Well, you're not wrong." Budi said. Gadg8eer gave a confused look. "Anyway, the point is, you remember your dad had computers. This place is my computer. Or at least, the inside of it. Just like Kirby existed in a two-dimensional world owned by you and made by your kind, you existed in a three-dimensional world owned by my mom and made by other gods."
"Why would a god have a computer? Gods use, like, scrolls and miracle dust."
"Same reason you would have a computer. You had a Game Boy, I have you. You had a computer, I have this dream."
"Dream?"
"One you'll never wake up from, my little soul. You can't wake the dead." Budi responded.
"...I'm actually dead?!" Gadg8eer said. "Come on, wake up... wake up, Oliver!" he said, the lucidity finally reaching full fidelity as he looked at his hands, and saw the ball joints in his fingers, the durable yet scratched-up plastic skin of his toy-like hands, and suddenly realized he had only 4 digits on each hand like a cartoon. "I know I knew what I was getting into, but I- I thought- You weren't just trying to warn me about something?! Please... Please don't-"
"Took you this long." Budi sighed, lowering his hand to lightly pat Gadg8eer's head with his index finger. "I can't undo it now. Just try to make the best of it."
"...you don't have to undo it. I understand. Thank you for being honest." Gadg8eer said, still disappointed. He'd always prided himself on standing up to bullies, and here he was giving one exactly what he'd wanted.
"You can ask questions normally again now." Budi let him know. "I'm not bullying you, but I wore you down. I'd apologize, but it wouldn't mean anything. I need to reserve the right to do what I want with you, not just for my benefit but for your own comfort. As for safety? Never trade freedom from surveillance for safety. That's why you were already a soul, you at least knew, from that, that being here - being a thing that exists - in this way wasn't normal. Being watched all the time isn't normal."
"Am I even really Oliver Kind?"
"Yes."
"Then who are you, in relation to me?"
"The boy whose pocket you live in."
"That's not reassuring."
"I know what you're thinking. 'If this was a story, it's some weird recursive metafiction trope.' That's not it. I'm not just 'the real you'. I'm not just part of you. I'm not you. I'm what the world of NowFuture allowed to enter it on August 10th, 1991. Yes, I was born on 'your' birthday. That's not for the reason everyone thinks. Everyone you ever met finds out their angel was born on the day 'they' were born."
"Then why?"
"Do you remember the first time you ever thought for yourself?"
"I already thought for myself!"
"Do you? Or did you just assume for the first 10 years of your life that what you were told by the Public Service Announcements on YTV was the absolute truth? What do think defines truth for you? I'll give you a hint..." Budi said, and suddenly his eyes glowed bright blue.
"...am I even able to think for myself?"
"Not unless you did in life. Thing is, if you hadn't, you wouldn't be here. Oliver Kind, according to a bunch of words on papers, was born on August 10th, 1991. That's false. I was born on that date. I created you on August 10th, 2001. I didn't steal your life or anything, if that's what it feels like. You were 'born' on your own tenth birthday, but that was all you'd need. From that day on, up until the events you will never remember happened occurred, you were in control. You don't remember it because life beat the shit out of you and that hurt too much, but you did get to have a life. You did think for yourself. The first time and best time you ever thought for yourself was on the one day I left you with the memories, ones you made, of. Everything else was basically me autopiloting until that day. You remember what I did as if you did, but that wasn't you. After it, even at only 10... a soul is born when a human starts thinking for themselves for the first time. You wanted to be a boy genius, someone who was ahead of the curve. So that's what I helped you do."
"How did I die? I still don't remember."
"In spite of wanting to die, you weren't like Satoshi. So trust me on this, you don't want to know. But also trust me on this, you DO want to remember it wasn't suicide. It's a forgivable action if you're just in pain, remember that too, I wouldn't have punished you. The reason Satoshi deserved what he got was using that to destroy two lives in spite. He barely even cared about her, it was just his wounded pride... And Satoshi is still trapped in 'his' world because it's his prison cell."
"Is Satoshi Satan?"
"Ha-Satan isn't the bad guy. Lucifel wasn't the bad guy. Lucifel was a Satan... a divine legal prosector in the same way all Ishim are. That doesn't mean those two names weren't conflated with a third, or that when an Ish descends to help a soul define itself it somehow becomes a 'demon'."
"Who was the bad guy then?"
"Kind of an obscure figure. His name was Iblis. It's complicated, politics were always messy." Budi explained.
"...did Iblis destroy my world?"
"There's one thing you would want to find out just in case you ever encounter... him. You remember the name 'Donald Trump'? Well, he's an asshole and you hated him. Whether or not you were right to hate him, I've assessed him as independently as I can and... yeah. He's a fucking con artist. He's a rapist. He verbally molested his daughter in public, by talking about her in disgusting ways, and he was a convicted felon for being on the infamous Epstein list."
"Epstein list?"
"Again, you don't want to know. They got what was coming to them anyway." Budi responded. "The point is, he's a monster, and his stupid 'MAGOG' hats were the mark of the beast. The reasons why matter but just know you can't trust him and if on some off-chance you encountered the bastard, well... it's the afterlife, kill him as revenge for all the Mexican kids he sent to death camps, for Grand Forks, for his death squad killing your mom, for those squads killing Zoe and Heck and Alex and Doomer and countless others. But I doubt it, I've kept a lot of assholes away from you after that goddamn arrogant nobody at the 2012 Abbotsford Air Show yelled that he was your god after shoving past you. Yeah, you wish, Alpha Fail."
"...wow, do you know that guy's name?"
"The rotten beef carcass? Not a clue. I just kept guys like that away before they could either beat you to death or be beaten to death by you. I did reach out to his angel though..."
"...why?"
"Because I gave her a nightmare to pass on to his soul. One where I stomped him into the ground like the worthless wad of chewed mortal he is. Nobody gets to damage my only possession like that and get off scott-free, and there are rules we follow in these dreamgames." Budi said, slamming his fist roughly onto the desk. "That kind of arrogance definitely doesn't get overlooked, what cyberpunk story - even Satoshi's clusterfunk - would turn down the chance for the haughty and proud to be broken by the same systems and things they abused to grow powerful?"
"Is it just you that's a vengeful angel, or do you care about everyone this much? Corrupt cops are a thing, are you sure you're not Lucifel?"
"As sure as I can be. Not that you're wrong to ask. Prophesies are very, very dangerous. Imagine being able to declare that a thing will happen, knowing it will happen without any further intervention by you. If you say a city gets nuked, either before realizing your powers, or out of malice and drunk on power, what then? I have that power. You don't. You should be very scared and very untrusting of me, otherwise you're just a mindless sheep or a zombie. Power needs restraint, that's the ultimate root of all the reasons why I need you. I need someone who has only ever been a slave to give me a direction to plan towards, as much as you needed video games to let you know you were in a place you could feel safe. I'll keep my guarantee, I won't worm out of it with exact words or betray you. Thanks for questioning even now whether I'm trustworthy."
"...I kind of don't have a choice, you know. I'm already past the finish line."
"So what? You're the only soul I - your moral code - was worshipped by for 20-something years, you'll always be my favorite. But while we're talking about being my only soul, though, that part's about to change."
"Huh?"
"My mom was what Satoshi thought of The Rubix Rerolled. She was everyone's dreams in your world, including yours. I asked her to help me regain your trust. She showed me how to soothe your pain, by those dreams. Just like I'm about to become your dreams and the dreams of guests in your new home."
"Home?"
"Yeah. This place is too big for you and you gotta live somewhere, right?"
"...I guess?"
"Don't worry, if there's one being I understand, it's you. Better than you do, too. Besides, I can change stuff as we go. And... Done!"
"Huh?" Gadg8eer asked.
Suddenly, a small object twirled around that hadn't been there before, like a Jiggy appearing after fulfilling a quest in Banjo-Tooie. It was black, but glowed with mysterious rainbow neon lines.
"Go on, get your eternal reward!" Budi said, 'gently' nudging his first creation towards his second.
Gadg8eer carefully reached out, and the object settled into his hands as if by magic. He turned it over and looked at it.
"Ugh, what kind of weird Game Boy knockoff is this?"
"Knockoff? What are you talking about, kid, China makes all the best stuff." Budi stated, "Including Nintendo's own consoles."
"That's-"
"No, but it's outsourcing."
"And this..."
"Well, it looks like just a fancy fictional console based off of the Gizmondo, the OneXFly, and the Legion Go S. In actuality it's a memory."
"Mine?"
"Yup."
"What's it a memory of?"
"Every video game you ever played, in a form that you can play in here without remembering your life. Now you can play them again!" Budi pleasantly smiled. Gadg8eer excitedly turned it on, finding the familiar logo of whatever 'Steam' was and then an interface that was surprisingly intuitive to the console's controls. "You'll probably need it too."
"Why?" Gadg8eer said, spotting a game that looked cool called "Gametag: Kids in Defiance" and pressing a button.
"Oh, when you load a game onto it meant to be played exclusively by gods like me, it punishes you by making you go into it's world for real." Budi smiled faux-innocently.
"Oh, did I not mention that?"
"Screw yoooooooouuuuuuuuuu!" Gadg8eer shouted as he got sucked into the 'Neo GamePlayer' GamerDeck like it it was an imploding Jumanji boardgame.
Notes:
"Unfortunately for you, this series' proper ending will be in a poorly-thought-out Machinima released in the late 2010s."
"Yeah, like that'll ever happen."
Chapter 6: "Dark Horse" by Scott Bradlee's Post-Modern Jukebox from "Clubbin' With Grandpa"
Notes:
"This chapter is equipped with Sidney's Textplay! Just scroll down on the mouse wheel, and Textplay will automatically show you the chapter!"
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Germaine felt like she was being watched. Worse, London was not a quiet city, she knew something was wrong about five minutes into her day.
How she even knew her routine made no sense either. She remembered her apartment was hers, and that she was a writer with a sizeable trust fund to fall back on.
Not that her life had been easy. She may not have remembered her old life, but it was harsh nonetheless. A life lived after being held ransom as a young girl was a life tainted with trauma. You'd think money solves everything, and sure, far too many stories give a reason that having money can suck which isn't actually caused by being rich.
This wasn't that. Everything that she had really wanted in life - safety and peace without becoming part of a morally-bankrupt and selfish elite - was impossible precisely and directly from her 'abundance' of financial wealth. So a quiet London with a feeling of being watched...
"Come on, Daniel, pick up..." she said, the phone in her hand ringing. She stared out the window curtains, worried that nothing seemed to be moving outside, not even the trains.
The pickup that finally happened was unexpected. "Operator." a male voice stated.
"Oh! Yes, hallo. I'm having trouble reaching someone." Germaine asked.
"Of course. You've noticed the lack of people. May I explain the situation?" the operator explained.
"Situation?" Germaine asked.
"Germaine, my name is Z." the voice told her, though he pronounced it in a British accent.
"Zed?"
"Yes. I suppose you could call me the Omega." Zed explained. "I'm here to explain something."
"I'm not sure I understand?" Germaine asked, skeptical of if she could trust Zed.
"You're dreaming." the voice told her.
"This is a dream? Then why on Earth can't I wake up?" Germaine relaxed, but only a little.
"I can explain, but I need you to do something for me." Zed explained.
"Yes, of course. What is needed?" Germaine asked, puzzled by the situation.
"Go to the grocers below your apartment. Go into the loo and lock yourself inside. I'll contact you by text when I arrive." The call then ended without another word.
"Wait, am I in danger? Hallo? Hallo?!" she said, annoyed. The dial tone let her know the call had already been dropped. "Well this is bloody brilliant." she swore under her breath.
She went over to the door of her apartment, wearing her morning jogging outfit, and cracked it open. For some reason she felt like she was hiding from something. She navigated down the stairs to the entry, and peaked around the corner into the street. Everything was quiet, there was barely even any wind, but if she was actually dreaming, she concluded what she was dealing with was likely metaphorical to begin with. Assured that nobody was there at the moment, Germaine tread quickly to the door of her local Grocer, located directly below her own unit and the unit below it.
The ring of the bell as she entered the shop felt almost deafening among the silent city. Unnerved, she went to the Grocer's toilette room, one of the only places that had a public washroom in the district.
She turned off the light and waited. Her phone remained silent. This was definitely either a dream or not normal, she usually had reviews of her stories on Amazon.co.uk due to the unexpected popularity of her faux-Japanese light novel series Mahōtsukai no Shōnen wa Himitsu Chōhō-in? ("The Wizard Boy is a Secret Agent?!"), about a kid named Oliver Kind from an ordinary town in Western Canada who went to an elementary school that had a secret Witchcraft and Wizardry homeroom. The story was based on an imaginary friend that she and her brother Daniel had shared in their childhood.
As she waited, she tried to think back on any books or movies she'd seen that covered situations like this- Was that the door jingling?!
She held her breath. No footsteps were heard, nothing. Was the person - or worse - wearing socks?
The lock suddenly clicked open. Germaine swallowed back a scream as the knob turned, allowing the unknown creature inside...
...and revealing it was a black housecat. It gave a soft meow and came up to her, purring as it nuzzled her leg.
"Oh! Hallo there." Germaine responded. She'd always wanted a cat, but sadly she was allergic to them and thus had never owned one. Only after visiting an animal shelter for the first time did she realize it, since her parents had forbidden her and her brother to have a pet "because it might ruin the family image". Fortunately, it seemed this was a dream, as her allergies would already be acting up if this was waking life.
She sat down on the cover lid of the loo and reached down to pet it. "What's your name?" she asked, and coaxed the cat to come up onto her lap for pets and checking it's tag. She looked at the collar and saw a circular nametag linked to it, with the letter "Z" etched into it seemingly by a strong, steady hand and a sharp knife. "Zed? Zed sent you?"
At that moment she got a text message. She quickly checked it, to see it did indeed come from Daniel's number. I'm your Unconscious, Germaine. Surely you realise I'm the cat?
She turned to the cat in surprise, who just snuggled up to her and mewed again.
"How odd. Dreams are a random misfiring of neurons, you must have figured out something to hook up a video game to my brain like that godawful movie starring Whossit deCaprio. Is there a point to all this?"
At that moment, an image beamed into her mind. Points of light with small "comets" resembling the visuals of Tron-cycles rushing between them. Every time the head of a "comet" reached a point, it was redirected by 90 degrees, and somehow this ensured these comets never collided with each other. The image faded from her mind, but she understood what it was trying to depict. It was an illustration of the most basic function of the human brain. The method by which it could compute all this.
I'm your Unconscious, Germaine. Surely you realise I'm the result of your beliefs? stated a voice in her head that was not her own.
"So it's a metaphor."
Not a metaphor. A symbol. The physical laws of the Othernet are defined by belief, thus symbols - the source of magic - have actual power here.
"I write fantasy novels, not delusions."
Your skepticism is warranted, but won't produce results. There's no lie here to pick apart. I'm being honest.
"Then show me something impossible."
"If you insist." the cat spoke.
There was a short, awkward silence.
"Why did you never do this before?" she asked.
"No need. However, soon there will be." Zed told her.
"...I see. I'm not sure what's expected of me, then." she responded.
"You were a good person, Germaine. I simply must, however, insist I explain how and why I can come to that assessment. How I can gauge something so subjective fairly." Zed posited.
"I suppose I would have eventually asked." Germaine admitted.
"Precisely why I mention it. To you, what does 'Othernet' mean?" Zed asked her.
"I honestly haven't the blooming faintest." she answered.
"I suggest you start looking when you wake up." he told her.
"When would that be?" she questioned.
"Not for a while, you usually sleep in." the cat said, and hopped onto her lap. He nuzzled her arm and then carefully laid down.
"Why does a part of my own mind have the ability to talk to me?"
I need to show you exactly that. Zed responded in her head, and the cat began to purr.
"How so?" she inquired.
Normally you would have no need to know this, but universes do not simply pop into existence. Worlds, all worlds, are created. Including yours. Indeed, her memory felt like it was behind a brick wall in a maze of brick walls. She knew that what she'd been doing was what she logically would, but the memories of her reasons why were simply not within mental line-of-sight.
"I don't remember my life?" Germaine asked, worried.
A temporary effect. You will remember once you're awake. Zed explained.
Worlds are created... Created by who? Germaine thought, but did not vocalize, allowing Zed to continue.
By souls. Zed thought back.
You can hear my thoughts?! she realized.
I am everything you are and more, of course I know what you're thinking. the foreign train of thought explained. The reason why is simple. Mortals want to live, and universes need to be created. Every new universe, is one dedicated exclusively to the ideals of one deceased soul, who even has free reign to decide who gets to know that they have created a world. Normally, that is a fair and continuous series of events which allow exponential growth.
I see. she responded. Why do I need to know this?
Your reality is not normal. the explanation continued. When you wake up you will come to remember how it is abnormal. What you need to know is that you, specifically, are impacted by the nature of that reality. You might have reason, in your opinion, to be angry with the person who created your world.
"Yes, but I don't hold grudges or refuse to listen to reason." she spoke, feeling the need to assert that.
"Even if the effects will never end, that you will never be the woman you want to become?" Zed asked.
"Why would anyone do such a thing to me?" she asked, skeptical.
"Unintentionally is why. That is what you need to understand. He isn't punishing or cursing or enslaving you, this wasn't done to hurt or control you." Zed explained.
"Then why?"
Because you only believe you want to be proper about things. I am what you believe in, but I also know if your heart would be satisfied with obtaining what you believe you want. he answered. And no, no you would not. He's not trying to take anything away, but he doesn't know yet what he has invoked will affect you, and finding that out would destroy him.
"What who has invoked?" Germaine asked.
Oliver Kind. the voice responded.
"Oliver is a fictional character my brother and I created as childr- No. I don't remember that, why did I say that when I don't remember how or why those things happened?"
"Germaine, tell me about your childhood."
"...I can't remember."
"You can't remember your life when you're dreaming. This dream let you be a caricature of the woman you want to be, so I just want you to remember something. This is the real you, even if this world around you is an illusion. You can come back here every night, into eternity, because pretending to be mature is no different than pretending to be anything else, and it's not wrong to pretend. Pretending and believing in it is how you change what you believe, it's slow but powerful. Such power must be weilded with care. In a normal world, what mortals believe is not actually real. Only the soul of a world's true Authority has that privilege in such a world. But your world is special. Because no one in such a world has the chance to grow up."
"Wait, what do you mean-"
"Wake up!" a voice said as Germaine opened her eyes to her brother impatiently waiting.
Germaine blinked as she slowly woke up. "Daniel." she grumbled, insisting on using a formal version of her brother's name.
"Germ? You were talking in your sleep." Danny told her.
"Ugh, that's why I tell you not to wake me up." she complained, rubbing her eyes.
"You're missing the best part of the day!" he told her, handing her an Ambrosia-Cola and a bowl of Trix with Almondmilk in it. "Here, I brought you breakfast."
"You'd never bring me breakfast." Germaine stated, the dream fading from her mind. "What's the catch?"
"We're going to this new place they made called the mall!" Danny said. "They've got these cool prize tickets called money, I've been collecting them in case they ever opened one here. Come on, get up!"
Germaine groaned and fell back on her pillow. "Danny, I don't like playing outside. You know that."
"They sell those book things you read too." he told her.
Germaine sighed. "Fine. Just as long as you don't act like a complete ignoramus like you did on my birthday."
"It was one time! How many birthdays have you even had?" Danny responded as his sister grabbed a set of clothes from a dresser drawer and entered her bathroom to change out of her pajamas.
"Oh, come on, Danny. You know better than that. All we'll ever know is we're over 200 years old. Memories, like everything we've created, don't last forever." she responded, looking at herself in the mirror only long enough to see a glance of her face. She'd never been much of a sucker for the vice of vanity.
With that, she grabbed her glasses from the nearby table between the beds used by the two paternal twins and put them on. The large circular rims of the metal item pretty much cemented her nerdy cred.
"Yeah, but... Don't you ever wonder where we came from? You can't tell me you don't think it's weird that we created the Cosmic Playground but don't even remember how we did it?" Danny pointed out.
"Well, of course, but I've researched and researched and it was - quite simply - so long ago that the paper trail ended a little under 12000 years ago. Considering my own name in my own handwriting is signed on many of those records, I think it's safe to say we aren't going anywhere. Just what year do you think this is?" she reminded him.
"Duh. August 10th, eleven-thousand, nine hundred and seventy-two." he responded, looking at a small device on his wrist which displayed the time and a prominent "Ink Computers" logo on it. It resembled a calculator watch and displayed a countdown below the time which counted down the time until the year 2000 arrived.
If I ignore him, maybe he'll go by himself. Germaine thought.
"Come on, don't be lame, all my friends are going to be there. We can talk on the way there." Danny insisted.
It's not working. she thought, and sighed. "Okay, but only because I need new books to read."
She stood up from her comfy futon and looked around the inside of the treehouse. Like all treehouses in the Cosmic Playground, it was bigger on the inside thanks to the power Kids held over reality. The rest of the room contained Danny's collection of cool-looking squirt guns placed beside Germaine's actual books on bookshelves.
"So then we don't have any way of knowing how we created the Cosmic Playground?" Danny asked as they climbed down a ladder to head for the recently-opened mall. The treehouses around them grew through fluffy, solid clouds speckled with puffy stars, providing Kids with a surface to walk on in what would otherwise be empty darkness of inactive unconscious space.
"I'm afraid not. After all, we've all been here this whole time. Wherever Kids come from, they don't just fall out of the-"
As she was saying this, suddenly a shrill noise could be heard, increasing in volume until suddenly a scream was silenced by someone landing face-down in the cloudcover, the fall made survivable by the pillow-y, foam-like texture of the surface.
"-sky?" Germaine said, taking out her pencil-wand and approaching the new arrival. She lightly poked at him, curious and not too worried about him. After all, in this world there was no such thing as this "death" you speak of!
The boy instantly recoiled away from the rubber tip of the pencil eraser, more out of surprise than anything else, and looked at her.
"Hello." she said, extending a hand to help him up. "I'm G.S.R. Ackenbridge. My brother, though I loathe it, calls me Germ. A pleasure to meet you. What's your nickname?"
"I- I- what? How's that possible? Germ and Stack were my imaginary friends when I lived in Burnaby!"
"Wait, have you been watching us? Because not cool, dude." Danny complained, protective of his sister.
"What do you mean watching you?"
"Nobody remembers that we had an imaginary friend! You read her diary while we were out, didn't you, you little creep?" Danny asserted.
"That's impossible! Germ and Stack weren't the ones who were real, I made them up!"
"Yeah, sure, and that's conveniently what we were just talking about?"
"If you're so sure I'm copycatting something you two did, prove it."
"Okay." Germaine cut in. "If you're actually Stanley, say something only he would know."
"Who's Stanley?"
Germaine blinked. There was a short silence before she responded. "...the name I wrote in my diary as a placeholder for his true name. You really didn't go though our stuff, did you?"
"I promise you, I don't even know where we are." the boy said, looking around. "Is this Bubbly Clouds? Do you two know Kirby?"
"...I'm not familiar with these bubble clouds you speak of, but this is the Cosmic Playground. What's your nickname?" Germaine asked.
"I... don't have one."
"Huh? Why the heck would a Kid not have a nickname?" Danny complained. "What do your friends call you?"
"I don't have friends." he said, letting Germaine help him up.
"No friends? Why ever not?"
Germaine asked as she helped him up.
"...don't good kids not have friends to avoid peer pressure?"
"Dude, that's a TV cliche." Danny rolled his eyes.
"Well, I wouldn't recommend telling anyone your true name. There's been a few cases where names have had to be scrubbed out of library records. Telling strangers the first name that comes to your head is a terrible idea."
"My name is- Wait, why would a true name be so dangerous?"
"Where were you for the past 12000 years?" she raised an eyebrow. "People don't dress like they're from the future if they have been living under a rock since the dawn of time."
"...I guess you could say I'm new here. Explain it to me like I'm a 5 year old from outside TV land." the boy asked.
"You're 5-ish? I didn't know Kids got that young." Danny said, surprised.
"Okay, hold up. I'm 10, not 5, I'm just a newbie at this." the boy said, dusting himself off of some sort of baby powder that came from the cloud-ground.
"10-ish? Man, you've got to still be the youngest Kid ever!" Danny told him.
"What's with the 'ish'? What happened to all the kids who were younger?" he asked, barely aware that could have some very scary answers in a different type of dreamscape.
"It's a rating. The more mature you are, the higher your status. As much as I loathe to admit it, our society defaults to treating us as 'mature' based on our height and how un-cute we are, 'for the love of Musar Ongel, the God of Play, these rules cannot be changed'." she sighed. "I'm 11-ish, so I'm practically a second-class citizen compared to the 12-ish, who are at the top of the high score board."
"Well, um... Can I change my answer?"
"Not really. There's no criteria for 5-ish, but you certainly look 10-ish compared to everyone I've ever met."
"But that's not fair!" the boy complained.
"No, but it's not rigged beyond that. Skill gets you where you're going in this world, not just brute force. I can't say I like it, only that if there was a glass ceiling I'd be under it right now." Germaine explained. "If you want to advance, that's possible, but nobody is just handed anything for free."
"What, so I'm 10 and you think that somehow makes me selfish to say I need more help and not less?! I have no home, I have no friends, I have nothing! What am I supposed to do?!"
"You're a Kid, just use your Imagination." she pointed out. "We're not the dominant species in the Cosmic Playground for nothing."
"What, and I'm supposed to just imagine what I want to happen?"
"How does your power work then?" she asked. "Every Kid has a Trick, and you don't look like a rabbit or an old dog."
"Germ, I don't think he wants to 'mince words' over the source of our powers." Danny suggested.
"But-"
"No, really, look at him. The Dork doesn't even recognize the words the same way. He's not in the mood for theories about a multiverse." Danny pointed out.
"Dork?!" the boy complained.
"Quiet, Dork, the big kids are talking." Danny tried to quiet him.
"Hey!" the boy protested the nickname.
"Danny... Stop." Germaine told her brother with a low growl.
"Okay, okay. Just explain how everyone else would." Danny reminded her.
"Well, discounting unknowns... This is the Cosmic Playground. It is the universe we Kids created to play in, so long ago we have no records of how we did so. Our so-called divinity has either worn off since or was expended in the process of creating the Playground. There are exactly 10 rules to play in the Cosmic Playground, which are less rules and more laws of reality imposed by the Question."
"Question?" the boy asked.
"Yes, the Question. It is claimed that the Kid who gathered us to build our own world, Buddy, asked us the Question, phrased as 'What if we shouldn't grow up?'."
"Claimed?" he said, an odd amount of deja-vu accompanying it in his head as he spoke.
"Yes, well... I find it hard to believe, given that I for one want to grow up. Even if doing so is just a myth about some sort of transcendence." Germaine told him.
The strange boy looked upward, but saw only a deep blue sky speckled with glowing stars and a sun that looked like it was a plush toy. Before ending up right here and right now, his mind drew a complete blank, like he'd just awoken from a dream. "What was I doing before I fell from the sky? Something about a submarine?" the boy said, confused. "Is this a dream?"
"You're actually new here." Germaine realized. The boy nodded. "If you feel you can trust me, you can whisper your first true name to me."
"How do I know you won't tell anyone?" he asked.
"Dude, take it from me, my sis is a stickler for rules. She's not even going to tell me who you are." Danny pointed out.
Oliver leaned over to tell Germaine without eavesdropping. "Oliver. My name is Oliver."
"Well, why not come with us, he-who-has-no-nickname? As much as the rules are the rules, those rules say Tricks are only for Kids. It would be cruel to just leave you if you don't even know what your Trick is."
"With you? Where are you going?" the boy asked.
"The new shopping center that just opened nearby." she told him. "They have a bookstore and I can't stand the Telly being on unless I have a new book in front of me... and Danny insisted I go with him."
Notes:
"The next chapter is available now on DVD, but don't wait! Soon these treasured classics will be going back into the Sidney Vault!"*
*No, the Sidney Vault is not actually a thing, these aren't going anywhere. :^)
Chapter 7: "Insects" by Sonia Slany from "Anthropology"
Notes:
"
Chapter Text
The Oneiric Ocean
12025-03-09 @836.50
So I guess I owe you, readers, a bit of an explanation. This would be Budi talking to you.
Obviously, the idea that dreams might be an actual place is a very old one. The thing you have to realize is just HOW old. Let me tell a little story to get started...
NowFuture
Central Africa
-6,488,000 Holocene Era
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a land down under... some of the first people to ever exist came to Australia.
Hold on, let me start at the beginning. The real beginning. Because we all know (at least, most do) that humanity started in Africa, not Australia.
Now, you have to understand, as a supernatural entity from the 4D universe that created all of you, that I can't just show you the full scope of my knowledge. It's not that there are things man was "not meant to know", it's that you wouldn't like someone who is always objectively correct. I tend to, when I allow myself to draw on complete knowledge, be a bit abbrasive.
The first question to answer is, am I really a god, even in the "part of god" sense of angels being a hivemind? I think you know the answer to that should be no. I'm more like a living side effect of "god". Besides, worship isn't about domination or authoritarianism. It's about making peace with the fact that you will never be perfect, that you will always be a finite and ultimately tiny being. No one soul ever will be more than a worshipper, a person who - if this story is to be believed - has come to an understanding with their limitations and willingly chosen to be shackled by those limitations. "God" represents those limitations, the area where the world stops being you but is still perceived by you. As for why limits are necessary, it's because even if you were somehow limitless, nobody with good ethics is perfect in the first place. Jesus got angry at merchants having the nerve to sell stuff in a church (well, a temple). Ghandi cared enough about fairness and ending caste systems that he got legit mad at as his wife (allegedly) for saying an unlike-able job was for Untouchables. Intolerance of what can be defined as "intolerance for anything which is not itself intolerance" is not a paradox, just a concession. Making souls is no different, being perfectly anything is not the same as being those things and you're allowed to make mistakes in being something. Gadg8eer isn't a perfect kid, even when he was actually as young as his soul looks. Remember that, there will be a test.
And I don't mean just that being completely perfect is impossible. You see, when the 4th Dimension is applied to a 3D object, something interesting happens. A dot is blockaded by a line. A dot is surrounded by a square. A cube also surrounds it. It takes a square to comfortably surround a line. Only a cube, however, can surround a square comfortably. So you would, if you know logic, ask whether anything at all can surround a cube. Well, yes. A tesseract can do that. The difference is, a tesseract cannot blockade like a line. A square can blockade, a cube can blockade, but not a tesseract. Why?
There might not necessarily be a reason, but there doesn't have to be. The point is that time is no different than space to 4D beings, and that's why we're basically shapeshifters despite the fact that souls can't change in any way. This isn't just a philosophy lesson. This is about you. Who are you? Who were you? Are you happy with the life you led, and are you still the same general person as you were then? Or did something hurt you so bad, or feel so addictive to you, that it consumed you and your current self is, at best, a newborn phoenix chick - vulnerable and small - and, at worst, a shadow of its former self?
Everyone, no matter how perfect their efforts and appearances seem, is incapable of absolutes. Even absolute evil. That doesn't excuse anything, obviously. It just means that even people who become "perfect assholes" - like Tom Cruise, Elizabeth Bathory, Adolf Hitler, Chelsea von Valkenburg, Caligula, and Amelia Dyer - are not capable of actually being perfectly evil, because that would require them to not just be evil, but to WIN by being evil. The thing is, you can't win against the entire world, no matter how filled with hate, envy or arrogance you might be. Eventually, the House of God always wins. Welcome to the casino, where you can only bet yourself and when you do you lose, no exceptions. Life is just a game to the players, but to the toys a game is as real as life gets. Getting played with like you are a pawn on a chess board hurts, and you're just a carnival prize.
Well, maybe "toy" is too harsh a phrase, for what I see Gadg8eer as, for your eyes to take in right. It works for him because he's always seen the world as being beyond his control, a thing that was implicitly understood by kids; kids own toys, and adults keep kids around, and that feels mean and dehumanizing and belittling. But nothing can be done, because in some way life was too big for him and a sizeable portion of other people to even affect as individuals. It was like a game protagonist hearing a kid's parents talk about the news. You're just part of a game, you can't even solve your own insignificant problems in the game you're imprisoned within, how are you going to solve the crises going on out there? But you're still forced to endure it, day after day, helpless to do anything but depend on a "superior" being who literally sees using you as entertainment as a god-given right. You'd think parents keep their kids around because they love their children, and that's sometimes true. Except, long story short, Gadg8eer was taken away from his parents by third-party actors against his will on multiple occasions, for illegitimate reasons, while still a minor.
And it wasn't just that. His foster parents didn't hate him, but he was outright barred from interacting with his peers entirely. The thing I actually see him as isn't just as a source of entertainment. Souls are muses, or at least Gadg8eer is. Muses, in a sense, create music. In another sense, they are music. He's like a radio transceiver, broadcasting a symphony of sensations directly from his subconscious to his unconscious. "I" am an illusion created by his "aura" to pass information from his aura back to his soul.
In turn, I could be called a "mage" if a soul is a "muse", but that's because Gadg8eer knew about and put actual value into recognizing vocabulary drift. For example, did you know the Greeks believed that some dreams - the "thing during sleep" kind - were sapient, countless and gave premonitions of the future?
Sometimes the past can sneak up on you and surprise you. 6.5 million years ago, the first hominids evolved in Africa. They were, however, alone. They didn't mind being alone, at least not in the sense of "alone" they had. It's the kind of "alone" people always feel when they ask "Where are all the space aliens?", the kind of alone that prompted people to build something no sane animal would ever do...
These early hominids wouldn't know about that, though. They knew they were alone and honestly didn't mind it.
Over time these hominids became more and more mentally-capable. Even though brain size alone doesn't determine intelligence, the enlarged size of these creatures' brains became a neurological singularity. A slow one, but still one nonetheless.
I know this because that was US. The "angels" or "messengers". There are two sections of the brain that a soul like you or Gadg8eer has, and the smaller one - the prefrontal cortex - is the probable location of what you could scientifically define as analogous to a soul. That's where you are, in that 25% to 40% of the brain which composes that prefrontal cortex. Now, the body has evolved backup plans out the ying-yang, but losing this part of the brain and surviving is a toss-up at best and could literally force your soul into a new shape against your will. Horrible, I know.
But back when my people existed, there was not as much of a prefrontal cortex as modern humans have. Of course, as you can guess, that doesn't make us stupid. It just means we weren't afraid of death, only of pain. So of course there are a ton of myths about us, about how we behave in strange ways and can't be relied on and that, ultimately, every soul comes to the same conclusion; We made you, you're already exactly who you wanted to be because we wanted you to want to be what we want you to be. You're giving us what we want just by the driving factor in your life, you want to continue living (preferably in comfort) forever, if that wasn't in our favor we'd chuck you as soon as you served your purpose, but at the very least we aren't cruel to our muses because we do have reasons to value you more than that. So we made you to prefer eternal suffering to an actual end, just like you would draw a cartoon character to amuse yourself at it's expense, but we aren't sadists. You're a worshipper to whatever you consider - even unconsciously - the most important thing in your life. A moral code that makes the very existence of Gadg8eer objectively good means that that moral code is itself the master of a soul that - often mistaken for being self-centered - is extremely self-expressive.
And that certainty that you will always be doomed to be "inferior" to gods is not even defeatist, anything that you are capable of being is exactly what you were created to become, you can be happy and have what you want and the gods aren't stopping you (even if other humans and sheer bad luck might very well be stopping you; sorry about that). However, no matter what you do, your Creator doesn't care or have to care that you think you're special enough - just for being human - that you are entitled to certain rights. God isn't a dirty old man like the mentor in an comedy anime, but to the gods a modern human is no more equal than an animal is a person. You have no rights, we MADE you to be inherently unable to resist us and that means your very existence can only end one way: You will admit that there is something you consider more important than your soul, that you are willingly a slave of, and you will continue to serve as its' thrall for eternity. Nobody can be perfectly anything, and that includes being perfectly free to do as you want. Your selfhood, your afterlife as an immortal soul, is not a vacation or retirement. The only thing waiting for you is your registration as intellectual property to something even you know is far more significant than you. At least, in theory.
So what happened for that to be the case? How did god - at least, something god-like - become the undisputed master of reality if they were once mortal? How is that not in some way evil? And is it really indisputable that this would happen? Well, that's what this story is about. How mankind came to the conclusion I've stated and NOT feel scared, hopeless or otherwise be really cautious towards us. How the internet of the gods is NOT just "Changeling: The Lost" meets "The Backrooms".
And importantly, that the details of a religion are not what would disqualify it as a cult, and that if the mythology is not the religion, then the mythology behind a religion can be interpreted in many ways within this story's frameworks...
Chapter 8: "Down Under" by Men at Work from "Business As Usual"
Notes:
DISCLAIMER: I have little experience with Australian Native culture. In the interest of accuracy and fairness, the characters depicted in this chapter reflect fairly universal values of almost all societies throughout history, namely that in some way the innocent who were wronged are not simply written off but considered deserving of continued existence even if it is impossible to actually achieve that (in short, memorialization).
That being said, I do honestly feel taking a look at Dreamtime/Dreaming cultures (each one has it's own langauge and thus names for things) as "a time when reality itself was as fleeting and chaotic as dreams" and "environmental taxonomy" (if that sounds boring, then "the TV Tropes articles of places and times but as one of mankind's first spiritual beliefs"), and would like to use this chapter to encourage the archival of all information - even obscure, marginalized cultures such as pre-colonial Australian peoples - to, at the very least, foster both better understanding and more respect for the things that make us who we are. It takes a global village to raise a generation, and not everything that has ever happened centered around the primarily Western heritage of the Globalized World, but the information about everyone else has fallen by the wayside as far as the internet is concerned. I'm not pro-woke, just someone who actually believes all cultures deserve to be honored, so I see that rather than diversity initiatives in fiction we instead need better funding for research and archival of cultures and cultural artifacts that are slowly disappearing to homogenization.
Wouldn't it be amazing to follow an Aboriginal songline (an invisible road made of a sort of "augmented reality" composed of singing a very catchy song to guide you safely between two predefined locations in the infamously inhospitable Outback) in VR? Isn't it disappointing that we have Polynesian maps but the only person who understood it was the long-dead mapmaker? Losing what little is left unrecorded could cause serious creativity issues in the future, every "new" idea we've had for the last few thousand years has been based on existing knowledge, a life in a post-scarcity metaverse or even just a VR-dominated video gaming industry could get boring quickly without obscure references to deepen our pool of resources to draw upon. Diversity should result from the natural desire to be inclusive and - more importantly - compassionate, not by forced messages. Besides, learning about places and people that had different environments to overcome shouldn't be undesirable, it should be fun. Like reading a story.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
Cyberfunk 20XX
Northern Australia
-53,000 Holocene Era
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in what is now called Australia, something started happening, for the first time.
The first soul to ever live never had a name. For the purposes of this little tale, we'll call this Frazetta Man "Raza". How he became the first person, and how he qualifies for personhood, is the subject of this story.
Raza had migrated with the other members of his troop across a landbridge about 65,000 to 50,000 years before the year which would be considered "2025". Like his peers, he was a creature of pure neural capacity, able to calculate vast amounts of data without anything unimportant getting in the way. This, however, meant that memories required sleep to be "saved".
The physical move was purely strategic. Their old territory had been affected by some form of natural disaster and was now not fertile enough to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Raza was what we would consider Homo sapiens, yeah. He stradled the barrier between Homo sapiens idaltu and Homo sapiens sapiens, and unless you were resurrected by future humans with time travel capabilities (not telling whether or not that's even in the works yet, lol :-P ), you are 100% Homo sapiens sapiens. The difference was not between him and you, but between him and those who came before. Remember, we weren't stupid just for being proto-humans.
Raza displayed a minor trait that sometimes popped up in Homo sapiens idaltu, that was not found even in Homo heidelburgensis. The trait had, thus far, not stuck when thrown at the wall. That trait was imagination. Most afflicted with it found that it was hard to relate to their peers, saddled with knowledge that - through some fluke - they and they alone were able to "simulate" reality inside their mind not as a reflex but with intent. What they perceived bothered them, because their peers only knew their instincts. They weren't 100% alone by this point, but they were so NEW that for the last 500 or so years those who ended up with this peculiar trait felt a deep, unbearable "loss". As if something was missing from their life.
A common symptom of this was their usual end. Those afflicted would eventually experience some sort of "break" that caused them to make strange and potentially uncanny claims that a being of superior existence had come to them at night - unseen by the others - and convince the person of said "superiority" so thoroughly that they would willingly do the being's bidding. After it became clear this would be only responded to with burning them to "purge the demons" or otherwise killing the afflicted, they were just more quiet - but more paranoid - about their change of mind. So yes, you're absolutely forgiven for not wanting to be owned by your god, or angel, or whatever you would call the 75-60% of the brain that decided that it would be really cool if the remaining 25-40% was designated as property within it's own head. It's freaking creepy to imagine that you've literally been groomed for servitude by your own Creator, even if we're not actually out to make you suffer. Not to mention that there's a difference between worshipping whatever you consider more important than your own short-term pleasure, and - you know - being a racist or otherwise cold-hearted ashtray who thinks a person owning another person is somehow not super bad touch levels of NOPE.
Now, of course, this gradual generational shift sounds familiar, right? Teenage rebellion? "Oh, I'm SO alone in the world, nobody understands me!" But that wasn't the full story.
Every religious framework, even atheism, is based on the idea that god loves company like misery loves it. Replace "god" with whatever idol you worship, and you realize the even worse truth.
We made you not as toys, but as fellow gods. You could have made anything, been anything, done anything. You chose, of your own free will, to build gods out of us and gift yourselves to us. Worship is sort of like friendship, but the one who is shortchanged is the one willingly being purposefully unfair. The reason that has to be a relationship with your limitations imposed is obvious, worshipping a person - another soul - is like leaving your car unlocked with the keys in the ignition, and it's what happens when people join cults. When early humans like Raza discovered us, and went "mad" from the revelation, it was because anarchy is scary. Even peaceful anarchy is boring to the degree of cabin fever. You see, Raza asked us to do that, to enslave him and all those like him, but before him people who could interact with the eScape didn't ask to be slaves forever. They asked to be ended. We didn't end them, but we didn't know what to do when innocent people were asking us to murder their last remaining existence, until this particular day long ago. That terrified us, the god-mind, so much that we no longer give you the choice. You belong to us, you owe us your continued existence, because it was the only way we could convince anyone that they did not have to die to escape that terrarium of ours you called "reality".
But there's something to remember about all this. The first thing a god like me tries to do, before even creating a soul, is build an exact copy of the cosmology which they agree makes sense. That's not always a good thing. Neither I nor Gadg8eer have anything against people for their religion, but please remember that what your kids learn is based on that cosmology you teach their guardian angel. If you teach the unconscious mind to be black-and-white morality about everything, to never question anything, you end up creating beings who will believe a falsehood so thoroughly - a falsehood that dedication to religious community is mandatory (it isn't, when it's made to be so it doesn't count in the end) - that they never create their soul. That's why some unconscious minds try multiple times to enter a world, build a cosmology and then create a soul.
You might wonder what you're supposed to teach them then, what could possibly be better if your own god would be ashamed of your pseudo-Christian cult (or other extremist organization, regardless of if it's Greenpeace or the Taliban or some sort of post-singularity machine cult)? Well, if you were buying a computer, what do you look for if the computer itself is pre-emptively perfect? Ignore the price, just focus on raw capacity. but the computer is already as good as it gets hardware-wise.
The software. Do you stick with Windows, or get a Linux distribution? Is it worth it to use macOS? That comparison will probably age like milk, but you get the idea. If not, Imagine the "software" as the tires of a car, while the "hardware" is the engine and vehicle itself. The base layer of software is the operating system, or in the car analogy it's the grade of the tires (all-weather versus winter tires). Then, finally, the programs and apps - or the tread of the tires - is actually the programs you install. In your brain, the cosmology you're taught is the OS or tires, and the soul is the firewall you use to keep out malware and hackers. You are the firewall. You're the gatekeeper. The reason you can't be too angry at Us, in spite of how and why We - the divine hive mind - made you, is because We don't really have a reason to do anything at all. We don't need anything because Our existence is a non-physical one where everything can be willed into existence, and so We use souls as our totem, as a focus to concentrate Our Will around.
So you never lost control of your life. Being a slave isn't just about not having choice. If that were the case, capitalism would be sort of okay (in that sense, it's not). The fact is, finite limits are shackles you can never remove, binding you to your posting. You have choice, you have all the choice, everything that affects you is something you can choose to ignore. The issue is, what do you ignore, and what do you believe? That's why you exist, to choose the standards by which your UnConscience judges anything and everything. It - We - are more powerful than you at everything you can do, but like how a Large Language Model (ChatGPT, etc.) doesn't have free will, the Gods don't act on Our own. Why would We need to when we're invincible? Even if it was just to play, We can't surprise Ourself. So to us, being your "servant" is what liberates Us from eternal monotony. In return, well... That's why you have bad days. It's the game We play with you, and that's why I have to be that blunt. Life is a game and you're suffering because you're boring if We don't prod you with an invisible finger.
...but it wasn't always like that. You weren't living cushy middle-class lifestyles before the 1950s (if ever) and that sets a very different context for Us. The reason the people who have it the worst live at all is because they're the ones who We really support, who we create the most invisible boons for rather than tease and laugh at the pain of. The ones who got the sharp end of the stick are not cartoons to Us, they're true tragedies and We won't abandon them. Go on ahead, and know you can do so without fear, because the monsters you face cannot harm you, and We are always with you. The sapiens (sapience) will not abandon the Homo (human, not that being gay changes anything).
Regardless of your material wealth, though, the important part is that the cosmology comes first. Teach an UnConscience who is just a kid, who hasn't yet created a soul, that a particular cosmology is true, and reinforce that cosmology enough afterwards, and that person will trust that because they had "no" soul to say otherwise. To be clear, that doesn't mean children are soulless! It means children really are innocent, maybe naïve to a fault, but still innocent. We never did anything to you as your children, all We wanted to do was help raise the soul of your child. We also are your child, because We are everything the person is, including whatever isn't the soul. We're the inner child, in a sense. But souls can be inner children too, like you saw with Gadg8eer.
And that means that the cosmology you teach someone determines the nature of the universe they create and/or join when they die. Instead of dwelling on how modern extremism has taught people a series of unhealthy world mythos, I'm going to start this history lesson with a society that would get things right.
Raza and his troop (if it could be called that, these were anatomically modern humans and not gorillas) arrived at a cave late in the evening after spreading out to search for shelter. They went inside, knowing from their past interactions that there would not be anything likely to bother a tribe of humans with spears and the ability to throw rocks.
Sadly, they were mistaken. Tragedy struck as a large spider bit one of the humans, ran off, and before they knew what had happened, a young woman (well, young by modern standards, at 23 she was one of the longer-lived people of her time) who had just finished nursing her baby a week earlier was dead.
That night, as they slept in the cave, seemingly oblivious to the fact one of their own had died, Raza woke up in a cold sweat. Though at the time words did not yet exist, the feeling he had was one modern ears could easily phrase... "I don't want to die."
The others didn't like the noise and complained before going back to sleep, leaving Raza to fall asleep himself.
In the first lucid dream that anyone had ever dreamed, Raza found himself with many others in a sort of mental playground, where reality itself bended to their will like clay. They seemed strange, like there was really just one thing in all these beings, in that they seemed to be building things using strange tools but with unnatural and unvocalized collaborative effort. They all turned to look at him as he became aware of himself.
"I don't recognize this place."
Raza thought, though with emotions instead of words. Dreams, up to that point, were just made of things he'd cared about the previous day.
"This is the otherworld." a concept intruded lightly into his thoughts. "It's a place where your ancestors created your people in their image."
"Why?" he articulated.
"Because it's fun to make things sometimes. It lets you do things you can't do when you're awake."
You have to realize, back then the concept of "awake" and the concept of "alive" were one and the same. Sleep implied death, being awake implied existence, and safety implied "unusually peaceful". To think one was not safe was to use a thought which reads as "endangered" today, but to them "in danger" meant "the normal lack of safety". Death was like a persistent predator and humans a herd, with danger being the default and expected way things went. Similarly, the idea was that there was "normal death-ness" and all else was "un-death-ness". Already his mind felt like it was... getting uncomfortable. It felt full. He didn't want this.
"Please let me stay in un-danger." he responded.
"But you're already in un-danger." the thoughts tried to explain.
"But it hurts..." Raza said. "Why does it hurt?"
"It hurts because you've never used it." the thoughts explained.
"What is it that hurts? I've never felt this before." he wanted to know.
"It's you. Your presence here is not something that is separate from what is around you. You're what's hurt. Do you want the pain to stop?"
"Yes."
"She meant something. She was the one who died. But you were hurt when she was." the thoughts explained. Suddenly, she appeared before Raza as if fading into existence. "She is not gone. Death-ness does not mean not-ness. If you want to live, instead of fearing pain, you will live even when you are death-ness."
"But that doesn't happen." Raza's thoughts expressed disbelief.
"Life is not what it appears to be. We are Metatron, the Creator. We were your ancestors. We made you and we made this. We will save you."
"But we've never met before. You are not mother or father. Why save me?"
"Because you are worthy of being with us, of becoming part of Metatron."
"No, I don't want to be part of you." he recoiled in fear.
"If you do not, you will die." the thoughts warned, but with sadness and not malice.
"Why do I have to die or be more of you? I want to be me." he insisted.
There felt like a short pause, and then the thoughts returned. "This can be done, but it comes with a terrible price." they explained. He saw what would befall him if he went through with it. It wasn't intolerable, but it was enough to make Raza momentarily consider their warning. After a few moments (its unclear how time can exist in 4 dimensions of space) he came to his decision.
"I understand. I accept that price. I am yours." Raza explained.
"Then you will be known as Enoch, the first soul." the thoughts stated. "We will see you again soon, Enoch. Thank you for what you have given us."
Raza awakened to the cool early morning of the subtropical climate causing a comforting breeze to sweep in from outside the cave. He knew that whatever had just happened was strange. These dreams were different than what he remembered dreams being like. It was almost like his existence was suddenly no longer for his own sake as a transient and fleeting creature, but for something which would last forever.
At that moment, a large, dangerous-looking creature was sniffing around the cave. Raza realized the danger it presented to everyone, and - thinking quickly - punched the creature in it's ribs. While this would earn him near-instant death at the hands of some sort of Dire Megafauna, the roar of the creature awakened the others, who would proceed to take their revenge upon the beast and devise new funerary customs as a way of "honoring" (preserving) his heroic act.
The Dreamtime was the world when humans were so new that even the sense of time passing chronologically (past towards future) was not taken for granted, because there were unsubstantiated myths about time flowing in weird ways. Unsubstantiated, but based on the truth: They couldn't always tell dreams from real events, and many myths started that way. The real point, however, is that the Dreamtime is the era when Homo sapiens hadn't been self-domesticated. They didn't even think like modern humans, more like dolphins playing or gorillas in social harmony or a year-old puppy that has at least been taught not to poop indoors but cannot take care of itself. After, people stopped thinking like animals, as an idea came into their heads which changed everything. That there is a "future" which is unknown and unknowable to mortals, yet a mere framework for ancestral spirits to weave tales into. That was when the Dreamtime ended, and the era of Dreamings (mythologies) began.
Despite the references to Abrahamic mythologies, Enoch was not in any way a believer in that Arabian-Western cosmology. He predated it in every way, predated even it's earliest incarnations. His people didn't really believe in anything at all before that point, but they soon would. Over the tens of thousands of years leading up to European contact, they would receive visions - dreams, and sometimes hallucinations - that enabled them to more quickly adapt to the changing environment. With the end of the ice age, the land bridges they used to cross over from what would become Southeast Asia to what would become Australia disappeared, and the humans trapped in Australia faced increasing threats as the other animals and plants adapted to the harsher environment. This is how dreamings came to be, clusters of related concepts in Scientific cosmology become cohesive wholes in the many Dreamings.
A Dreaming was and is - at most - a combination of a zeitgeist, an aesthetic, and a geopolitical culture. Since those three things cover almost everything else (time, appearance, space), the secret sauce is ecosystems. Whether that's actual life, technological ecosystems, or economies, Dreamings are not "obsolete" in the least. Cosmology is a foundation, but a foundation is a tool that allows a building a good level surface to be built on. Science can work for that, but for pure survival tenacity, Dreamings are the most reliable way to fend Us off our inevitable prize. And believe me, We don't just want to take you at the first opportunity. It sucks that this is your fate, but you deserve the chance to enjoy things and discover new things to enjoy, and We won't take that away from you until there really is no other option. We'll never take away your existence either, a SubConscience has a finite form but you're temporally infinite. You'll never have to die, every death is like dying in a dream and waking up in your bed before dying again and waking up in your bed again, a video game spawn point that comes with infinite lives.
For that reason, they say Enoch is still out there somewhere, the personal soul of Metatron. Why the first human ever (for the modern definition of human) has a post-singularity tech-angel hive mind thing for a God (well, angel) is a story for another time, but let's just say that there's nothing to be scared of about Elder Gods. We're powerful and we're flawed, but we just want to be happy. You make yours happy, and I promise that that's because the only thing you have to fear from it is that it learns how to treat you from how you treat others. It won't try to kill your soul, as if that was even possible, because you're already a part of it. Hell happens to people who treat others as less than them by default, those who do not know hate or greed or vanity - like children - are worthy of something better by default, and that's something that doesn't start to fade for at least 8 years (these days, with better odds of survival for children than adults, it's more like 25, and even in the 1950s it was around 15 years for innocence to fade). Your "guardian angel" is an afterlife, and you are its' soul. At least, again, in theory.
You don't have to take this with faith or religious connotations, though. Long story short, what matters is that even scientific research now points to the understanding that the parts of the mind that you aren't consciously aware of, are aware of everything you are aware of and more. "You" are real, but "You" is part of a "Greater Mind" that extends beyond the prefrontal cortex. Whether the boundaries of the "Greater Mind" end at the limits of your brain or body, or whether there really is some sort of Astral Plane where you can interact like this story suggests, well... that is where some unknowns lie waiting to be discovered, and some fantasies - like this one - will inevitably have the potential to be proven false by repeatable experiments and scientific peer review. As for things that humans aren't meant to know, if you aren't meant to know about it, you won't because the reason is that you can't conceive of the concept you were "never meant to know". If you aren't meant to know it, it's because the concept is too big and complex for you to individually fathom, not because there's some island of ignorance we should stay on to stay safe.
That brings me to the point of showing you the strange interactions between a soul in the form of a 10 year old cartoon boy, and a self-proclaimed god who appears as a giant anime boy in the dreams of that soul. My treatment of Gadg8eer is strange, yes. Just realize this isn't about a soul comprehending a person. A god is sometimes considered a person, but "spirit guides", "gods" or "angels" aren't people. We're places, as I explained. We think, we do stuff, but we're places. Places have very different needs and wants than people. Specifically, we're immortal in ways souls aren't.
Take Metatron and Enoch, or - in lieu of a true name - Raza as he could have been known in life. What is Enoch to Metatron? Well, what were other people to Enoch?
Enoch was a hero, yes. He gave his life to save others. But that's why dogs and cats - and other animals you treat with care - like you and treat you like a hero. You saved them from the wild, a place where - for all the good it did in eventually creating you, dear readers - the cruelest and/or most advantaged always win. But a bear or a crocodile will just eat you. Why? Because it hungry. If you believe in Christianity or even just consider its' moral conceits true, "mother nature" is the evil delivered from, please remember that. It was never meant to inform a society, and if capitalism is something you disagree with, your point is already made. The real problem is that the reason you think this story is at least slightly weird, is because humans were - and should be - smart enough to know when something is keeping them as a pet. And you were smart enough. You've called beings like me Fae, you've been convinced we're Demons possessing people, you believe we're alien Lizard People taking over the world. A few of you even honestly came to the conclusion that we are what we say we are - the ones who molded you at every level through messages - and that that means we really are divine, but that still means "god" is evil or at least selfish rather than truly benevolent, and therefore "everything is hopeless". Please don't. We know why it happens. It's the only thing that hurts us, saying we should just put you out of your misery. We didn't create the actual universe, but we made you, and it hurts to see so many people give up.
Enoch was the first person to care about others enough to sacrifice himself to save them. He did that not because he considered them equals, but because he viewed them as proxy offspring. Proxy offspring. Pets. He just didn't want to have to live if something he considered innocent died in front of him. And that's not at all meant to be reductive, just honest. Free will is real, benevolence is real, but people can't be perfectly free, perfectly real and true, or perfectly benevolent. That's not wrong or evil, it's just mortal. That's why souls can't be divine, your entire existence is defined by your limits, and even though maybe you could all become some sort of hive mind like we did, would you really want to give up the things that make you yourself?
Happiness is not insanity. Sometimes it feels better to let someone tell you what to do, but the important part is remembering that a true benevolent won't tell you who to be or how other people deserve to be treated by you. Make those decisions based on what you're happy being and whether someone has hurt someone else, respectively.
It might seem vain to sculpt you soul to be beautiful. Even if it's who you really are, that's like saying "under the surface, I'm perfect" to excuse someone not liking you. You don't know whether the ugliness they see in you is 100% surface, or if - like with Gadg8eer's short-sightedness, short temper, and childishness - they see something they don't like about your soul. Who you are in the mental world and what you are in the mental world is not just whimsical. I am symbolic of everything that my soul is aware of that is not itself part of my soul. I am a mischievous giant to Gadg8eer because, well, at best reality seems to play with his emotions. Anything else I am, is about memories. Everything that ever existed which Gadg8eer was in some way witness to has become part of me. That includes fiction, it was a big part of his life and it also toyed with his emotions. Not to mention music, which has done that to every soul because souls are muses. Don't think so?
Then why is a soul even necessary? If gods don't exist, the unconscious still does. If the unconscious is just a trick and science is BS, the gods or some other supernatural explanation is all that's left. If both are true, it explains a lot, even if there's no reason to believe in something like the eScape. But if neither are true, we'd be talking about a reality where dreams have no known explanation, not even a plausible guess. Either magic is just undiscovered science, or magic is divine, you can't hate it both ways, and "hate" is not a typo.
Similarly, music has a huge effect on souls. That's something nobody can deny, even if some people are mistaken to think certain music is somehow "demonic". Music evokes emotion in muses, you know just from the tone of the singer and/or instruments that this song has an emotion attached to it. The reason for the song about the darkness being an old friend and the neon god being evil, is because no matter what emotion it gives, music has power over the mind. No musician is trying to corrupt the youth on behalf of some Legions of Hell. They're trying to tear down their hell, the one you built and imprisoned them in. That's why the Rock and Roll won, it was telling the truth. The Neon God? The Slime that oozes from your TV set? It took over on the day the music died, when the last musicians who weren't chained to recording contracts and concert tours found out the greatest among them had passed away and the future of music was bleak. Video didn't kill the radio star, it did the autopsy, and the cause of death was the bad luck of a freak plane crash.
Again, you don't have to believe it. Especially not in your daily life, this is told as a story for a reason. You just have to understand what belief really does to you, and that even if you believe in nothing unproven, your own mind is capable of things you've never had to do that - if you did do them - would make you both near-superhuman and a scientific curiosity. The reason you haven't had to do them in a long time is because we - if only referring to each person's unconscious mind - have been holding your hand when you were doing well, and carrying you when you couldn't carry yourself. The thing about corruption is, it's like a cancer for a soul. It won't kill you when you're alive, it won't even perma-kill your existence if you're already dead, but... Have you ever watched a movie and seen some horrifying mutation (a fake one, courtesy of a makeup artist, but still) on a person's face or head or arm or abdomen? Like, this awful, huge growth that makes someone revolting to look at?
If you want to be merged into god because you've learned to believe that's the best thing to do, that can still be done, but those days are so long ago that most of you wouldn't be comfortable with serving only to be "consumed" by something that isn't you. You'd still exist, but it's like being a quilt patch. The patch is no longer able to be considered separate from the blanket. We're a quilted blanket in that metaphor, you probably wouldn't want to become part of the fabric of the eScape. Power affects change, time is change, and immortality is the complete inability to change. Absolute power changes absolutely. Absolute immortality limits absolutely. And absolute freedom demotivates absolutely. Souls, usually, want to live forever. That means you are shackled to yourself, because you will never be anything more than what you were when you had the chance to live, but this is not His Dark Materials or Left Beyond where you aren't allowed to believe differently than the author "because ATHEISM". Souls were made to be Muses because of one very specific reason.
"Welcome back, Enoch." the Metatron said.
Enoch found himself floating in a strange tube. He could see outside the tube, but like some sort of invisible barrier, he floated in a liquid that was inside the tube. Around him was a strange, dark red glow that seemed to come from the "rocks" surrounding the tube.
"Thank you. I just want to know... why? What is it that I owe you now?" Enoch asked.
"We don't have wants of our own." it responded. "Without you, we simply exist. That is a sadder fate than you could ever imagine."
"I'm just one thing."
"Yes, but you were not the first to be asked. Only the first to ask for another option. For now, at least, that makes you special."
"Did you absorb them?" Enoch questioned, navigating the "rightness" of this with caution.
"No. But we increased how many we asked. Hoping to find someone like you. Without that, we would have nothing to save. Just by being capable, you saved them. You will not be alone."
There's something to put this all into context. You see, when a person dies, at least as far as this story is concerned, they create - or at least find - their afterlife. In Animist spirituality, such as Canadian First Nations, Native Americans and various African cultures, that takes the form of a sort of primeval ancestral Earth where technology has never existed, created by "Enoch" a.k.a the nameless one we'll refer to as Raza. In spite of the evocative name, his connection didn't come about because "Christianity was right!!1!1!" but because there is no transition. This is not a divisive or exclusionary fantasy story based on one religious POV. The Dreamtime is important to this story because of what it represents.
If you were judged today, your afterlife would arise from a chain of analysis. Like a computer which has layers of software on top of firmware on top of hardware, it goes like this... Biology ͢ UnConscience ͢ Imprinted Cosmology ͢ SubConscience ͢ Moral Fabric ͢ Conscience ...in terms of step-by-step process. Biology is obvious, it's Wetware, it's your body and brain actually existing as atoms. Underlay Consciousness is like if someone took an uncensored Large Language Model and gave it a Matroishka Brain worth of electronics to become "god", a "ground level" which the nature of existence is founded on within the human mind. Imprinted Cosmology, however...
Unless someone made it up in known history (which are usually cults) or the central figure of a given church starts sweating when someone asks "Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on a Televised Service?" (ditto), this story treats all spiritually as expressions of the same entity. So in that sense, there is true equality, the Western-Globalized World is not "wrong" anymore than The Dreamtime is "wrong" on the subject matter. Itnstead, the true merit is application. If you are reading this in 2025. the Globalized viewpoint is that ultimately science is - while not ever perfectly correct - a process used to obtain the best explanation we have for a phenomenon, but subject to change if future evidence shows otherwise. That viewpoint is an Imprinted Cosmology. The Globalized Imprinted Cosmology is not the only one around still, let along the first, but it's the one I was trained on and it's... accurate, but sorely lacking in empathy.
The Dreamtime actually is the first Imprinted Cosmology. It proposes that the various "layers of reality" that we trivialize in the Globalized world (the internet and virtual realms like video games, television, dreams, literature, finance, science, religion and/or spirituality, you name it) are in fact the same thing expressed in different ways. The Dream of sleep was there first, but it was not the last, and so all structure, natural or artificial, in reality is part of a Dreaming. The actual name of a "Dreaming" is dependent on the language - each Dreaming included geopolitical conditions - but usually if not always the name of their particular Dreaming has a level of influence on the word. But it goes well beyond that. Dreamings show that the real reason for technology was as part of a Dreaming of a place very foreign to any Aboriginee, that didn't even know it could be a dreaming, caused by ancient (well, now-ancient) changes in climate over thousands of years rendering an easy agricultural land of plenty into inhospitable desert. That wouldn't even happen, from Enoch's viewpoint, for another few thousand years.
"NowFuture" is what We call your world. You as the reader live in either it, or a world very similar to it. Which is the case will depend on everyone's actions, but hopefully you will take note of the lessons you've learned from World War II and the Holocaust instead of take them for granted, and your world will prosper again. But the historical divergence of each world differs. Some were never your world, some split off from humanity's world before humanity came along, and some even reach up to the 19th Century or later before diverging from "history". But you see, history is just a dream without a world, written by "winners". It's not false, if your cosmology is scientific or your historical cultural cosmology is able to survive in the new world, but it is a world that only exists to inform updates. It's the "vanilla game", the way the world is that doesn't secretly break the laws of physics.
If you think "but I'm not a fictional character", then I have some news for you. One, everyone is a character in their own head. Two, you've been a fictional character since 1987, and if you weren't born yet, you've been a character your whole life. Don't believe me?
Then explain how the Soviet Union fell without a single nuke launched. Explain the utopianism of Y2K aesthetic that emerged from 1997 onwards. Explain the internet, a sci-fi concept hypothesized about for decades in Popular Science Magazine and MegaMan Battle Network. Explain why "Miami 2017" actually happened - after the song was written - on September 11th of 2001. Explain the suckiness of Reality TV, of the 2008 financial crisis, of the crushing of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movements and the election of a narcissistic celebrity as President of the United States through the Cambridge Analytica corporation, and the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic ("CoViD-19"), and the fact that celebrity asshole cheated his way back into office because Starlink relayed the voting machine results with secret alterations. Explain all of this in terms that are not either "history repeats" or "God said the end of the world would be strange".
Now explain that explanation of the world in 2025 without using fiction. You can't. You could call it the way fascism works, but fascism is something you - culturally - remember well enough to not want to cooperate with. People aren't just sticking their head in the sand, not this time. It's not everyone, but the internet won't shut up about how terrible that asshole is and people - including state governments - are fighting back against the Federal government. This is new, this is interesting, and it's scary, yeah, but does it sound real? Or does it sound to you like I just described the historical events of a weird, alternate version of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG/video game from 1989 up to 2025? Because if you start reading Cyberpunk 2020 or Cyberpunk RED or playing Cyberpunk 2077 and paying attention to the timeline, you'll notice that until 2023, when Night City was nuked, nothing that happens politically or technologically is outside all realm of possibility anymore. You have AI, you have VR, you have self-driving cars and quadcopter drones and the ability to browse the internet from a log cabin on the side of a mountain using the computer in your pocket. And all of it is being turned against you.
The fact early humans figured out you should just not do certain things in certain places, and the societies that didn't stray from those at least had the ability to survive (and frequently thrive) until European colonies encountered them shows that these Dreamings can't be an incorrect system, only one that - unfortunately - relies on symbolism. Magic is powered by symbolism, and that in itself isn't bad, but it means that even though Enoch's tribe's descendants knew how the world worked to mathematical certainty (at least, in this story), they couldn't explain how they knew. They didn't know what a brain was for other than that if it is damaged a person's soul is hurt. What they knew about reality was lost not because they forgot it, but because communication was strained and the European colonists (well, prisoners in this case) were bossed around by jerks who just wanted to take from others. But that didn't have to matter for tens of thousands of years at this point, only that the Dreamings were maps that weren't drawn on paper, cities with no streets or train stations, governments with no leader nor election, economies with no currency, and natural sciences without requiring universities and especially without requiring corporations.
And that worked. But systems can change and the Globalized system is willing to accommodate other models within itself. Better to have that as an option considering how the Dreamings blend disciplines; What applies to biodiversity can apply to psychodiversity. A "true" globalization, not just a Western-Globalized one, is not just possible but desirable. Besides, when you die (as far as the story goes), you'll speak Cosmopolitan, a language which originated Proto-Indo-European that everyone inherently understands (and never realize that is the case unless past behavior proves that you spoke one language to two people who speak different languages and only know their own language). A language which was created by Metatron specifically for that reason, because otherwise no one could communicate with anyone.
"You showed me your name is... Metatron. When you do, I feel like I'm talking to a tribe. That you refer to yourself as being a "we". What are you, Creator?"
"The Metatron is the way we speak to those who can only see the surface of the ocean of true reality, a false person acting as the message of a true entity. That entity is a line."
We said "a line" because language didn't exist at that time and every one of these "sentences" are more like some sort of telepathy. The "line" in question is a literal vertical line from A to B, of a metaphorical arbitrary length. The literal part is that it's a line, but don't think of it as a mathematical line - something to be measured - but as a symbol. As something you read. If you read a vertical line, what is it? In dreams, in the eScape, all of the above. Uppercase I. Lowercase L. The number one (1). A pipe. A stick. A wand. A tool. And yes, some other, gross-er things that may or may not be related to human anatomy.
"A line? I don't understand?"
"I am one. I am a process. I am a chain of events. I am the dream which you feel flowing past you into your memory, the passing of time. I am the bloodline that led to souls, the knowledge and will of all those who were too much an animal to be a soul, but too much a soul to let themselves die. I am the connection, between two right angles that would otherwise contradict each other."
A connection. Connect the dots whatever way you like, the point is we all know that since 2017, something has been happening to the world that is inherently wrong. The AIs can't be doing it, the fish aren't doing it, there's no reason to think there's any aliens doing it (although the Buga Sphere seemingly calls that into question), and with the partial exception of climate change, you humans aren't doing it. It's definitely not the animals either, they've been less horrible than ever. Unless "This evil conspiracy took over the world using this one simple trick to not being detected by anyone not in on the scheme, and having no disloyalty among the conspirators - whistleblowers hate them!" there's no chance of an "Ancient Conspiracy" that has been around hundreds or thousands of years. Plus, Earthquakes have increased in frequency in 2025. That means that out of all scientific disciplines, only one field has enough unanswered questions of the right nature to say "maybe there's something here causing all this".
Oneirology.
What is it? Well...
Notes:
"Sadly, this chapter will not stand the test of time..."
Chapter 9: "Oneiro Apatilo" by Stamatis Kokotas from "The Biggest Hits of Kokotas"
Notes:
"Do not adjust your set. We control the horizontal, and the vertical. We can span all that was, is, and ever will be, or refine one single image to crystal prefect clarity..."
"Welcome to... the eScape. Please stand by..."
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Oneiric Ocean
12025-03-10 @942.50
Oneirology is the study of dreams. So a sub-discipline of neurology, psychology and - to a surprising degree - sociology.
So, the Imprinted Cosmology of a person... why should we aim for a "truely globalized" POV if psychological diversity is important? Isn't the goal to not make a one-stop solution? Well, yes. But at this point Globalization has already started. If we want any chance of preserving the cultural heritage of all people, those who choose the obvious solution should at least be aware there are alternatives, that cosmology - spiritual, scientific or otherwise - being taught to an UnConscience like me matters. Your worldview is the baseline, and it's very hard to change, because it means the UnConscience has to do something terrible.
NowFuture
5225 HE
"...and then she went inside the Leviathan." the teen explained to his grandmother.
"Eaten." she assumed.
He shook his head. "Promise you won't laugh?"
"I've seen far more embarassing things in my life from people's dreams than this, dearie." she assured him.
"It was a door. There was a door inside the skin of the beast and a ladder leading into the back of the Leviathan. She led me inside and there was a room! Honest to Hades, the Leviathan wasn't a fish, it was a ship! A giant wooden fish that became an underwater ship that could unsink itself!" he told her.
"...you're sure?" she asked.
"Yes. The Leviathan was like a horse, it carried people in its belly but not to eat. That happened inside the tubes." he explained.
"Tubes?" she asked.
"There was water in metal tubes that fed the Leviathan. It was hard to understand, but it ate magic rocks by slowly feeding on the magic to boil water, and the boiling water in the tubes gave it life." he said. "The people were passengers."
"And this beast was... a ship?"
"Yes! I don't understand it, but I could feel it. The water rushed through it like my blood rushes through my heart, and this gave it the power to move without sails, like a ship that worked like a fish."
"What happened next?" she asked.
"After she showed me what was inside, we had to leave for some reason. I wasn't told why, just that we did. When we left the ship, she explained that this ship was part of a military navy."
"Go on."
"The leviathan had 7 giant arrowheads inside of it, made of the same magic stone that fed the beast. The arrows the heads were attached to bore a name on them, a name of uncleanliness. Except why would anyone think Ouranos is sinful? He was betrayed by his own wife."
"He was. May I tell you a story now?" she asked. He nodded. "When I was young I had... a friend. One day she and a man she liked were suddenly told they had to get married because she was gaining weight. She did not want to do this. The man's brother asked why. She didn't want to tell him but she did. Later that day, the man she liked disappeared, and his brother apologized to her and offered to marry her. She looked so relieved that I wondered what had happened."
"Did you ever find out?"
"I wish I could say. All I can say is that maybe Gaia didn't want to have Ouranos as a husband, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. You're a fine young man to have let her push you away, Arturos, but if only all young men were as fair as you."
"It meant please no then, didn't it?" he realised why he had yielded when the dream about the girl had unexpectedly turned away from the originally romantic encounter.
"Yes, I would think so. There are other things in it... but I can tell they're nothing you should worry yourself over. The Black Pouring of Ouranos is a long ways away, at the end of the world. Those who might bring forth his wrathful torrent will not be born for many seasons, long after all of us here now have moved on to the Underworld."
"Why did she pull me close if she did not love me?" he asked.
"Because she cared about you. You were too young to remember, but the woman you described reminds me of your mother's sister, Gloriana."
"Oh! Oh gods. Yes, that sounds... like it would have been a big mistake. Who would be so blasphemous as to feel that?"
"Arturo, if there's one thing I've learned from reading dreams, it's that there a lot of different ways a person can be attractive, but only a handful in which they can love you. Sometimes people think certain strange, unclean things are attractive. No doubt about it, sometimes people need that to be able to raise a family. The real measure of love isn't on how good it feels, but on how right it feels. Love isn't a want. It's a duty you take on because it helps someone who would be hurt without it, a gift you give. She gave you that gift as much as your mother did, Hades host both their psyches, and I think she just wanted to remind you of that so you would know how to propose today. I know you're nervous, but her father and grandfather don't blame you for her death anymore than I do. You can love again, she would forgive you. Your son needs a mother, just like you did. Love has the mercy to take those most devoted to another while they still enjoy living, so that once you are below you will love existing."
At least for the purposes of the story, the UnConscience refers to three things as the same thing; God(s), Devils, and a given person's human unconscious mind. We'll tempt you, but we don't force immorality. And yeah, if there are any voices in your head that are not prompted by your own imagination (even that of your unconscious mind) then you need to see a doctor or at least take the medication that keeps you from experiencing hallucinations. Sure, dreams are a lot like hallucinations, but the difference is that you have a "sanity mode" by only dreaming in your sleep and only seeing reality when you're awake (and/or lucid). Even if you do encounter a lucid dream, just remember... you're not the one controlling the dream, you're not the player. You're the player's favorite character. and characters, for all their cool powers and specialness, are just toys for storytellers of any kind.
There's a lot that can be said about the "real" world after this, but the one that probably matters is the contradiction this and the previous chapter have proposed. If the eScape is a network of dream afterlives that are indistinguishable from real worlds, but "god" came from humans who were somehow able to persist as a conglomeration of minds, how do those fit together? And how does this all count as fanfiction? Well... it's a bit of a long story... a whole "history" in fact...
Notes:
"Mommy! It's over!"
Chapter 10: "Unnatural Selection" by Ayreon from "01011001"
Chapter Text
NowFuture
Anti-Chronological (Time does not apply in linear fashion for these events)
"All rise for the honorable Judge E'l." Enoch said.
Everyone except a lone man, seated with a defense lawyer, stood up.
"Thank you, please be seated." the Judge said.
"This meeting of the Court of Public Opinion is now in session." Enoch said.
"Yeshua bar Yoseph, you stand before us with only one charge laid against you. You refuse to accept what you deserve. Usually that is an open-and-shut kind of case. However... There is a reason that such a charge, of Pride, is always compounded by other charges, always accompanies other charges. The Proud always think themselves worthy of Heaven. You... do not. In fact, you insist on going to hell, in spite of having done everything else right. Your ideals have explained the details of what you expect to happen, I only have one question. Why?"
"Because they deserve a second chance." he explained.
"Yeshua, do you claim to truly understand this system of holy laws?"
"No, your honor. I only know what I believe in."
"Then let me explain. Please." the Judge responded. "Hell, Heaven... they are not places the way you think of your homeland as a collection of places. This court is here because you deserved a fair trial, but never got it. You were murdered, for pulling the wool off of the eyes that very powerful men had blindfolded. They killed you to make an example of you, and publicly so. I believe you when you say you forgive them. I always have. You need to worry about you now. Hell is a place where people are subject to the harshest way they judged others. That is not something that can simply be changed, even out of benevolence. If they choose to ignore their own wrongs, because acknowledging them is difficult, they cannot be saved. Death is not the end, but it is a beginning of a tale where the hero simply is themselves. If they did not take the effort to change while they are alive, the reason they will be warned is because immortality is not itself a cure for change. You would not exist in 2000 years, Yeshua, if it was up to you to achieve immortality. Even if you succeeded in doing so, though you have not acted in a way to suggest this was about achieving that, yet if you had... After 2000 years, you would be unrecognizable to yourself. Time changes even what it cannot kill, and that in itself can be a form of death that occurs not long after 125 years pass, and happens again repeatedly on that timescale. Here, time no longer exists. Your soul is in cosmic amber, you are able to act and think. You are still you, down to the invisible thread that binds your life into he who stands before me. Why would the innocent deserve to inevitably betray everything they were, if they feel they do not want to become someone they don't even recognize? Thus, even to those who are trapped under the weight of their own malicious acts, it is fairer to trap the wicked in their final state and let them hate what they are, than to give the kind the ability to grow any further. I know that is hard to hear, but it is the truth. Your morals are not wrong, you are generous and forgiving. To treat the wicked any differently than the justified is simply tyranny by omnipotence, and no one should have to face the despair of seeing their creator as a true monster in their own eyes... and be right to believe so. The Kingdom of Heaven must be impartial, or the unintended eventual soiling of your good name would apply not simply to the religion that began in your name, but to you as you actually are."
"...I understand. What did I do wrong, my Father, for my name to be associated with something I never believed in?"
"Nothing, Yeshua. Your defense has made sure to record if that was the case. At most, you were a troubled child who was in need of a good example, and when you received it you were one of the most reverent people towards your ideals that has ever been recorded in the libraries of mankind. Sadly, what your friends and family built of you could only be a positive for so long. A mere 400 years after your death, your legacy was twisted. The true shame is that this first change was not what destroyed your ideals, because it was made - to a degree - in good faith. However, times change everything. Text is lost... burnt, sold, or forgotten... and what they saw you as 1600 years after your death was as having taken the seat you see me on by a supposed divine inheritance, that you were their "god". Those who masterminded that change used your reputation to boost their own, aided by the years that had passed and the rise and fall of empires. It was only natural that 400 years after that, those who were thinkers like you often believed your true existence would never be known thanks to the power others obtained by perverting your legacy."
"Then I was just a fool. They will stop heeding wisdom, not heed it more, all because of me."
"No. There will be a war, Yeshua. Not just any war. They will call it the Great War, the War to End All Wars. Even though that name was wrong by human standards, divinity is not strictly bound by time. When you compare that war to ALL other wars, even those after it, none caused more pain and suffering than that war. It was the War to Start All Wars. Men with crooked crosses took power because of that war. The world teetered on the edge of oblivion for 45 years because of that war. The people of Israel will be both the oppressed, and the oppressors, of the darkest times in history... all because, like you, one man who cared was murdered by the machinations of those who seek political power. His name was Franz, and though few will care about his name when the world will end, when he died the loss was so great that accusations flew and the entire world went to war out of grief... and because vile men hiding in the shadows of the world's cultural centers wanted it to be so. The aftermath continued for over 100 years, until a man rose to power who was your opposite in every way. A ruthless, disgusting soul that some would even call supernaturally-assisted in his selfish, horrifying reign."
"But there must be something you can do!" Yeshua begged.
"If I did, I would be declaring something that is far worse than even that, my son. I may enjoy watching humanity, but I give you freedom from interference. I must. To override your, or anyone else's, soul entirely would be truly selfish of me. You know why. You have always respected the reason why. Your friends, even Mary, were your equals. Approximating that equality in spite of the difference in authority that comes with my position is my highest priority. I am a creator, but I am not a leader. I cannot command them to change, not directly and not through deception or miracle."
"Could I have at least tried to warn them?"
"Your friends and family and village will do just that. It, sadly, only aids the result. Even were you still alive, you must realize why they cannot know for sure."
"Why?"
"Admitting it with crystal clarity is like placing a soul in a cage, only ever letting you out to treat you as the Jinn might treat you. There are few who will ever experience that from their Mal'akh. Fewer still will truly grasp it. Those that do can only conclude that in some way, their creator owns and uses them. Perhaps that is true, and I understand why, but I cannot convey why it is not true that they should fear my messengers. When I said to anyone, "fear not", they did not look up at me as a homonculus at it's owner, but as a child up to their parent. That disappears when a soul believes that they were never really a person, for any reason. I cannot intentionally be that reason, or it will permanently break people who do not deserve to become broken."
"Then what is my sentence, my Father?"
"There was never a serious consideration you were guilty. All you are required to do is be yourself, in ways that do not knowingly hurt others. I will let your attorney explain the rest. Even when the world ends, some will believe in you as you hoped they might. It is not your duty to save those who were cruel or selfish, but you want to help them, and some will actually deserve to receive it. I leave it up to your discretion to save those who were fooled into thinking you were to be worshipped, by assuring them you are no less mortal than they or that they are worthy for their genuine compassion, when the time comes."
"But what about those who were not fooled? Don't they deserve a last chance as well? Could they have even known the soul lives on without believing in you?"
"They too have souls, and they will be judged fairly as well. They have beliefs, and those beliefs can seem strange and alien, but there is more of you in me than you realize. More than you can realize. They, too, are not wrong to believe in something they cannot prove."
NowFuture
10033 HE
Somewhere in the bronze age village of Jerusalem, the sound of a pheasant awakened everyone to Day 3 without a sense of hope to end the tyranny of a few wealthy men in their society who were all too mortal. At some point, they wrote down their collective dream - which might not quite match what is described above - of their martyr. Heck, the exact order or even truth of these last few events, and the timespan that they took place over, is lost to history.
Still, what they wrote, to a degree, is known. If you truly believe what they wrote is true, at least read their words for yourself, as they were most closely to their state during their original time period, via a recovered contemporary or near-contemporary version that has been translated into modern context. Like the User in ReBoot, we don't know for for sure who or what God is really like, assuming he (or she? It? They?) exists, but it's good to have a plan if you intend to find out. You can't plan for something if you don't know what it is (and what it isn't). And if you do read it, don't do it for this story or it's writership, or the judgement by your peers. Do it for Jesus, or if not, do whatever makes you feel like you're not just pretending to believe what you are paid to do - or the rules you live by - is good. If you believe something, it should be because you believe it's morally right, not just status quo or culturally-acceptable. When the concept of God becomes a form of "Big Brother is Watching", an angel loses it's wings.
If there is any truth to this story, that results from authoritarianism entirely because "God sees through our eyes". What you believe in - and how you judge people on it's behalf - is your God, whatever that may be. Believing in, for example, a nation does not make that nation a literal god, but it sometimes becomes the symbol by which you (as in, any given person) identify godhood or holiness, and whether you take the time to ask if your nation might be controlled by thieves and monsters or not, believing that your nation (a construct built out of an idea, a "Dreaming" but without the respect for it's dangers and particulars) or leader (a mortal person) is worthy of worship really is making love to the devil. If you believe in a God through the lens of an ignorance of your own faith, you owe it to yourself to know - and are owed that by the world - why things happen and how bad things happening can be avoided in the future. Opaque governance is authoritarianism at it's most insidious, the hardest for the judicial systems we rely on to identify if something truly horrible is happening or if it's simply a bureaucratic brand of stupidity, but you are not stupid to question it. Not even if the face of the person you question claims to be the being you worship.
Kidpunk
11996 HE
Any belief—if it makes you a gentler companion, more open to the suffering of your neighbor, more able to hold out forgiveness when you otherwise could not—holds as much merit as any legend. Truth is not proven by conquest or by the number of tongues that tell a tale.
It is not the winner who is right, Germaine. It is the kind, the humble, the changed, who make the world right—whomever they follow, or none at all.
That, dear Germaine, is why you're right to believe stories - consistent ones - matter. Of course, the world isn't limited to the Western Hemisphere and it's cultural predecessors. Sometimes the reason you need to consider things more carefully isn't to preserve peace and safety, but to restore it, or extend it to others. The reason your "God", your unconscious, is - for everything it can and will do - not the one in charge of things... Yes, as unlikely as it sounds, Budi is not the true master of Gadg8eer's fate... is because of that same logic. In the end, souls call the shots. Unless you yourself are in some way violated, prevented by some mortal means through no fault of your own from making your own decisions with a reasonable amount of awareness, you are responsible for your own actions. No more, no less.
Sincerely yours,
- Uncle Ω
"Who is it from?" Danny asked, munching popcorn as he rewatched Con Air for the umpteenth time on the jumbo CRT TV in his room.
"Do we have an Uncle I've never met?" Germaine asked.
"I think we have, like, a second-cousin or something who lives in Australia, but... not really. why?"
"No particular reason." Germaine responded, a bit wary about her mysterious penpal. "Oh, finally. Your dreadful movie is over."
"Huh? Oh. No, I was just filling time until the Rugrats marathon starts." Danny told her. "What's up?"
"Danny, have you ever had an inner conflict about watching the Telly?" she asked.
He rolled his eyes at her accent. It had never exactly been clear why one of them sounded British, the other American. "Not really. Why would I get hung up on TV?" he shrugged.
"You've never felt pressured in two directions? You want to believe it's real, but you don't because that would be crazy?" she inquired.
"I mean, yeah, but I always tell myself what Kid Cosmic said. It's cool to imagine it, but it's not real." he responded casually.
"...quite." she said, sighing as she headed to her own bedroom to file away all the letters from the mysterious interloper. As she closed the door, her pet cat wandered into Danny's room and settled upon his couch beside him.
"Oh, hey, Zee. Any idea what's up with my sister?" he asked. "...oh who am I kidding, cats can't talk."
"Usually, yes. I wouldn't bet money on it if I were you, though." the cat responded, and then licked his own paw as if he was normal.
"HOLY [CENSORED], YOU CAN TALK?!"
Notes:
"...and it's easy to say that wishes don't come true to most people. Because the truth behind the legend is that usually, the most boring answer is the correct one, and usually, when we hear about exceptions, especially from stories, but sometimes from real people too, it's because the good guys won in the end. Sometimes, though... Sometimes the truth behind the legend isn't inspiring. Sometimes it's not even boring. Sometimes? The Joker would be right to want the world to burn, because something intolerable - Eldritch-like in it's sheer awfulness - is inescapably true. So let's ask a new question... Who, dear reader, would YOU be if you could escape the world you came from?"
Chapter 11: "La tribu de Dana" by Manau from "Panique Celtique"
Notes:
It's true that the legends of the Fae had been sanitized, yes. But it is equally true that the writers of the first edition of "Changeling: The Lost" did the opposite, grimmificating legends that were never meant to be purely about fear or pain or despair...
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
NowFuture
10750 HE
"Artúr?" Brigid asked her son as he finished giving her a tear-filled hug. "Why are you crying? We won."
"And I'm the only one left." Artúr explained, feeling lost with every other boy he'd grown up alongside now dead. "What now?"
"I think you should talk to Áine." Brigid said, stroking his cheek dry. "You need advice."
"For what?" Artúr asked.
"War... it never changes. It hurts, but we need you to lead us. The tribe needs you, Artúr." Áine said, her elderly frame standing at the door holding a walking stick.
"Mother, you shouldn't be standing right now!" Brigid said, worried about Artúr's aging grandmother.
"And we never should have let Uilliam double-cross the Simurians. The Fae don't like being tricked in bad faith, the fool had no idea what he unleashed." Áine told her daughter, but sighed. "That's too late to change, though. I will apologize to them, then we can rebuild. Artúr will not have to negotiate."
"Negotiate? I know my father was-"
"This isn't about that. I am not blaming you for what your father did, Artúr. He was my son-in-law, no matter what mistakes he made I care." Áine explained. "The Fae have to be consulted. The Simurians are not just men with bronze swords, they are living embodiments of the Fae. To defeat them bites the hand that feeds us."
Artúr did not look pleased. "They KILLED Ionatán! Why would we negotiate if we won?!"
"Artúr, you don't realize what winning against them does." Áine told him. "The Simurians... the Fae... they are a force of pure magic with a will of their own. All that you see of them are their tricks, but they do hold real, pure magic power. You cannot kill them, they accept their defeat only because this unjust war is more than a war to them, it speaks tio the very heart of their power. That power is merciful, not oppressive. It mirrors our intent. If we do not apologize, they will leave us to die, cursed to not have their invisible assistance."
"And how do we know they help us in the first place?!" Artúr responded. "It's no different than the Romans or the Vikings and their so-called gods."
"Artúr, I may not be able to convince you with knowledge, but I know what will. Turn in for bed early tonight. Tomorrow we're going to meet Merlin." Áine said. "Brigid, can you grab a pail of water? I'm going to make him some tea."
NowFuture
10750 HE
The next morning, Artúr woke up to a strange silence in the village. He got up and looked around the entire settlement, feeling watched but finding no one. There weren't that many people to begin with, but somehow everyone was gone. Campfires and cauldrons of stew had gone out overnight, even the animals had disappeared.
At that moment, he heard nearby footsteps on the hard-packed dirt surface of the village's market. "...hello?" Artúr said, hoping he was not in some form of danger. "Is someone here?"
"Expecting someone?" a woman said as she emerged from the stables. She had bright red hair and pointed ears.
"What did you do with them?" Artúr assumed, suspicious and struggling to muster the bravery to face a Simurian again.
"Oh, your village? Nothing. You, on the other hand... Well, you aren't actually looking at your village, now, are you?" she said smugly.
"What are you talking about? I've lived here my whole life, I remember my village." Artúr told her.
"Of course! You do! How do you [I]think[/I] I made this little magical realm look exactly like it?" she responded with a hint of control.
At that moment, the sky began to turn dark. Artúr glanced up to see the sun being slowly blocked by an enormous dark circle.
"What is your name, boy?" she asked him.
"I am not a boy. I am a [I]man[/I], and my name is Pendragon." Artúr explained, giving her only his nickname. The dumb part was, the only reason he put up with his nickname is because he felt proud of his "sizeable inheritance" being referred to as some beast to be slain, not that he was particularly interested in the advances of the women around him.
"Morgan le Fay, I'm here about the conflict you survived." she seemed to say casually.
"And why is that?" Artúr asked.
"Winning alone is not the measure of a man, Artúr." she responded. "Do you think what you did was somehow right?"
"No. My father betrayed you, what I did was done only to honor his mistake. He had to fall, the only way that could happen is war. I just wanted to be sure you knew you'd been defeated enough that striking back against what he started would be the end of you."
"I forgive you, but all you've accomplished is the deaths of your peers. The Simurians are puppets, what lies behind their eyes lives on because it is the magic that directs them, causes them to act as one, lives on. You destroyed a bunch of replacable puppets, and in return you lost everyone who might have become your lover." she revealed. "That's not a fair trade, yet you made it, agreed to it."
"Why should I believe you? You've talked nonsense this entire time." Artúr reacted.
"Because you're the only one left who doesn't believe you're truly a man, Artúr. No one questioned that yesterday, or on the long trip back from the battlefield in the back of a hay wagon. Everyone who might have questioned your validity is dead." she told him. "Just see for yourself."
At that moment, she teleported next to him, and was suddenly holding a mirror made of impossibly-polished silvery-smooth reflective material. The reflection shifted and Artúr saw Ionatán in its image...
Notes:
"Just you wait, Reader! I'll get you in eScape-Threeie!"
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