Sophie Strange in the style of Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Chapter 22: A short term effect
Expedition headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension
Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)
Several days passed as the Special Circumstances section prepared their attack on Soth. The dimensions specialists at the Expedition headquarters set up a magic flow that resembled the Soth pocket as closely as they could manage, and Charlotte and Sophie practiced manipulating it. In their discussions, the SC board and agents considered bringing in other altering specialists – none of the dimension specialists had any alter skills worth mentioning – but the conclusion from their experiments was that the two agents would be able to handle it. With the SC hoard at hand hey had all the energy they needed, and adding more people would just clutter Charlotte and Sophie’s collaboration.
One day there was a major disruption to these preparations, as the anchor to the Soth pocket suddenly disappeared. People worried that he was onto them and fretted about having lost their advantage, but within a few hours the Soth pocket was back. Apparently – in retrospect, obviously – the pocket only existed as long as Soth was in Thesaurus. When he took a trip somewhere – probably to inspect and maybe strengthen the shadows in the Erd dimension – Soth brought the pocket with him. This was actually rather helpful, because it meant that one did not have to worry about attacking the pocket while Soth was away. If the pocket was up, Soth would be in there.
There was still the possibility of attacking the pocket just when Soth was about to leave but, assuming they would be able to slow down time in the pocket by a large factor, the SC agents would have to be exceedingly unlucky for this to matter much. Even if they caught him just a tenth of a second before leaving, Soth would still spend thousands of Confluence years completing his dimension flow, and for practical purposes that was just as good as trapping him for millions of years (Confluence citizens living a few millennia from now might beg to differ, but by then they really should have figured out a way to deal with Soth on a permanent basis.)
While everybody was focused on the attack on the Soth pocket, the Erd author went through a productive period, writing three more chapters and another interlude. The chapters dealt with the SC agents and their initial conversations with the SC board – well, not Sophie’s for some reason – and did not really affect the investigation: the only secrets revealed were the board’s admiration of Charlotte and Watson, Sophie’s experiences in the Chamber of Memories, and Bob’s unease at knowing that he would soon be a Confluence superstar. And maybe Watson’s love for his dog familiar. Everybody was prepared for the possibility that something unpleasant or otherwise embarrassing would eventually be revealed about them, but so far, it seemed that whoever was feeding the Erd author did not include any such details about the agents or the board. Of course, there were no guarantees that this would continue.
In the interlude, whoever was communicating continued using important events in the progress of natural philosophy as the backdrop for their messages. Arguably, this indicated that the people communicating had a certain respect for the Erd sims or for some other reason wanted to emphasize the positive aspects of their civilization.
To expediate their learning progress, the agents were all running enhancements of various kinds, especially Perk and Spark. Perk was basically every Confluence citizen’s favorite enhancement, at least during working hours, because it helped you get things done and canceled out your sluggishness and fatigue. Spark was only slightly less popular, as it helped you understand things and the Confluence was full of people who wanted to understand what was going on. Acuity and Celerity for their part were great for certain occasions, but they were widely regarded as stress-inducing and most people avoided them in their everyday lives.
For a few years, Rizz was one of the most popular social enhancements, but as the decades since the Revolution progressed, people got used to seeing others being all Rizzed up and were no longer very impressed by it. Mellow and Bliss remained popular for the evenings, although some people found that as you habituated to their effect, they lost a bit of their glamor. This was even more true for Bloom and especially Veil, where the consensus was that, in order to gain anything from them, you should wait a month or three before repeating the experience. Increasingly, people extended that sentiment to Mellow, Bliss, and Spark as well, although most of them continued to Perk up on a daily basis.
To the SC agents, of course, these were special circumstances, which gave them an excuse to Spark up more than they would otherwise do. Hopefully, by the time they had habituated to its effect, they would have completed the mission.
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In the evenings, Sophie and Bob continued to abscond to the Simulations headquarters to look more closely at the people in Sophie’s experiences (Bob supposed they were either memories or visions but, not wanting to impose either interpretation on Sophie, was careful to never refer to them as such).
There were patterns. Sophie and Bob never quite got around to talking about these patterns, Sophie because she was shy about what they implied, Bob because he did not want to intrude on Sophie’s territory. So, they continued to watch and not speak very much about what they saw. Bob asked several times if Sophie wanted to be alone with this, which she always denied, probably because the denial implied that there was nothing personal, to Sophie, about what they were watching. These were other people’s lives, just sims going about their affairs. Had nothing to do with her, really.
Also, it comforted Sophie to have someone around. If these stories were important, somehow, she was not sure that she trusted she would be able to handle them appropriately. A part of her wanted to hide from all this, definitely did not want to be the one to draw any conclusions from it. Leave that to someone else.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The patterns were obvious. In a way, it was like there was a kind of dialogue between the people they were watching. Violence perpetrated by one person was reflected as victimization by another and as further perpetration by a third. One person acted carelessly and another was hurt by someone else’ careless behavior. And always there were little details, seemingly insignificant, connecting the events. One person was murdered with a large hunting knife, and another was shot by a pistol – in a hunting lodge with that same knife, or one very much like it, hanging like an heirloom or a relic on the wall. One noblewoman was munching on a cookie as she rode with her knights through a camp of starving peasants; centuries later, a wealthy merchant choked to death on a cookie that looked almost exactly like the first. A father seated behind an imposing desk threw his son out of his house as a good-for-nothing; in a different era altogether, a woman was fired for incompetence – because of a mistake that was not really her fault at all – by her boss, who was seated behind a very similar-looking desk. A married couple hurled abuse at each other in a garden of lavender flowers; two brothers fought over a woman smelling of generous helpings of a lavender-based perfume; another fight took place in a room suffused in lavender-based incense. “Funny,” Sophie said, being either a bit na?ve or close to acknowledging the obvious, “I never really liked the smell of lavender.”
There were many such examples of recurring themes, and Bob was good to have at hand because of his expertise in dealing with the simulation interface. Despite their increasing number, Sophie kept searching for recurrences, seeming as amazed at the hundredth instance as she had been at the first. Another more general pattern was that while all the people they looked at made a lot of mistakes, the carelessness and cruelty very clearly diminished over the centuries.
One day as they were taking a break, Bob decided to talk to Sophie about his main difficulty with the Erd sims. “You know,” he said, apropos nothing, “what has been really bothering me about Erd is that it seems to be losing its way. I guess you’ve read about it in the book.”
“Yes,” said Sophie.
“I was hoping it could be blamed on outside interference, but when we found signs of such interference it dawned on me that, it matters, obviously, but it’s not the whole explanation. It’s also the Erd sims acting irresponsibly, stupidly, self-destructively.”
“A bit like us, I guess.”
“Sure, but worse. Several magnitudes worse.”
“Their lives are so constrained, the poor things. I think they’re a bit like us back in the ancient world, before the dawn on magical consciousness. The pre-Confluence world. I guess it was you who said that, actually. In the book.”
“I did. I think they are like us, although trapped in a world of limitation and deprivation. Maybe that’s the explanation. I’ve found it so hard to explain how they could be so intelligent and so dumb at the same time. Maybe it’s just poverty nagging at them, pulling their shirts.” He paused. “Still, you know, I find myself thinking that there’s just too much stupidity there to blame it all on poverty. I mean, look at this latest thing, right, the people of this very powerful nation choosing its leader. It’s not like these people are starving or anything. Most of them are not materially desperate, and still they go ahead and pick a fascist narcissist.”
“It doesn’t make sense.”
“Exactly. Such bright and in many ways privileged people, and then they go ahead and do something like that. I guess what I’m wondering is, how can the wisdom and the foolishness coexist so easily.”
“I see your point, I guess. Some of the people we’ve been looking at seem so, I dunno, developed, in terms of their consciousness, and some others are so dim.”
“True. And if you look at the Erd sim today, the conscious ones and the dim ones are both there at the same time. Like they are at completely different stages of development in terms of their consciousness, and yet they are walking around in the same area at the same time.”
“I suppose the difference is not that some of them have spent a longer time in school, right?”
“Education explains some of it, but I believe there’s a lot it doesn’t explain. But, you know, the people we’ve been looking at – those in the earlier periods were a bit dim, right, and then the more time passed, the more the people displayed a developed consciousness, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes.”
“And some of that is probably just civilization progressing, but you could look at any of those later eras and find people who are just as dim as the very earliest ones we looked at.”
“So, there is something going on here.”
“I feel that I’ve learnt something from this, yes. Like I understand it better now.”
“Want to share your insights?”
“Well, the thing is that I don’t want to impose my understanding on you. But if you wish, maybe you could say something about what you think is going on.”
“Yeah, well. There’s no overlap in time, is there?”
“No.”
“And the later we get, the less dim people are.”
“Yes.”
“And there are lots of recurring elements that seem to connect the stories.”
“Yes.”
“So, one interpretation might be that it’s all the same person, somehow.”
“Yes. I’m sort of tending towards that interpretation.”
“Really? Some of the religions talk about this. One soul reincarnating as many different people, expressing itself through many different lifetimes.”
“I’ve never thought much about it before – I mean before we started looking at these people – but it fits quite well with what we’ve been seeing, doesn’t it?”
“I guess.”
“And that made me think, you know, you look at Erd at a given point in time, and some of the people there, they’ve been working themselves through dozens or hundreds of lifetimes. And some of the others, they’re maybe there for the first time.”
“And that explains their dimness?”
“Right. Or, let’s say, their lack of development. They just haven’t been around for a very long time yet. They’re new.”
“Um, so where did they come from?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they were animals and now they got promoted.”
“Promoted by whom?”
“I don’t know, Sophie. It’s not like I have the answers to all of this, or to any of it for that matter. Maybe they self-promoted when they felt ready for a more advanced existence. I’m just thinking out loud here. But it fits what we’ve seen, or at least that’s how it seems to me, and it would explain the discrepancy that has been bugging me.”
“The consciousness and the dimness.”
“Right there at the same time. Maturity and immaturity. The immature ones, you know, going for the fascist madman.”
“Hm. But why did all this come to me, in the Chamber of Memories?”
“I don’t know, but I think maybe you know.”
“Yeah? Because they’re my memories?”
“Could be.”
“So, you’re saying I spent all these lifetimes in Erd before being born into the Confluence?”
“I didn’t say that, Sophie, but it looks like an explanation, yes.”
“That’s weird.”
“It’s a mouthful, I agree with you on that.”
“But how is it even possible? I mean, we’ve been running Erd for just about 40 years, right?”
“Actually, we inherited it from the Elders. They’ve been running it for millennia, but then they just left it. It was barely progressing at all when we found it, so we decided to pour some energy into it to see what might happen. It started moving forward more quickly.”
“Really?”
“We don’t speak about it, much. I suppose it’s embarrassing to some people. I never really thought of it in that way myself. Anyway, Sophie, how old are you?”
“I’m 28.”
“So, over those 28 years we have progressed Erd about 14. The last person we looked at died more than 14 Erd years ago.”
“So it could be me.”
“Yes. I’m not saying it was, but it could be.”
“I need to think about this.”
“Of course. Call it a night and see you tomorrow?”
“Think so.”
“You’ll be alright, right?”
“I’ll be fine. Good night, Bob. Thanks for your help.”
“Good night, Sophie. Thanks for letting me look at all this.”
Bob Rife in the style of Ren Xun, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
