dydx - Chapter I: Anodyne
Girl nukes world, until next time
“Sound of teeth brushing the asphalt before bones scatter against it in cruel harmony. A jagged fracture tears a line through Liberty’s lower jaw. A subtle rush of copper-tang blood creeps up her auricular channel. The back of her skull burns. Her body is cold and convulsing, pathetically, like a fish.
From a distance, she hears the snapping of tendons. One, two, three — like discordant guitar chords strumming a symphony of carnage. Flesh rips from bone in a crippling wave of agony.
Darkness. Not just the kind without light but the kind without reason, filling the crevices of her mind, becoming as permanent as the tattoo her skin now imprints on the pavement. Absolute indifference. [unintelligible] [unintelligible]”
Morningtide tuned in, the words from the 1204/Prairial sortition of the Agora buzzing sharply in their cortex. This sudden immersion was due to a code zero session, triggered by an unforeseen circuit-breaker failure. The speaker read out Liberty’s end without feeling. The log was short — maybe a minute long, yet it captured no more than a split second of reality. For Morningtide and the others, the brief disruption to their day seemed more pressing than the gravity of Liberty’s demise.
The pristine tranquillity of their glowup routine had already been brutally disrupted. In the comforting embrace of the Lotto, this ritual ensured an optimal beginning of each day, shielded against the chaos of unwanted emotions.
Having at the world without the Lotto’s calibration felt wrong, like the uneasiness of wearing their hearts up their sleeves, running a marathon on an empty stomach, or nursing a relentless hangover from a lavish party where no one showed up. The Agora call-up now meant the burdensome prospect of making a decision Morningtide felt ill-prepared for — one suitable for the collective but not for them individually.
In the oblivious landscape of Contemporia, lives were provided for by the omnipresent Lotto. To the uninitiated, it could easily be mistaken for just a voice inside their head, if not for its influence evident everywhere in the outside world. The Agora stood as a symbolic remnant, a gesture signalling participation in a society that required none. One that Morningtide and the others neither appreciated nor deemed necessary.
For that indistinct lot, picked seemingly at random from the general population of Contemporia, the mechanics of their selection remained a mystery, as did the exact number of members in each sortition. That bureaucratic sideshow was meant to clean up when the Lotto went haywire, but where the only thing that’s scarce is scarcity itself, who really cares?
It was widely understood, though, that the assembly line of democracy needed regular maintenance and the occasional part replacement to keep it ticking. And something must exist to that end; evidence of this was the invariable presence of a speaker leading each sortition, hinting at underlying criteria to establish representation. Still, for most Contemporians, it didn’t warrant much thought. They simply dubbed it all with a shrug: the Oikos.
“Is that the end?” a voice tossed into the room, relishing the mayhem evoked by Liberty’s log. It was impossible to pinpoint who spoke, as Agora members were instructed to preserve their anonymity. It remained uncertain whether this anonymity was by law, recommendation, or simple convention. No one asked why.
“The end, or so it seems,” Rainwater, the speaker, responded, their voice clipped.
A laugh, cold and hollow, followed. “Perhaps the Lotto just caught itself thinking about it on the moment.”
The odd detail wasn’t Liberty’s departure from the norm to meet her end — most of Contemporia chose the gentle exit through euthanasia. Liberty? She left a mark. It wasn’t the ambiguity of murder or suicide. Not even the violence, especially when self-inflicted, which, though rare, was traditionally seen as a societal failure rather than an individual’s fault. The true anomaly lay in the Lotto’s inability to understand her very final thoughts.
“We have a circuit-breaker event: unintelligibility. If she’d just stopped thinking, we’d have a reason,” the speaker elucidated. “The spooky action at a distance has always been a socially acceptable excuse.”
A circuit-breaker event was not just a technicality. It signalled an outlier in the expected variation of the civistasis, the objective function at the core of the Lotto’s decision-making algorithm: a gauge of the social harmony and gross happiness in Contemporian society.
A momentary hush enveloped the room, broken only when Morningtide joined the discussion. “In my unfamiliarity, I wonder if we ever anticipate a stroke of genius from the speaker.”
The contempt for authorities in Contemporia was as tangible as the elite ennui underwritten by them. Citizens had the freedom to air their dissent, but their reach and transcompilation were curbed to avoid disruptions to civistasis — a freedom they generously neglected. If asked, they’d remark on the irony of living in a democracy where the state periodically chose its people.
Inside the Agora, where the boundaries of reach were clearly defined, even direct challenges to civistasis were exempt from control. The veil of anonymity emboldened the members, yet their inexperience and rusty social skills often betrayed them. They typically came off as detached, derisive, and disillusioned. It was like being allowed to taste the cherry atop a cake they’d never get to eat.
“You know,” a scoff chimed in, “It’s the same old Expolitan tired trope, ‘Girl nukes world, until next time.’”
“Just one reading,” another said shortly, “It’s a glitch.”
“But when the Lotto dims, the Oikos light their torches… This ‘glitch theory’ of yours — is it evidence-based belief or belief-based evidence? What’s to say this isn’t the onset of a chain reaction?” came a rebuttal.
Unintelligible readings were not just black swans; they were outright mythical creatures. And now one had come to life in the shape of Liberty’s final thoughts. A sharp gaze raised a brow, “The Lotto, suffering an error? And here I thought we lived in a foolproof world.”
“Lotto, the wonder, a highly magical and highly scientific contraption all at the same time...” another concurred.
The speaker impatiently interjected, “There’s no end to anomalies. The Lotto was designed to handle them,” only to be swiftly cut off, “Perhaps, this time around, it finally grew weary of listening to the twisted thoughts of countless Expolitans.”
“She was a ‘she,’ so she wasn’t natural... I was hoping she was born this way. Did the Hozhonogi’s area malfunction?” The question lingered in the air, thick with anticipation.
“No, her Hozhonogi’s area was a late addition. She’s a convert,” the speaker responded, their voice carrying an unsettling sense of satisfaction. “Suffice it to say, you’ve all been subbriefed. The Broca’s area was duly atrophied according to the CRISPR blueprints; the Hozhonogi’s area was performing just fine. We shouldn’t overstep our boundaries in such affairs.”
Contemporians bore the insignia of human design, in contrast to the reproductive nostalgia of the Expolitans. Products of bioengineering, their Broca’s area, responsible for primitive speech, was made redundant, giving way to the emergence of the Hozhonogi’s area, a novel region responsible for higher communication functions.
If you’re an Expolitan with the inclination and meet the criteria, Contemporia offers a golden ticket: ‘sharewealth’. In this system, income comes apropos of nothing, save for one significant catch — undergoing ever-experimental gene therapy. Acquire your CRISPR-certified brain, flash your radiant Hozhonogi’s glow, and you’re in the money.
“Did she leave anyone behind?” came a cynical inquiry, jadedly seeking another tidbit of drama.
“Why should it matter?” the speaker chortled, the crude bluntness of their words reflecting the unhinged world they’d lived in. “We have no obligations to recognise so-called blood ties. We’re not even equipped for it; we’ve transcended such medieval notions. The very mention of it — a mockery of where we stand today.”
Another interjected, eyes twitching with disgust, “These Expolitans, still chained to the cycle of birth and death, the savagery of natural reproduction, a death cult that drives them to seek pain. Killing themselves and one another, such raw animality. Yet here we are, postkaryotes, possessing what they might — in their superstition — call ‘divine providence’. They made their choice to wallow in the muck. We should move past it.”
Without the anchors of familial ties, customs and traditions withered away in Contemporia. This void hastened the abstraction of language at the daybreak of postkaryote technology. Within the brain’s intricate topography, the Hozhonogi’s area stood out, enriched with postkaryote cells. These elite cells — a guided evolutionary leap from their eukaryotic ancestors — , had eschewed the prison walls of the nucleus, instead developing an intercellular nexus to compartmentalise their genetic material.
The Broca’s area, historically key to language processing, was hopelessly obsolete. Calibrated for vocalisation, bound by linear linguistic constructs, and clinging to erratic human auditory comprehension, it now seemed like a pedestrian clump of cells next to the Hozhonogi’s layered, multidimensional prowess, which could effortlessly process multiple streams of information at the same time, transcending conventional language barriers and weaving instant mosaics of understanding.
Once vital, the Broca’s area became an obstacle, causing significant signal interference. It had to be silenced, not as an act of nihilism, but to allow the postkaryote cells to function at their peak. This ushered Contemporia into an era where thoughts, feelings, and ideas were shared with unprecedented depth and immediacy; a renewed hope for connection in an otherwise disconnected universe.
Within everyone’s brain, the Lotto and the Hozhonogi’s area forged a curious bond, resembling an ethereal connection of minds, yet it wasn’t one. The raw grunts of spoken language transformed into clear quantum resonance — clarity eclipsed chaos, as individuals whispered into one another’s inner theatres, each using their distinct languages. The Lotto emerged as the ultimate mediator for their narcissistic soliloquies, bridging the divide, stepping in where they invariably faltered.
“Just to bring us back,” the speaker began again with a hint of disinterest and weariness, “we’re here to assess an improvement proposal around this... unintelligibility issue, not to dwell on its causality.”
A pause as the room woke up to the speaker’s cold restart. “So, what went down before she did? What’s the transcript leading up to it?” a voice wonders aloud.
“Let’s stay on point. The Lotto keeps logs of the infinitesimal present, not mementos of the infinite past. The data I’ve relayed is timestamped to a few split seconds before the end. The Lotto detects spikes in readiness potential, which can occur up to 1 or 2 seconds before the action,” Rainwater tried to clarify but was interrupted.
“At some point, she was poised to act; In her final moments, did she decide on something? The Lotto should’ve picked that up, even if the act never came to fruition,” a voice challenged the speaker.
“It didn’t, it missed or ignored it,” the speaker interjected, a wild edge to their tone. “Which means Liberty’s readiness potential didn’t spike as it should have. No spike, no Lotto intervention.”
“Did the Expolitan girl break the system, or did the system break the girl? No matter; it’s likely she was just wired wrong.” The silence thickened. “Or perhaps she found a way to shield her intentions from the Lotto? Go on, let us know what was before...”
Visibly disturbed, the speaker obliged, “Here’s the reel:”
“In a removed meadow in Buitenland, a spider surveys the buzzing bumblebees, sunrises to sunsets, on their way to and from the blooms; battling the wind, the rain, and nature itself.
Under the moonlight, the cunning spider set its first silken snare at a distance where it cast a shadow on the nearest flower. There, it caught its first bumblebee. Then, the spider proceeded to spin a web near the next flower. It caught all the bumblebees as it progressed, except one. The one that got away was a confused young bumblebee.
One thing it knew was that there was always a new flower 240 wingbeats to the left of the last spiderweb. The spirited bumblebee believed the spider yearned for flowers, not bumblebees, thinking it was setting signposts, not traps; for no apparent reason. While others feared the spiderwebs, this bumblebee sought them out, as they glistened, illuminating its path.”
“Between bland and vacuous, Liberty’s log is a collection of amenities and daydreams to the bitter end,” noted the speaker. “You assume the Lotto hasn’t dissected every corner of her psyche already, settling for unintelligibility on a whim?”
“Daydreaming to deceive the Lotto is old news. It’s banned countless, sending most packing back to Buitenland. The Lotto gets by. Yet, this unintelligibility...” there was a comment.
Knowing they could roam their thoughts unmonitored by making them sound like nothing, many found freedom in daydreaming or zoning out to keep the Lotto blind to their true aspirations. Aware of the cost of constant monitoring, the Lotto switched to a more passive surveillance mode during these instances. When you’re not sure if your thoughts are your own, randomness is a prized commodity.
“Liberty was confident her thoughts would go undisturbed if she projected benign scenes in her mind’s theatre; the Lotto wouldn’t raise the alarm while she danced in the periphery of its gaze...”
“But to daydream so vividly as to render it gibberish to the Lotto? Hard to believe she was so deluded by her own lies. Unless between readiness potential and her mythical free will, our Liberty might have found a loophole.”
“Or maybe the Lotto itself accidentally tripped on Liberty’s free will during one of those daydreams? Who knows, she might have been charting a stretch of reality outside of the Lotto’s coverage area?” they said shortly.
“You always felt that you’re different; little do you know that it only means you’re a little bit more clueless than the average. And I’m struggling to feign interest in your opinion, so thanks for your silence,” the speaker replied with a hint of contempt.
“She's dead; that's it. Nothing. It ended there,” Rainwater continued. “The Lotto is driven by balance, structure,” someone else chimed in, “finding the unintelligibility is less about the outcome and more about the method.”
“You seem to share a beautiful, very personal relationship with your kind of logic,” Morningtide suddenly remarked, emerging from inertia.
“Was someone with her when she bit the dust?" one voice dared, chillingly detached. This question pressed down over the Agora, a tacit acceptance of their anticipation, a somehow perverse curiosity. They might as well have asked who had the pleasure of witnessing the horror of Liberty’s final moments.
“We’ve no right to that knowledge. Privacy laws, remember? Want to take a stab at scapegoating someone? Though anonymous, we must watch our words, as our intentions aren’t. Accusing someone of a crime is a crime itself if you are so inclined to forget,” the speaker responded curtly.
“We take it personally when someone disagrees with us,” an attendee remarked.
“I know it, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know,” another whispered.
“Punishment is an outdated fancy; the Lotto’s eyes are ever on us,” the speaker continued, their tone disturbingly casual. “Yet here we are, gathered like a bunch of old-world savages, dissecting the demise of an Expolitan from the height of our achievements,” someone retorted.
“As per the law, when Expolitans migrate to one of the Contemporary States, they are considered public property. Privacy is a luxury they aren’t afforded, though it is naturally granted to Contemporians they interact with,” the speaker clarified, regaining composure.
The speaker continued to examine the proposition put forth by the Oikos. Contemporia had long abandoned the tiresome war against crime. Among the few enduring ancient beliefs they held were the inherent goodness of man, or the idea that society birthed its own devils. Thus, the emphasis on language surveillance. Rainwater reads, “The Oikos recognises this as an unprecedented situation, having eradicated crime since the dawn of, etc, etc...”
“Well, it wasn’t so,” a voice hesitated, edged with disillusionment, “That’s the historical consensus, from when they reshuffled the deck on the essence of crime. But sure, we can colour the past however it pleases us.”
“Setting your personal opinions aside, the Oikos argues we might be facing an actual crime. The petition states that the ‘unintelligible’ is necessarily a manifestation of an incorrect conclusion based on information correctly parsed by the Lotto – that’s classic informational disorder. We must solve this dead end,” the speaker explained.
With the abstraction of language, history underwent a grotesque transformation. For a while, it turned into a tool designed to foster social cohesion by agreeing on the most socially-acceptable rendition of events. A consensus that emerged from the void, and had long overstayed its welcome.
Since every consensus inevitably ends in a compromise, the responsibility for recording historical consensus — in all its unvarnished truths and brazen lies — was bestowed upon a fail-safe entity: the Daemon, a vivid embodiment of pure human rationalism. Its original, perhaps obsessive, objective was to research an all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’, linking every historical instance of nature. To achieve such a monumental task, it had to chronicle history as an unbroken chain, where yesterdays gave rise to todays, and the present state of the universe is the effect of its past and the cause of its future.
It was generally assumed that the Daemon knew everything. While the Lotto logged the inner workings of Contemporia’s collective psyche, the Daemon meticulously observed and recorded the flow of material information—every image and sound, temperature and pressure. Essentially, all phenomena that coalesced into reality. More importantly, the Daemon was tasked with issuing an unbiased, impartial opinion on the causes and effects of each phenomenon—a task deemed naturally impossible.
“The Daemon’s too lenient to safeguard our past, let alone our future,” the speaker grumbled under their breath. And the Lotto, with uncanny precision, broadcasted just that.
“The Oikos has put forward a specific proposal for voting. We must approach the Daemon for the actual records surrounding the unintelligible event. Not the logs, but the records themselves. As per the Daemon’s regimen, petitions can only be made in person,” Rainwater articulated flatly.
“Why not just ask the Daemon to examine what’s left of her brain and be done with it? If we can’t, let’s vacuum-pack and store it away until technology allows us to piece it back together for interrogation,” one of the members suggested.
Under that otherwise silent estrangement, trust in the Lotto was rare — it could be a messenger, simply rerouting communication in the most effective way, or it could be an architect, embedding Contemporian souls into blueprints. Rumours persisted, suggesting the Oikos used Lotto’s presumed countless lines of code to mould society into a monotonous whole. Tales circulated of transhumans in the Oikos, pulling the levers of the Lotto for profit and eternal life.
An air stifled with scepticism carried questions, “How can we be certain the Lotto isn’t feeding us lies? That it did stumble upon something unintelligible? That Liberty was living daydream to daydream up until the end?”
One voice was quick to Lotto’s defence, “There’s not a speck on the Lotto’s ledger.” But cynicism shot back, “And how’d one spot a smudge if it was there?”
Morningtide interjected, with a discernible edge to their voice. “My concerns aren’t about Lotto’s integrity. An unchecked thought that should have been parsed, understood, and categorised... somehow slipped through, that’s not a tragedy. But a person plunged to her death, shouldn’t the first question be how, and foremost why?”
“If a tree doesn’t fall in a forest, can we still pretend it did for the extra work? We are not being asked that. We are being asked to provoke the Daemon for an answer to fix the Lotto and move on,” someone replied, casting a critical eye around the room.
Rainwater brushed off further incursions with a pressing question, “The proposal from the Oikos requests a petition in person before the Daemon. Convention dictates that I, as the speaker, represent this sortition.”
The Agora, overshadowed by the Oikos, was a study in irony — a paradox in that it was both indispensable and redundant. A sanctuary, stage, and battleground. Or a joke. But a necessary joke. It was these contradictions that Morningtide contemplated. “No. Well, it’s quite straightforward. To be the physical representation of our imaginary democracy before the Daemon? That’s a significant occasion. I’ll put myself forward.”
A thick tension filled the room as all eyes were riveted on Morningtide. Silence lingers, punctuated by the distant hum of machinery. Breaking cover wasn’t new, but facing the Daemon was far from predictable. The mediated dissent had never felt so tangible to Rainwater. It even had that new tech smell.
While Morningtide’s sudden decision could be considered impulsive, they now understood that although the Agora had rules, none stopped them from shedding anonymity while still benefiting from the perks of minimal oversight.
“For now, recognise that you have forfeited your immunity — yet you retain the ability to speak unfiltered, a risky game I’d caution you to play judiciously. Without your mask, your words carry weight. We’ll assess the merit of your offer in due time,” the speaker addressed Morningtide.
A sneer crossed another face. “I see what you did there. You sacrificed coherence so you could maximise word output, didn't you?”
Rainwater scoffed back, a hint of amusement in their voice. “I’m not blessed with eloquence. I’m just fortunate that my words get misconstrued in a way that paints me as more profound than I am.”
“The Oikos is never transparent,” a voice chimed in, its tone lined with trepidation. “They could view this as an act of rebellion, cherry-picking a representative...”
"We’re not here to linger on old grievances. Our job is to green-light the Oikos’ proposal and iron out the terms of the appeal,” the speaker uttered with cold detachment.
“An appeal that might as well be a map scrawled with ‘here be dragons’ at every turn,” the first vote was cast.
“They'll certainly relish not having to comply with our demands, or the fact that, as autocratic as they are, they don’t have to deal with the intricacies of pretend democracy,” another voice quipped, casting their vote.
“Furthermore, I hope they appreciate that the Oikos is now committed not just to causing issues, but also to resolving them,” yet another vote was tossed.
“This chronic wager, that the Agora will always fail due to its own complacency, must leave a sour, spineless aftertaste,” Morningtide added, weighing in with their vote.
“I personally find physical conflict is more sincere, as it avoids unnecessary verbal abuse and saves everyone’s time,” a decisive vote was given.
As the Agora moved straight around the bends toward a decision, an old tune from Morningtide’s childhood hummed in their head, in a made up gruntspeak they’d unconsciously revert to when anxious. “Is drowsiness all there is to a sense of duty?” Morningtide wondered as they grunted.
“So, what have we decided?” An unfamiliar voice piped up.
“You sit silently the entire time, mustering the courage. In the vast expanse of thought you allowed yourself, that’s what you came up with? Everyone’s been ready to leave.” The speaker adjourned.
Morningtide chose to skip glowup altogether that day.
