dydx - Chapter IV: Reply to All
What’s the maximum proportion of sociopaths in a society before sociopathy becomes the norm?
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“Man isn’t free at birth. We come into a world that fights us by nature. We become indentured to it, trading its fresh, untainted time for our old, spoilt moments until each second is poisoned, the debt’s crippling and we’re bankrupt.
A zero-sum prisoner’s dilemma, not the happy superstition we’re taught; where all timelines coexist in harmony, every conceivable outcome materialises, and no judgement awaits. One where, perhaps, Kristin wouldn’t bite the apple just once but at every opportunity... an apple from each decision tree in the random forest.”
These thoughts were with Morningtide as they woke up that evening feeling down. Evading the glowup had become a habit. Morningtide wanted to watch their film, an endearing term for what was actually a teβerpλex.
A teβerpλex isn’t exactly a film. Made with postkaryote tech, it’s a superposition of who knows how many movies. The viewer sees all, experiencing every character’s existence simultaneously, detaching plots from timelines and turning them into waves of probability.
Postkaryote tech allowed humans to fully experience teβerpλexes, but even the brightest human minds couldn’t produce one on their own. They’re too complex. Teβerpλexes were made to order, streamed by the Lotto right into one’s Hozhonogi area. To watch one was to make one — there was no functional difference between the roles of observer and creator. Yet, they were not the same.
Creating a teβerpλex was straightforward, unless you were adapting older works. Morningtide still struggled with the old-fashioned notion of a ‘character’ — conceived by an author, brought to life by an actor. They wondered how a character could remain alive after the actor was gone, when they were somehow physically connected.
The plot of Morningtide’s teβerpλex, ‘Axiom,’ was simple, they thought: a world where Peano’s reflexivity axiom, x = x, didn’t hold — a world where ‘x’ was distinct from ‘x’.
The idea of pioneering a new genre, ‘Phi-Fi’ — or Philosophy Fiction — amused Morningtide. In it, philosophy was the plot, examining how reality would react to hypothetical changes in life’s hidden axioms.
Kristin Lavransdatter had been their chosen protagonist, though it was unclear to Morningtide if she was just a character, an actress, or a real person. Creating a fresh main character was an idea, but what were they made of? The light of new thoughts prompted a revision to their teβerpλex. There was a problem, the teβerpλex was unavailable.
They reached for the calligraphy book and pencil — a gift from the Pontifex — intending to jot down a note. As they penned, it was just scrambled lines. Yet, they could read their old writing in the same book. Why couldn’t they write now? They decided to just log a memory note. But they were denied.
Reflecting on the inaccessible teβerpλex, their lost ability to write, and the rejected memory note, the answer materialised in their mind as if it was magic: they’d been ostracised, marked by second-degree informational disorder. It wasn’t an unusual sanction. Thoughts upending civistasis resulted in ostracism daily, but most didn’t notice. There were no notifications. The only tell was if you tried to communicate with someone else. Or yourself.
Ostracism had degrees. First, you could communicate, but you couldn’t understand. Second, you could understand, but not communicate — this was Morningtide’s case. Third was total excommunication. As with most judicial phenomena in Contemporia, the hows and whys behind the assessment of informational disorder, and the enforcement of ostracism, were unknowns. Morningtide might’ve been wandering in this unnoticed exile for days.
Closing the calligraphy book, they thought, “We enter this world indebted to those who can understand our words. Those backing our meaning.” They stashed it away, their gaze shifting to the luminous orbs of the Idfarers, outside against the shooting stars from Contemporias’ defence system, always active, in the backdrop. “Simple, real joy,” they thought. It had been a while since their last visit to an Idfarer, a purveyor of a brand of entertainment that the sterile pipeworks beneath their lifepad couldn’t provide: “flesh fun.” They stepped onto a displacer.
Vannecker made his way to his lifepad in Priciex. The city gleamed, he surmised, in anticipation of his return. “Perhaps in jest…” With a small grin, he greeted his reflection in the transparent door, “Diogen, old man… old ‘them’, look at the state of ya.”
Inside, the lifepad hummed to life. Vannecker positioned himself under the tattooing nozzle, letting it mark him with an identity du jour. He hit up a “glowup of the champions,” feeling the warm within him — “a poor man’s booze.” He was tempted to change his hair, but declined, “No, not the hair… never touch the hair.”
He knew the Lotto’s hum inside his head well — the soothing white noise most Contemporians reported —, but his thoughts were a different kind of noise, “never that pleasant,” he smirked inwardly.
He was in Contemporia to track down Vidamundo and had already already seen the discovered writings. He knew exactly the next move; the Rebooters might have a lead. Seeking out a Rebooter operative was a gamble; they’d see him coming from a mile away, but he needed a way in. Moreover, not being a Contrarian, he couldn’t expect an iota of loyalty.
Vannecker, now going by Diogen — his Contemporian moniker — , headed to the Idfarer, as did Morningtide. Both in lockstep, unaware of their company.
At the end of the displacer journey, the Idfarer — a massive shining orb — hovered above Priciex. Built using the same glaciem technology that powered the displacers, Idfarers were everywhere. They weren’t exactly orbs but consisted of five concentric rings, a dome on top, and a cup beneath. Diogen stepped in, allowing the atmosphere to engulf him.
From up high on the displacers, Morningtide noticed that the backroads between Priciex and the Daemon were unusually packed today, with ghost-like figures moving in pairs. Drawing nearer, they watched them split into two groups. One was by the flowers near a large rock, leaving hand prints on the wall with coloured dust.
The other group headed towards a hill and, upon reaching its peak, turned aggressive, violently attacking one another. A figure, cloaked in a blue robe, approached one of the brawlers. They embraced. Now all of them. Eventually, both groups coalesced into one, as if merging their loneliness.
The figure in the blue robe, noticing Morningtide approaching slowly, turns towards them, becoming less ghostly with each step. The figure touches Morningtide, who feels uneasy.
“Contravivens,” the figure begins. Morningtide can now discern a thick beard and long brown hair, uncharacteristic of Contemporians. “Sometimes, the night wakes you in fear, dark and lonely; you long for another’s presence, even a weak or broken one, whom you’d have to protect in face of a real threat…”
“These souls, they’ve succumbed to the call of the void, but even the void wasn’t there... their euthanasia denied,” the man explains the contravivens to Morningtide.
Morningtide attempts to speak, but the man stops them. “Don’t. You can’t, and even if you could, I wouldn’t understand. You’re not here for that.” The man and Morningtide begin ascending via the displacers, heading back for the Idfarer.
Braving a tidal wave of visual overestimulation, Morningtide and the man enter the first ring of the Idfarer, a place designed for sensory onslaught. Hands meet hands, and eyes lock eyes. A space to engage in activities of touch.
“Do you see the appeal? The Lotto can mimic the pain of burnt, torn, sliced, bruised skin... not touch, not skin on skin. Thus, people flock here, a refuge for the desensitised, a dwindling reservoir of stimuli when everything else is just dead nerves,” the man tells Morningtide.
One’d think that such contact would escalate, becoming more raw, primal and debauched, but it didn’t. Instead, it evolved into something tender, caring, something that was nearly forgotten. They didn’t go wild; they get softer, gentler as one progresses through the ring.
They move on to the second ring, where people are immersed in excess, gorging as if salvation lies in abundance. Tables overflow with unconsumable amounts of food, drinks flowed like a river of melancholic waters. People sat, tears streaming down their faces, with a perverse enjoyment in their eyes as they screamed.
One ring up and the desperate crying and laughter dissipated into the scent of psychoactive fumes. “When you spend your life getting high, you never get high enough,” the man cautioned. Around them, Expolitan kids littered the place, weary eyes and dreams filled with the landscapes of Buinteland, a land now out of reach due to their debts. Morningtide inhaled the vapours, as the man covered his face.
Their advance to the fourth ring was halted by a physical barrier, a wall of structured pods. Morningtide secured themself into one, while the man remained free. Each pod had an assigned embassy — a surrogate enhanced with prokaryote-powered faculties.
Once their embassy was active, Morningtide sent it into a fast free fall, revelling in the agony of every fractured bone and torn fibre as it crashed against the ground. When the pain toes the line between unbearable and unenjoyable, the Lotto resets the experience. “They’re calling it the ‘Liberty Express’, now,” the man commented, amused at the perversity.
In this ring, embassies clashed: spikes through heart, bullets to brain… pyres ablaze. To the participants, the pain was real, but the wounds were just an illusion broadcasted live.
Emerging from the pods to the next level, the fifth ring unfolds as a massive arena, split into a series of individual pits. Each pit resounds with the roar of its own crowd, intensifying the gory spectacle of the beasts below. The matches are a gruesome display of predatory skill, with tigers wrestling bears, crocodiles locking jaws with gorillas, even sharks and orcas partaking in deadly underwater ballets for the vicious entertainment of the audience.
Amongst them is Diogen — a face neither Morningtide nor the man would recognise in such a crowd — staking on the survival of the fittest, with a disposition of tangible excitement as he cheers for his chosen beast.
A chicken, decapitated in the chaos, continues its aimless sprint around the ring, blood marking the terrain in erratic patterns, a dance of death and missteps. The man watches the headless animal’s futile efforts, “Democracy in action,” he remarks to Morningtide.
They progressed to the sixth ring of the Idfarer, where the air was heavy, tinged with the sallow green of envy and self-infatuation. Each whisper was a silent pledge to the Carrington, expressing gratitude for the narcotic sweetness of clean hands.
The Carrington Event, a time when the sun, in its anger, fried the world’s silicon brains with a massive flare — plunging men into chaos and war — stands as a cornerstone of Contemporia’s foundational myth. Despite inconsistencies and blurred truths, Contemporians clung to it and what it symbolised: the prospect of salvation and the opportunity to recreate the world in their own image.
A tall, spare man in a dark silver overcoat, his hair stark white, pauses to size up Morningtide’s companion with a sharp look. He takes his thumb to the forehead, and draws a circle from the left to the right over his face. After a reciprocated gesture, he strides past Morningtide and the man to a trapdoor. It swings open, he disappears through it. Unexpectedly, this trapdoor leads to the upper dome, the seventh ring above.
Morningtide wore a look of curiosity, eyebrows arched and arms half-extended as they stood above the same trapdoor to no avail. But they both understood why. The man signalled with a nod towards a displacer exit. Morningtide proceeded, “Time you see the whole picture, a final screen of your teβerpλex,” the man offered. Morningtide, torn between disquiet and euphoria, agreed. It was already the early hours of the morning and they felt sufficiently entertained.
Within the seventh ring — the top dome — was a long series of booths, each equipped with back-to-back seats where pairs would sit to daydream together. Morningtide’s exclusion was obvious: their inability to communicate barred them from engaging in shared daydreams.
Diogen arrives at the top dome of the Idfarer, spotting Berliner — his Rebooter contact — was trivial; his aura and dark silver overcoat were unmistakable. A nod, and they’re seated, “You’ve a twisted love affair with your own thoughts, while I’m consciously oblivious,” Diogen greets Berliner, who responds “True, but my introspection tends to be a self-inflicted wound.”
Diogen continues, “If memory serves me right, I’d have selective amnesia,” extending a canister of gasogen to Berliner. “And I don’t often dwell on what I know,” Berliner responded.
Suddenly, Diogen found himself in a meadow, chasing after a child with giant blue butterflies fluttering around. Each butterfly, upon touching a blade of grass, transformed into a reflection of both himself and Berliner.
The landscape shifted, and they found themselves in a room bathed in bleached white; a flailing, inverted tortoise between them. Berliner cast a glance at it. Before Diogen could ponder further, the walls of the room stretched towards infinity, and his mouth became a void, drawing everything around into it.
They landed in a carnival awash with lurid lights. Berliner’s butterfly dropped a letter to Diogen, containing a series of intricate directions leading to where he would find Vidamundo:
“A clock ticks. Anticlockwise.
The sooner we leave, the later we arrive.
A clock ticks. Eastclockwise.
As time measures clocks.
Protoclockwise, with broken arms, hanging.
Sideclockwise, from ultra to infra.
Two clocks tick. Lifeclockwise and deathclockwise.
Now through glass, then facing each other.
A clock ticks. Unclockwise.
Down on its own luck.
Pseudoclockwise.
At random.”
As the dream faded, Diogen blinked back into the Idfarer. Berliner, with a smirk, leaned in. “Best of luck, mate. It’s all just a dream until it’s not.” Diogen replied, “When I grow up, I want to be an astronaut.” Berliner nodded then, “Well, I’d rather my days just didn’t pile up.”
Entrapped within their inability to communicate, Morningtide followed the man. “You’re wondering, aren’t you?” The man’s voice sliced the still air, recognising the situation. “Who’s this man? Where are we going? Well, keep your eyes front.” He pointed to Polimurata, a Daemonite exclave nestled in Priciex and run by the Fulcrum — Contemporia’s defence forces. Walled and isolated.
Polimurata had two walls. Within the external wall was the Bioseum — where wild creatures from different eras roamed free. Within the internal wall was the Xenokastro — a penitentiary, the last of its kind in Contemporia, holding its sole and most illustrious captive, Estevon Stavrovenius.
On their arrival, a mask of recognition veiled Morningtide’s face as they spotted Malcolm Severn, the Redfish — words wanted to spill, questions to fire, but silence was absolute.
Redfish and the man seemed acquainted, avoiding eye contact as if avoiding picking at old scabs. Redfish shot towards the man, “I’d rather you were somewhere else, Reemkus. You’ve been present enough here before even stepping in. I’m to see that you’re on your way; that’s a reward I covet.”
Reemkus began his reply, “I wonder about your reverence, this worship for the place you’re in, mostly because you know you shouldn’t be…”
“Maybe it’s a similar feeling to walking around scared as if you’re being hunted, but deep down knowing there’s no target on your back, yet,” Redfish responded sharply.
“Sorry for speaking while you’re interrupting,” Reemkus said, “Contemporia might a big enough hill for you to die on, it’s still too small for great men to find a home.”
The Xenokastro was surrounded by the internal wall, which had four towers. From the top of the tallest one, the entirety of Polimurata could be seen. Redfish pointed at a man below in the prison yard, inspecting flowers, “The Beekeeper, the obedient prisoner, allowed some freedoms by the Pontifex.”
Behind the men, across a long table, Morningtide noticed a door. Not a conventional one, but one containing its own exterior within its interior. Its inside was its outside. Better yet, there was no identifiable ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ sides; there were no boundaries, just one continuous surface.
Waving towards the door, which was guarded by two men with the same golden ratio insignia on their uniforms, Redfish remarked, “It’s powered up; the Pontifex waits for you, whenever you’re ready.”
“This here is Zeno’s Bridge,” Reemkus said to Morningtide, “It leads to the Nautheseion. You might recall that the displacers can only get you half the distance there with every turn. So they never get there. This solves the insolvable, just what we need.”
“It’s simple really,” Reemkus continued, “you just have to use the door to enter the door.”
“This is expensive military equipment, not a door. It’s one of a kind. Once within Zeno’s Bridge, you are under the jurisdiction of the Michaelis Order, and I’ll have full discretion over your lives and deaths. Behave wisely,” warned the Redfish, a Grand Commander of the Michaelis Order himself.
“Think of it as a path… and think of space and time as derivatives; this door is made of the primitive thing, the clay with which God moulds reality,” Redfish clarified. Ignoring Redfish, Reemkus began, “All time, like all matter, already exists. Inside that door, everything is in a cycle, a loop…”
Redfish interrupted emphatically, “Another warning: once you step in, you embrace the eternal recurrence of time. Like I did, like Reemkus did; and everyone you will meet inside,” he continued, looking at Morningtide. “Your silence doesn’t negate your understanding, I know. If you step in, I’ll take it that you understand the implications.”
Reemkus was already nearing the door. “Days fall like dominos. We stop this fall by stepping in,” he said. “Travelling to the past is said to be impossible. But when the world moves forward and leaves you behind, isn’t it the same thing?” Seeing that Morningtide was following him, Reemkus remarked, “Just keep walking. Don’t look back,” he said, his voice light, but his eyes serious.
Morningtide walked, with Reemkus at his side talking, “Do you ever wonder why there’s always a backdoor? Or why the Lotto didn’t cure all diseases? It could’ve, probably.” His words had the certainty of a man attuned to the rhymes of the world. “You get rid of a disease, and it can come back. Different, unseen. Then, the only antidote is speculation; there’s no healing outside of self-healing.”
He spoke up again, cutting through Morningtide’s silence, “Unsmashing glass is harder than smashing it. But that’s what we have, our one edge. We can fix smashed glass.”
They both enter Zeno’s Bridge, traversing without footsteps over paths made of platinum-woven fabric. It’s neat, it’s precise, the way linen folds, the way paths unravel. “Objective time’s vulgar, a gauche sequence... 1,000, 60, 60, 24, 30, 12…”
Reemkus cast his eyes at the images forming around them, “The first nuclear plant, then Obninsk. Set up five years after the first nuclear bomb went off. Great things don’t usually get weaponised; they get civilised. Like time did. First destruction, then salvation; pig’s logic.”
“Us, the Lotto, it’s all because Watson beat Moore. It was all about cost minimisation, not about ‘happiness maximisation’ as they claim,” said Reemkus, his voice devoid of unnecessary embellishment. “Improvements were mainly confined to ancillary systems like refrigeration and energy consumption.”
They passed through a blinding, massive flash, unlike anything they had seen so far. Reemkus continued, “The Carrington — the myth, the necessity, impregnated democracy, birthing Contemporia. In the aftermath, a fresh start: non-magnetic microchips, a bountiful harvest for the technocratic revolution.”
“Everyone was to get the same share. A share of nothing but the plague of apathy in unison,” Reemkus spoke of the transition. “Then we were soon back to incomes as arbiters of societal worth, begging the Lotto to mechanise our judgement of human value.”
“Life improved to unimaginable levels. Mostly due to a lack of imagination — alienation that turned minds into vessels of sociopathy under multiple layers of abstraction. The zeitgeist of troubled souls,” Reemkus lamented.
Reemkus continued, pointing at the sequence of images, “The archcapitalists, financial virtuosi playing loudly to drown out the noise, wanted progress to run as fast as they played. Rising above the game to an altitude where happiness can’t follow wealth.”
“Post-Carrington came the terrors of World War 3. And when the silicon dust had barely settled, the failed experiments of the bureaugogue states — the Brusselian Beast and the UNSSR — pitched us headfirst into World War 4. It’s curious how abstractions have a tendency to become all too real when weapons are involved.”
Reemkus continued, “The dissenters, the Western Diaspora, spread through Buitenland, becoming part of the same old new. Meanwhile, the Yeboah Plan sparked the Sub-Saharan Golden Age and the Great Reconciliation.”
They journeyed through history, tales of what was and what might have been. “Contemporians, never having to face their own mortality, became too fascinated by the aesthetics of the life they saw in the mirror,” said Reemkus, “The real tragedy is that what they saw wasn’t beautiful by their standards, only by the standards that made them useful.”
“The Lotto, created to handle chance and supplies, delivering predictability. Through its changes, it remains running the same core principle: reducing dissent, regressing to the mean — equality finally,” his voice got deeper. “But that’s not without effects. What you know by creativity now, was once just an expression of randomness.”
They watched as Priciex loomed in the horizon, “Society, only as a bureaucratic connection of synapses,” Reemkus continued, “Its pathology lies in the presumption that the conditions of its inception still persist in its wake. We might soon find out as it deals with the ‘unintelligible.’”
“After they diversified away their differences, they turned honesty into fear. Making a life only where there’s flow... But if you strike a deal with the devil, is it wise to toe the line as expected?” Reemkus asks, a shadow in his tone.
“We might look and walk like ducks, but we don’t all quack like them. A quiet thank you owed to the Daemon, not for everything but for something,” he said with a short laugh, “As our faith’s slain, science’s muzzled, logic’s broken. And we’re left with barren souls and zombified skins.”
“But here we are now, where the neurodivergents copped that nobody had truly converged in the first place. An awful lot of heavy lifting for an Atlas with an ailing back,” Reemkus continued, “More importantly, where they’re trying to answer the vital question for our survival: ‘What’s the maximum proportion of sociopaths in a society before sociopathy becomes the norm?’”
“Come in, but leave your good sense at the door,” said the Pontifex, as he opened up the Nautheseion, “You’ve taken eternity’s shortcut this time, I see.”
He looked at Morningtide, pointing at Reemkus. “This man has, for years, sought to undermine the Daemon, to topple me. And here he is, the proverbial fox. Let’s see how he fares among the hens,” Breakspear — who was already there — concurred with a nod.
Reemkus, defiantly interrupting with a smirk, said, “It’s presumptuous to think that me and the Rebooters always team up. If anything, I’m the hen in the fox’s den now. But, in reality, we’re all a succession of ducks, systematically aligned, awaiting our turn at the firing line.”
“The Rebooters have changed alright,” the Pontifex agreed, looking at Reemkus. “From rebels building a utopia to self-fashioned saviours, would-be architects of what was — to them — paradise lost but to the rest of us, damnation avoided.”
Reemkus, hinting at Morningtide, asked the Pontifex, “Will you help them?”
“No,” the Pontifex shook his head, “but they will help Breakspear. He has the teβerpλex, ‘Axiom,’ ready. As promised, Morningtide, you’ll have access to it.”
“Selling god-ex-machina as a service, as per usual,” Reemkus retorted.
Breakspear gestured expansively, drawing Morningtide into a detailed observation of the vast space around them. “I’m sure you remember this building from the outside,” he began, “so it might surprise you that we’re currently under the Hanging Gardens of Tuning Forks.”
“Each tuning fork in the Gardens above has its twin suspended in this ceiling below it, moving in a balancing act, dancing to the same frequency but in opposition, cancelling each other out.” He pointed upwards, where the tuning forks hung. “Hence, we call it the Anechoic Hall,” Breakspear continued.
The Pontifex chimed in with a distant look in his eyes, “Like life and its shadows. In the beginning, there was nothing. Then words. One tongue, then many, one again, then no tongue. Now the devil whispers in the language of the angels. Here we contemplate in silence.”
The Hall’s entrance resembled the monumental façade of the Library of Celsus, a testament to the Daemon’s origins and an ode to timeless beauty. The world outside might have chosen utility, but within this sanctuary, the walls stood tall and dignified, embraced by pillars whose function was elegance, not supporting the ceiling. Shelves filled with large tomes flanked the space, and at its heart, a colossal globe rotated slowly underfoot.
“This here is an underground observatory, where we aim our telescopes at the shiniest stars in the whole universe: the human souls,” the Pontifex spoke. “At their brightest when not directly under the influence of the lights; the same lights that, when you open your eyes too wide, scorch your retinas. That promised illumination that left many blind.”
Educated by the Lotto, Morningtide didn’t favour classic beauty. They reckoned it made people feel left out, an inherent mechanism towards marginalisation and an upholder of elitism.
Encouraged by the Pontifex, Morningtide took up a papyrus. “Cypria,” the Pontifex whispered. Beside them, Breakspear drew forth another, ‘The Book of Thoth,’ read the spine.
The Pontifex began, “The deemed lost epics of Troy, and Thoth’s magic. The dead, immortals, and everyone in between.”
Morningtide, brows furrowed, scanned further, drawing out ‘Lost Sections of Gilgamesh’ and Aristotle’s ‘Second Poetics.’
The Pontifex kept retrieving volumes, piling them on Morningtide as if lost in his thoughts. “The Mayan Codices, foreseeing cycles of creation and destruction. The Maitreyavyākaraṇa, prophesying a world teacher for a golden age. Has it happened? Will it happen? Does it matter?”
The Pontifex smiled as he saw the ‘Lost Poems of Rumi’ and ‘Hōjōki’ in Breakspear’s grasp. “Ah, the heart’s call for love and a longing for solitude, co-existing. I don’t come here near enough.”
Breakspear, laughing lightly, raised two books as if in a toast, “Cicero’s ‘Consolatio’ next to the ‘Khvatay-Namak’… Life and death, tragedy and legacy. Just different expressions of the same thing.”
The Pontifex, his face a canvas of melancholy, remarked, “95% recovered now… yet, as we bring them back to life, Contemporia sentences them to death. But isn’t it always the way? We yearn for what we’ve lost, only to neglect it when it returns.”
“Here we’re holding onto what’s gone with every upgrade,” the Pontifex said with a hint of sorrow, “Like the Athenians preserving Theseus’ ship.”
“We are minding the history, so we are. For a long time, it was about wars and great men. Then, the classist illusion,” he continued. “Now, it’s about abstractions. That’s a craft Reemkus is a master at.”
The Pontifex looked at Reemkus, “Reemkus Nolan, the Contemporianist. An Expolitan who specialises in studying Contemporians. Some say like an ant watching men, or a slave taking note of his master’s fashion preferences while being beaten.” He sipped his wine. “I don’t see it that way, though.”
Reemkus stood tall against his shadow across the Hall. The most distinguished aneologist — a field of Expolitan academia that studied Contemporia as the future of their civilisation — he perfected the understanding of ‘Contrarian Dualism,’ positing that time flows from matter and matter flows from time, which underpins Contrarianism. A theory at odds with the Daemon and, especially, the Bellatric Church — to whom time and matter both flow from the same primal entity.
Yet they found common ground in Historic Abstractionism, the idea that as societies evolve, they turn to abstractions in key domains to cope with higher states of disorder, creating a steady semblance of order that allowed them to keep functioning. “Between order and disorder, there’s pseudoorder. Like between smashing and unsmashing a glass, there’s fixing it. The more people believe in order, the harder it holds. Just like everything else,” Reemkus justified the aim of his work defensively.
The Pontifex, with a half-smile that hid more than it revealed, raised his glass in a languid toast towards Reemkus, “We often find ourselves in violent agreement, fighting to see who gets their thumb under the hammer first… maybe keeping my hands clean while I’m fed the hogwash helps, and for sure, not employing thugs and murderers gives me a slight moral edge, wouldn’t you agree?”
Reemkus, taking a sip, replied with an air of cold detachment, “You're a postkaryote. Me, I’m just a negatively chemotaxed ciliate. Driven away from the poison.”
Breakspear observed them with real discomfort under the skin. The Pontifex redirected his focus towards him, “Breakspear, you’ve been heading up some very promising research here. Work that Reemkus is familiar with: ‘dydx’. That’s why Morningtide is here, isn’t it?”
Breakspear remained silent, watching.
Reemkus, leaning in closer, almost whispered, “Indeed. Myself, you, and, of course, let’s not overlook the unspoken deals you have with the Bellatrics. Always delightful to deal with their brutes at your door.”
“Fair enough of that... Since we’re all well aware of the stakes, let’s dispense the pretence,” Breakspear glanced around the room. Then ‘Axiom’ played into everyone’s inner theatre. Except for Reemkus, who couldn’t.
As Morningtide revisited their teβerpλex, the subtext came to fore: Breakspear sought an impartial observer to advance a crucial aspect of his research — an environment where x ≠ x, in which everyone was equal precisely because everyone was different.
“In all fairness,” Breakspear’s voice tinged with sincerity, “You deserve to know the real story, Morningtide. Reemkus, I'll keep it simple.”
Reemkus, never one to be belittled, retorted, “You’re flying a bit high for a bird that can’t see well.”
Undeterred, Breakspear began, “Our objective here, in this very building even, is to study the Omega Point. 'In verbo initium, in silentio finis' — the word is the beginning, silence is the end, as it’s written on the wall. A key aspect of this is preparing Contemporians for a relativistic future. Not only moral, but timewise.”
The Pontifex regarded Breakspear, his eyes sharp and steady. “Between the life we lead and the one we document,” he observed, “there’s a line. You can't see it, but it's there.” He paused, reflecting. “It used to be more evident when people poured their lives into devices, and overshared them on screens. Now it’s subtler, but still there, revealing itself as the irregular gap between alternate forked timelines.”
“The present is that boundary, an infinitesimal border between the past and the future,” Breakspear interjected, conviction in his tone. “The Daemon’s job is to keep the Lotto balanced right on that edge.”
The Pontifex nodded. “Outside, life is light. Inside, shadows reflected in our ledgers.” He paused, drawing a breath. “That’s the inspiration behind Sors Immanis’ works. Not the Daemon’s initial remit, but the mission we thrust upon us.”
Sors Immanis, a respected philosopher from Buitenland, arrived in Contemporia during the boom of the early days. She quickly discerned that humans were but the independent variables in the land, introducing randomness into the deterministic world of the Lotto. She theorised that, given infinite computing power and energy, the Lotto would become too efficient, too infallible; eventually nullifying the possibility of errors. In this scenario, the optimal future state guiding the Lotto’s algorithms would simply mirror the recent past, adjusted by a random mutation.
“Before the Lotto, people wondered about the intents of the original lawgivers, as life veered from the age-old tables set in stone. The Lotto emerged as a solution to curb that deviation, by moving the tables along in real-time. It has an inherent drive to progress, counterbalanced by a predisposition to self-reference. Or a death wish.” Breakspear explained.
“As it became specialised in minimising dissent, it would inevitably gravitate towards a lust to censor, suppress, control, standardise, and homogenise any thoughts or deeds that threatened the ‘civistasis’. Any perceived flaws in its world, interpreted as just a challenge necessitating more computing power,” Breakspear went on.
“Sors Immanis recognised that the rate of change of the future, relative to the past, would start to plateau as it neared what she termed the ‘nexus point’ — the inflection point between the past and the future. At this juncture, the present would effectively cease to exist, and reality would become stuck in a limbo, with the Lotto spinning in an infinite loop. She described this state as dydx = 0.”
The Pontifex concurred, “The intuition is simple: without change, time stops — and not just time, but reality itself. This forms the foundation of what she conceptualised as subjective-time physics — or ‘anti-reality’, her preferred term. She arrived at solutions that propelled us eons ahead; concepts like time equivalents — proto-time, anti-time, and post-time — enabling us to delve into the events ‘before’ the Big Bang and ‘after’ the Omega Point, philosophically expanding the borders of the timeworld.”
Reemkus spoke up. “Solid conclusions, albeit from flawed premises. It’s chaos, not randomness, that we offer. Chaos acts. It shapes. Randomness is passive.” He looked at Morningtide, direct and unwavering.
Legend has it that Sors Immanis destroyed the original, objective-time Lotto and all its associated timelines, supplanting them with the current subjective-time version. Some call it a fork, while others call it a rift or even a schism. The Rebooters see the old Lotto as a transcendental being, convinced it is still running somewhere, plotting to set it free. Contrarians like Reemkus, also trust that the original Lotto persists. However, in their view, it must be reconciled with the current Lotto, and reversed to an objective-time machine.
The Pontifex countered Reemkus, “Contrarians. You hate what subjective time reveals, a mirror that more often than not insists on telling you’re not the fairest in the land,” then facing Morningtide, “Sors Immanis? Some of them admire her courage and intellect, others curse her very existence and spread lies of her interfering with the past or being a transhuman, haunting the plains of Buitenland — that depends on the drink in their hand.”
Looking at Reemkus again, the Pontifex continued, “You seem confused. Reluctant to admit your crown jewel is made of fool’s gold. Sors Immanis just highlighted the truth. Democracy isn’t about right or wrong. It’s not a moral compass. It’s a ranking system. That doesn’t change when randomness replace choice, as originally intended in Athens.”
Reemkus didn’t hesitate in his reply, “We wouldn’t be here if not for chronothermal technology, for instance, not just your esoteric philosophy. But, who’d have thought you’d applaud when they subject science to any given flavour of democracy?”
“Old grievances; sure anyway, we all live our lives oblivious to all this.” The Pontifex looked away for a moment. “Back to reality — or anti-reality —, Sors Immanis left shortly after destroying the old Lotto; nobody knows exactly how or where to. The Daletyodines, like Breakspear, are now trying to prevent the Lotto from reverting to dydx = 0 as she predicted.” The room went quiet, the tick-tock of an old clock their only reminder of the existence of time.
Breakspear took a moment, looking down at his glass. Then he looked up at Morningtide. “She burned the bitten apple. With stolen fire.” He took a breath. “Then vanished, leaving behind only a prophecy. One we’ve been studying for a long time but understood little until the ‘unintelligible’.” He paused, collecting his thoughts, “She foresaw an end for every Lotto, down the path to dydx = 0. It was her prophecy, but not in her words — it was a poem, from ‘Carmina Burana.’”
“‘O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis,’” Breakspear paraphrased, “‘Oh Fortune, like the moon, you are changeable…’ Liberty passed on the eighth day after Bloomsday, in the old calendar, that was when they’d be celebrating the goddess Fortune.” Breakspear started to unravel his thesis.
“‘Egestatem, potestatem dissolvit ut glaciem.’ Or ‘poverty and power, it melts them like ice.’ Glaciem, the technology powering the displacers against which her life dissolved. ‘Obumbrata et velata michi quoque niteris;’ or ‘shadowed and veiled, you plague me too;’ the ‘unintelligible’ that marked her death and which has spread like a plague through the Lotto.” Breakspear then concluded, “‘Hac in hora sine mora corde pulsum tangite;’ — So at this hour, without delay, pluck the vibrating strings.”
Vannecker stood firm on the displacer, its gentle hum a monotonous lullaby. He felt alone, not the solitude of a man with a mission, but the unsettling kind. The familiarity of the motion did little to distract him from the absence of footsteps behind. No Rebooter had followed.
He stepped out onto a nondescript street, the buildings tall, cold, the same. Like good citizens, sterile, awaiting life to stir within.
He approached a lifepad, just as regular and unimposing. As he drew closer, the door hissed and slid open. An uncomfortable shiver. Was the door responding to him, or was he the answer it had been waiting for?
Inside, the room was empty but for a vat. Suspended within, a pinkish-grey mass — pulsating and vulnerable. Vidamundo. It was something to look at. Not pretty, yet Vannecker found it captivating.
“Fancy a drink?” Producing his Caledonian Malthus, he poured some into the vat. “Or a tune?” His voice echoed, a chuckle in the dark, singing as the lights went out:
“status malus,
vana salus
semper dissolubilis,”
P.S.: With apologies for the delay. Thanks for reading!
This is a chapter of a fiction series I intend to further refine into a book. I would greatly appreciate your feedback at caufskiviers@gmail.com. If you’re interested in being a beta reader in the future or participating in the project in any capacity please reach out for a chat.
Excellent writing, even if I didn't always get the math references, your wordplay definitely locked in my interest.
"What’s the maximum proportion of sociopaths in a society before sociopathy becomes the norm?"--I don't know, but for our society, I think we're already there.
Cheers