Sophie Strange and Bob Rife in the style of Abstract Expressionism, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 17: I believe you can survive

  Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  While she waited for a summons to the Tower, Sophie tried to spatially and temporally localize her other visions in the Chamber of Memories. There were many visions to go through, but restricting the localizations to Erd reduced the energy expenditure substantially.

  All the visions were from Erd. The geographical distribution seemed random, but temporally the visions were spread out without any apparent overlap. Most likely, none of the people whose memories she relived would have been able to meet one another, although there were a few cases where a temporal overlap might have been possible unless the person died early. Sophie tended towards the interpretation that these people had in fact died young: it seemed to her that the visions were like pearls on a temporal string, each vision distinct and separate from the others.

  Perhaps she just wanted to see it in that way, she thought. If these visions could be understood as a string of lifetimes – if the visions were her memories after all, some essence of selfhood expressing itself across a range of Erd lives, death followed by new life – then her friends who had sacrificed themselves for her, the friends she might perhaps have rescued if she had not panicked, were not really dead. That was the implication. Sophie had never believed in reincarnation before, but she had also never wanted to believe in reincarnation. Now, maybe, she wanted to believe.

  It could be argued that she wanted it so much that she had made herself believe something she would otherwise have rejected. She was in a state where it was easy to lose one’s footing, where one might be tempted to escape a harsh reality by welcoming delusion. Or maybe she had for many years been ignoring the evidence before her eyes because it did not fit with her belief system, and now the loss of her friends had given her the strength to challenge that belief system.

  Why was it somehow important to her that there should be no reincarnation? There was a sense of defeat in it – accepting that maybe reincarnation is possible was like a concession, like surrendering something she had held to be right and true throughout her life. And it was embarrassing. If she told people that she had started believing in reincarnation, they would pity her and worry about her. People would think she had gone soft in the head, probably because of the trauma she had experienced. Her dead explorer friends would have ridiculed her.

  Sophie found herself wanting to investigate each of the people in her visions more closely. Who were they and what did they do with their lives? Maybe she could identify some trends or similarities, maybe she would recognize something. Maybe she would remember something.

  It was possible to do this with Divination magic, at least to some extent, but the obvious and energy-preserving way was to gain access to the Erd sim. Then she could just browse through its history, identify each person in her visions and study their lives in as much detail as she wanted. Everything, including their surface thoughts, would be accessible to her at zero energy cost. But how to gain access to Erd?

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

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  Bob watched the developments in Erd with rising concern. Fascism was on the rise, the most troubling development involving an openly authoritarian candidate being elected president of one of the most powerful Erd nations. It felt like something horrendous was about to happen.

  And still there was no trace of outside interference. Bob held meetings with the Erd workers where they tried to understand how this could be an organic development – something driven by factors internal to Erd – but they never got very far. It seemed inconceivable that rational people would support a fascist regime just some decades after they had been embroiled in a major conflagration caused by the previous major outbreak of fascist politics. No one had a good explanation for it.

  If you wanted to make the case, you would probably have to start from the position that these people are just sims and cannot be expected to act very intelligently. True, they appeared to be conscious beings with a potential for rationality, but much of this is probably some sort of anthropomorphic projection on our part. We have created a simulation space based on ourselves, and so the sims give the impression of possessing consciousness, but that does not mean that they actually do possess consciousness. Does not the fact that we cannot simulate magic imply that we also cannot simulate consciousness? A dominant strain of Confluence philosophy had always held that magic and consciousness are inextricably connected, basing this position on the fact that consciousness, unlike everything else, cannot be detected with magic. You cannot use Divination magics to establish whether a person is conscious or to identify the contents of this consciousness – if that is even a meaningful thing to look for – and, somewhat paradoxically, this opaqueness to magical inquiry has been taken as evidence that the two are connected.

  Bob would usually prefer to establish a connection between two matters on something other than their apparent incongruence, but he was no philosopher. He supposed he had to agree that the argument had a certain elegance, though. In any case, a different argument held that it is effectively a delusion of grandeur on our part to expect that our mere creations should constitute conscious beings. Simulation theorists often believed that when you increased the overall complexity of a given simulation beyond a certain threshold, the sims inhabiting this simulation world would, through some poorly understood mechanism, gain consciousness. This point was hotly debated, however. There was no readily available explanation for why consciousness should emerge from complexity although, on an empirical level, life in limited-scale simulation spaces never seemed to reach the same level as it did in full-scale simulations such as Erd.

  Of course, if the Erd sims were not truly conscious, not much could be expected from them in terms of real intelligence, and the fact that they let themselves be manipulated into supporting fascist leaders might seem unsurprising. Like most simulations people, however, Bob resisted that conclusion – perhaps just because he had invested so much time and energy in Erd that he found it hard to accept that the Erd sims were, at the end of the day, not really people at all. He wanted them to be real people, perhaps needed to believe that they were conscious beings. And being unable to shake that belief, he needed some other explanation for their self-defeating behavior. Bob wanted it to be outside interference.

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  Unbeknownst to either Sophie or Bob, their summons to the Tower arrived at exactly the same time, while neglecting to mention that other people had also been invited. Bob wondered if the work he was expected to do for Special Circumstances would get in the way of the work he was doing with Erd. Erd being at such a precarious point in its development, he was already putting in too many hours, and trying to do even more would obviously exhaust him. So, he appointed his most senior supervisor as his deputy while he, as he explained, tried to help the government prepare for the release of the Erd author’s new Confluence book.

  Bob Rife watching the Erd sim in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.