Charlotte Ritter in the style of Ju Chao, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
Chapter 19: Think for yourself
Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension
Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)
After the meeting with the SC board, the team of newly created secret agents talked among themselves. They decided they would hold a meeting in the headquarters every morning. Other than that, the first practical step was that Charlotte, Watson, and Bob needed to learn the basics of dimensional magic, while Sophie would try to understand Soth’s full-body version – she had an idea of how to move forward with this but said nothing to the others just yet. No one had any particularly good ideas for what to do with Soth or with anything else, and since it was anyway getting late they decided to mull things over on their own and see if anything comes up. Everybody wanted to keep living in their own homes until some other solution was absolutely necessary.
Sophie’s secret idea was to spend time with Soth’s magic in the Chamber of Insight. She conveyed back home, then immediately lay down on her sofa and cast a life force projection. In the second Citadel chamber, she allowed herself to sink into her thoughts on full-body dimensional magic, abandoning her usual project of moving towards the door at the opposite wall. She recalled the long-standing conundrum in magical theory relating to dimensional magic and conveyance: apparently, the magical spaces accessible to Divination and the physical space accessible to STEM magics were fundamentally separate, to the point where the dominant theory about magical dimensions was meaningless when applied to physical space, and vice versa. Combining the two, either in theory or in practice, never worked.
Despite this theoretical disjunction, some people – probably best described as philosophers of magic – had always insisted that magical and physical spaces should be understood as two different expressions of the same underlying meta-space. However, no one had ever seen any trace of this underlying space. Critics argued that these philosophers, or what you want to call them, insisted on the unity of magical and physical space simply because they wanted such a thing to exist, probably because it would be more elegant. The critics – basically a different school of the philosophy of magic – saw the focus on elegance as being anthropocentric, or in other words as a belief that the universe organizes itself on a basis of human esthetics.
That was the disagreement, and it had basically stood still for decades. But Soth’s magic combined conveyance, which was a type of STEM magic, and dimensional magic, which belonged to the field of Divination. Sophie visualized the old bugger working on the problem for century after century, finally getting to some sort of unified theory – well, maybe not theory, but at least making it work in practice. He had found a way to combine these two fields of magic. Like some sort of magical genius, he had managed something that frustrated a veritable horde of Confluence theorists.
Maybe that was overgenerous: Soth had worked on the problem for several millennia, while Confluence theorists had only had a few decades. However you would assess it, Sophie knew that when Soth’s magic was released to Confluence specialists, it would mark a major shift in magic theory. She wondered if they would credit him and if he deserved, despite it all, to be credited for his invention.
Unfortunately, Sophie was no conveyance specialist – like most people, she knew enough to get around, but she was not capable of understanding fancy applications of conveyance magic. She also did not have any such specialist to talk to. Bob was an old Conjurer, but while conjuration and conveyance were now subfields of STEM magic, there was no relation between the two in the pre-Revolution Confluence. And the people studying Soth’s magic at the Expedition headquarters were all dimensional magic specialists. As far as Sophie knew, none of the SC board members had any particular conveyance capability either, although she supposed they might be willing to connect her with someone.
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Charlotte spent her evening thinking and rereading the chapters from the Erd author. For some reason she could not grasp, everything seemed to converge on Erd. She tried to get a picture of who was involved. On the one hand, there was Soth and his alien allies trying to sabotage Erd – they are probably the people behind the shadows sucking the magic out of the Erd dimension. Then there was the High Renegade – or could it be someone else? – informing the Erd author. By exposing Soth, whoever is feeding material to the Erd author is probably working against Soth and his allies – unless they are just pretending to. What if it’s someone else, maybe someone hostile to the Confluence? Nobody seems to be worrying over this, but if it is actually Soth or the aliens feeding the Erd author, then they have a way to circumvent Confluence security altogether. This would make them formidable opponents.
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The reason nobody is worrying about this is probably that, if it’s not the High Renegade, the Confluence is outmatched from the start. It would be rather pointless to try to do anything, and the info on Soth would most likely be false or misleading. On the other hand, if Charlotte and the group is able to use the info from the Erd book to make a move on Soth – especially if they are able to deal with him in a decisive way – then whoever is feeding the Erd author is probably friendly. Then again, it could be the aliens betraying their erstwhile ally in order to gain something else.
So far, the most likely interpretation is that these are two sides opposed to each other. Then there are the two parties communicating in the interludes – who could it be? According to the chapter on Soth, he has been estranged from the two other Elders, so maybe they are involved here. But the other party? Maybe we can learn more about them as the dialogue progresses – maybe there will even be entire chapters devoted to them, as with the chapter on Soth. Does that mean the best way forward is just to lean back and let the story unfold on its own?
One thing, at any rate, had not escaped her. She had spent years studying altering magic without ever having had anything very useful to apply it to. The thing about altering was that it manipulated other people’s magics – using it on your own magics might save you some energy but was otherwise pointless – and Charlotte never needed to manipulate someone else’s magic. But now she was pursuing a murderer who was basically hiding inside a magic bubble. Was there anything she could do to alter the bubble?
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If he had thought being turned into an agent of Special Circumstances would make him forget Erd’s troubles – well, that didn’t happen. As far as Bob could see, the Erd simulation was the locus of everything that was going on, and the recrudescence of fascist politics in Erd was, somehow, its innermost core. Soth and his alien friends were sucking the magic out of the Erd dimension and – through mechanisms far beyond Bob’s grasp – were thereby strengthening the fascist revival. As he had secretly hoped, the recrudescence was, in part, a result of outside interference.
In part. Back when his hope for some trace of outside interference was more abstract or conceptual, back when it was entirely lacking in specificity, his picture of the situation was dualistic, painted entirely in black and white. He wanted to blame everything on outside interference and nothing on the Erd sims, fearing that the opposite was the case. Ironically, perhaps, getting actual evidence of interference muddied the picture. There was interference, but the Erd sims were also being immature in the face of challenges. The interference pushed them in the wrong direction, but did not make their choices for them.
Well, that was how he thought about the matter now. In the era of the previous major fascist surge, the Erd sims had also been acting immaturely and against their better knowledge. It had seemed inconceivable to Bob that they would fall into the same trap once again, after such a short time, but Erd sims usually did not live even a century. The previous fascist era probably seemed like ancient history to them, and they did not see themselves as repeating its mistakes.
But they should. They were being willfully blind and willfully stupid. Bob could not make himself see the Erd sims as something other than conscious beings, but that also deprived him of the best excuse for their stupidity. Despite having no access to magic, the Erd sims had accomplished so many great things – how could they also be so stupid?
Bob wanted to stop Soth but had no idea how to accomplish that. He wanted to travel to the Erd dimension and burn all the vampire shadows with a great burst of light – maybe he could bring the SC hoard and set up a bright sun in the sky, flooding the place with light. But some of the shadows would hide indoors or underground, waiting for his energy to run out.
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It felt strange to Watson to think that because of his skill in loop magic, he was in some ways a more powerful magician than the five millennia old Soth – at least in terms of being able to nest through the traces of Soth’s magics and erasing the traces of his own. He tried to imagine other ways to exploit this advantage.
A direct attack on Soth would obviously have to contend with his many defense layers. Would it be possible to loop a cancellation flow through those layers? That seemed more elegant than the High Renegade and Elder Renegade’s brute force attack on Ambrose and would probably require less energy. If he collaborated with Charlotte, she would run the cancellation flow and he would loop through layer after layer – but they might need the whole SC hoard of energy to power the thing, and in the end they would just be able to face Soth on equal terms. Also, Soth would obviously become aware that they were tearing down his defenses and would respond by cancelling their cancellation attempt. Any form of direct attack seemed doomed to fail because Soth had such an advantage in terms of defenses and personal skill.
Another possibility might be to attack Soth’s pocket dimension. In theory, if they canceled Soth’s dimension flow, his pocket would collapse and leave him stranded in Thesaurus. On the other hand, Soth had probably added various fail-safes that would kick in as the pocket collapsed, most obviously a contingency flow that reacts by sending him somewhere else. Then they have achieved nothing while losing their main advantage.
Some sort of indirect approach seemed wiser. Maybe spying on him could be an option? Or waiting for him to engage with the Erd dimension and then – what? An ambush might be possible but would bring the same difficulties as other direct attacks. Soth has defenses and is powerful – even a surprise attack powered by a great energy hoard would most likely fail.
Ignoring Soth and dealing with the vampire ghosts in the Erd dimension would be another option, but walking through all the buildings to blast shadows with light seemed impractical. Perhaps it could be possible to trace a connection back to Soth’s alien helpers, but attacking an alien civilization was a bit overambitious. Watson went to bed seeing no obvious path forward.
Watson Doyle in the style of Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.
