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Save Point: Meditations of Balance and Power

Sethkill takes the introductory classes at the insistence of his trainers, but it's nothing he doesn't already know. This is basic symbolism, basic theory, and basic practice from the ritual school for a huge group of beginners who will mostly have no potential at all.

"Follow me here. The point of these rituals is not to combine silly ingredients and set them on fire, it's to twist your thoughts into the right shape. Your mind is what's doing the heavy lifting. This is just shorthand to get everything lined up correctly in advance, and that's why you have to learn all the correct symbolism first. By doing this you learn how to repeatedly and consistently produce an effect, but once you know how, you don't need the props anymore. You can simply line your mind up and do stuff."

Sethkill himself personally prefers the meditative school, sometimes mocked as being a mentalist school, which lets you perform little meditative exercises in spare moments, alternating several different types of meditation to accumulate and balance stored potential. With a stored reserve of potential reality manipulation at hand, actually executing the change is much simpler and you can mix it up more effectively, unlike the ritual school for which one must learn a whole series of new and assorted scripted exercises in mental gymnastics for each one.

This is also tricking yourself, after a fashion, but conditioning yourself to conviction and certainty that you can achieve whatever you might need to at a moments notice is preferable to convincing yourself that you can only do one thing right at a time.

Unfortunately, ritual is also easiest to learn if you have no talent, and this is the most likely to let the highest percentage of these idiots master at least one or two basic spells or cantrips that may prove useful in their everyday lives, letting them summon a little extra luck when they need it, get a bit closer and more attuned to a lover, or perhaps build a small fire if they get lost way out in the woods in the wet and freezing season. Certainly most of them are not going to achieve any sort of weaponizable potential, given the 'high genetic dependency' of inheriting suitable skills even with the last few centuries worth of tinkering the sethura have done on their own species.

Since most people incline to a particular and limited category or range of skills, ritual has higher odds of triggering a suitable existing instinct, but that's all it does. It won't really let you progress into any of the more interesting stuff that any of the other approaches support.

Being a generally civil sort of sethura, he attends, sits in the back row, listens to make sure there aren't any original details or fascinating off-topic asides, and resists the temptation to do anything particularly attention getting, like generate a number of small drifting pale white earth-lights and let them roll them up and down his arms while he meditates, or something of that sort. While the inevitable few twitchy brilliant types who are new to this desperately try to get noticed by asking contrivedly insightful questions, he reads the entire recommended text, then discretely pursues all of the external links and references out into the weave, where they obey a peculiar inverse law in which the information becomes less relevant and less accurate the further you go, ending up in references to possibly mythical ancient literary sources and uncommon superstitions.

Watching a someone combust a phoenix feather over a mortar and pestle to ignite the contents is always entertaining, and does have that certain something, but burning feathers really don't smell as pleasant as one might hope for. The extractor fans are working overtime and there's a reason why they hold intro to ritual class in one of the bigger and older chemistry lecture theaters, with a sink and some supply cabinets handy in case of unexpected physical effects.

He's also taking basic theoretical and practical chemistry, but the practical classes are oddly long and scheduled at strange late-night or early morning times because of it. The practical rooms give him a faint headache after the first several hours, impregnated as they are with lingering traces of decades worth of spilled everything despite frequent cleaning, and though he's tried to adapt to it, he probably won't be taking any further chemistry classes beyond what's required for everything else he wants to learn about. It doesn't seem to trouble anyone else at all, but he likes to think that maybe he's just slightly more sensitive to his environment than they are.

The feathers, however, are an unwelcome reminder. He'd rather be attending the basic physics, information technology and electronics engineering courses he's making a solid showing at, even if some of the more scientific purists deride them as being simplified and only extending to what you need to know to make things work. After all, that's what matters, right? Even the most elegant of theories is worthless if you can't actually use it for anything.

Education is of course free, but it is required by long standing tradition that fully half the course load be outside ones particular specialization, in an effort to create more rounded personalities in the long run that will last out what could be a very long life, barring accident. More importantly, it increases the chance that some sort of common sense will sink in over time, and that you might stumble across personally fulfilling interests outside the overly focused fervour of youth.

If you're going to be coming back again later to refresh your skills, every few decades, there's no particular hurry or immediate pressure, and if you want to take every second year off and wander around the world on the barest margin, collecting basic support or taking on temporary contacts, that's nothing particularly unusual. Everything will still be there when you get back.

Sethkills assortment of liberal and off-topic classes currently includes this very intro to ritual, the hotly contested creative anachronism course which everyone wants to take (the qualifier involves submitting a recorded feed showing yourself being awesome in 'any applicable weave game' since this is the nearest you can get to live weapons practice without actual danger to life and limb) and a couple of courses on history and literature for some of the eras he finds the most interesting, for example the very early not-so-civilizations like the Rainbow Tyranny, which started off with tools of flint and obsidian, and eventually graduated to copper and tin, but had no model for how to live or what a culture should consist of, collapsing after the discovery of how to cast bronze.

The history and literature classes are much more sparsely attended, as though the modern era is slightly embarrassed by its primitive antecedents and has decided to ignore them as inconvenient relatives you wouldn't introduce your sex-friends to. Like awkward bachelor uncles and maiden aunts, they have a vast hidden reserve of amazing but true stories from long-gone days to tell, yet lack the required social skills to express themselves concisely, unless you raise the topic first, and are then patient enough to listen through any number of meandering digressions.

~*~

Keselt is pursuing her own course of studies centered around sociology, which is unexpected, but he can't really determine why he finds it surprising. When he jokes that he's heard the purpose of the discipline is to create sociology teachers, she startles him again with a surprisingly fluent and well-thought-out refutation in which she argues that although sethropology, cultural studies and historical and archeological research are often seen as the backbone of the field, and she's taking classes in all of them now herself, sociology is not just some poor modern relation.

"It's the why of the which of the what she did," she explains enthusiastically, quoting some long past famous author that he doesn't recognize. "The best way to study a culture is to actually live in it and be a bridge between how the people there do and see things, and how you do and see them, unlike sethropology which has a sort of artificial division between the observed and the observer, leading to a sort of condescension and a framing of their behaviour entirely in terms of your own previously existing concepts. You need to get in there, feel what they feel, be part of celebrations and events and misfortunes and do all the same sort of things they do. Unfortunately, you can only do that with the modern cultures that still exist in the present day, which is why it's easy to look down on sociology as some shallow modern discipline. Way back in the day there were plenty of travellers who went native in one foreign society or another, and they were always looked down on as somehow having let their standards slip, but they had the right idea. You need to get in and do stuff, not just sit back and take notes."

Sethkill mentions the most recent Citadel Project, which is still underway and in the construction stages, but should be ready sometime within the next decade. This is the fifth launch in the series, each of which has exceeded the last in size and ambition, starting with a purpose-built structure resembling a small star-shaped bastion fort and scaling upward to something nearly the size of a den-city complex from the time of the pack-mothers. Each of these, on completion, has then been displaced out into the wide, the higher structure of the near seven-fold, to investigate various of the other timelines that pass subjectively nearby.

Much to the disappointment of many, there are no closely similar versions of their own history in which it all happened differently, or at least they're not instantiated, having collapsed back into a single sheaf where the differences weren't great enough. Instead of each timeline being a page in a book, each timeline is its own book and they're not shelved together in any orderly manner.

Still, it makes for regular and interesting news each time one of the Citadel ships uncovers a new world, or returns to base for cleaning and repair, sparking a brief frenzy to join the replacement crew for those who've decided they've had enough adventure, or the occasional unlucky sethura who's gotten themselves killed. Most of the timelines are either so different as to be uninteresting or so different as to be unacceptable, but occasionally one will be fascinating enough to justify an extended stay. It's kind of like gambling, or dating, looking for that perfect revision.

Reports come back showing magnificent alien jungles, empty places where the sky seethes and crackles with endless lightnings inside perpetual dark clouds, bright worlds that burn unshielded from their star in perpetual radiation and glory in it, and dull ones where the wind blows forever and the air is never still, carving the stones down to smoothed blankness. Civilization is very rare and so far has mostly been no-one you'd want to get to know, but caution is still warranted in case they should run into someone else with the ability to travel between.

"If they do find anything that we might want to talk with - say something that's at least nominally a mammal, has vaguely relevant genders, and doesn't think we look delicious - then they'll need a few more sethura like you, to go out and do the hard part of getting to know a new culture, which no-one has had to do around here in centuries. So there might be a place for a sociologist after all, out there on the edge. You could go live in an ancient culture instead of a modern one, while all of your backward-looking colleagues are still poring over pottery shards and carved bones. Most of them probably haven't even had it cross their minds yet. Plus, it's not like a lifetime of experience with sethura would count for much if it was a completely different but similar species."

Keselt contemplates the idea and rolls it around in her head. It's actually a really interesting idea.

"Oh don't be silly, we'd never get in," is what she says aloud. "Everyone and their bloodline would be applying. Why would they pick us?"

"Not necessarily," objects Sethkill. "You might not have noticed, but we're a little bit backward as compared to most of the general population. I blame it on our parents letting us run wild together when we were children."

Keselt smiles. He has a point. Everyone will think about it, but half of them will change their mind if it comes to such extremities as living in a tent, having no weave-connectable devices of any kind and digging their own improvised sorbance pit. The Citadel ship should provide a well-supported base camp for any expedition, supplying everything crews might need, but there'll be no specialty brewed drinks or backup coming when you're wandering across an entirely different world, and the fashion news is likely to be spectacularly out-of-date.

"We do have kind-of-relevant skill sets," she concedes. "Maybe we should practice a bit harder at some of the weave games and the creative anachronism stuff, try and get really good at it and not just pass, in case they actually do find something. We could present ourselves as a sort of up-and-coming young couple with versatile skills and lots of experience of working together, as distinct to the really hard-core survivalist crazies that always try out but get passed over, because they're not exactly how anyone would want to present sethura culture to someone else."

Sethkill thinks about it briefly.

"Nêh, you're right. It would never happen."

~*~

"Okay, to make this more fun, we're going to go all recursive. A weave simulation about the origin of the weave simulation, to help you enjoy the mind-boggling fun. This was reconstructed using a recording employing the conventional technologies of the day, but it has all the standard features you'd expect, so as long as you don't do anything disruptive, it's a shared instance. If you mess it about, you get splintered off as usual. This is the central presentation that led to the weave as it is commonly seen, rather than any number of other forms that it could have taken, some of which if misused could have had very unpleasant consequences."

~*~

Sethkill settles into the audience next to Keselt, wrapped superficially in the form of a technology journalist with way too many of the small devices that are prevalent in this era. They're infinitely thin and light, combining a multiplicity of functions and able to be what you want, a display paper screen, lenseless camera that captures incoming light and reconstructs the surroundings, comms device, or indeed anything else, but a hunger has grown for something more.

He's snappily dressed, old-school style, what the simulation estimates he would be like if he lived here and now and was this person, attending this event. Keselt is distinctly funky in comparison, wearing the same tech as a bridging pair of single-lense glasses that wrap around her muzzle, as tinted a fetching shade of purple from the outside. Here she's hip and outsider fashionable, trying to find that something new out at the edge of the scene.

The display wall behind the speaker has been swept clean with warm white and set to interactive mode so she can draw on it with a claw-tip, a deliberate gesture designed to hearken back to long gone days of white and black-boards, dried markers and chalk. The display can of course translate anything into perfectly set and crisply formatted text with an aesthetically compelling layout, but she seems to have deliberately disabled this in search of first principles.

~*~

There are several indent points marked out in a row, each with a summary:

-Problems of polysynthetic reality simulation

-Similarity of games to structured work tasks in 'process narratives' seen in dreams

-Similarity of dreams to emotional evocation effects of well designed games

-User self-embroidery of additional details and sense of significance

-Reduced rates of compression allow for complex task handling

The presentation is already in progress, so there are a few moments of polite shuffling, as they accommodate one anothers presence and get out of each others way.

~*~

"...the technology already exists to enable various forms of complete simulation, referred to as a 'polysynthetic reality simulation' because it potentially encompasses all existing senses. However, many of these solutions are intrinsically undesirable because of extensive and very wide-ranging potentials for abuse. The simplest and easiest is to infiltrate ones own body with nanotechnology, 'smart particles' that would directly input through the existing nervous system. But even setting aside the vast amounts of computational power required to create the perfect simulation, and the awkward question of supplying power to the system, one could effortlessly use this to subvert the sense of reality that we all take for granted. You could read every aspect of someones thoughts, or trap them in infinite inescapable suffering. If you tried to build in privacy by making it a crime to intervene in someone else's thought processes, then never mind the fact that someone else would immediately break those rules, you'd be making it compulsory to allow people to trap themselves in their own delusions with no prospect of help.

"Various approaches at different levels have already been tried by cutting edge cythura, and these if anything have served only to highlight the problem. Nano-assembling more extensive implants, around the nervous system and brain, solves some of the the power supply issues, and provides a stop-gap into which to place various mediating and buffering hardware, but makes the setup even harder to remove if something goes wrong. It also increases the computing demands even further because while the actual bandwidth of the input is not that great, modeling the possible response of the users mind is far harder and infringes on tricky ethical ground, because you'd be creating a partial model of your own mind and then using it as a test subject. A closed system with a limited range of possible interfaces and an expert user can be implemented with relative safety, but open unmediated connections to full sensory input are just asking for trouble. You could find your body hijacked by someone else and being walked around to do things, and not even know the output to your body isn't matching the input to your mind.

"Bearing in mind all of these possible issues, many of which have been discussed at much greater length and far more eloquently than I could manage by assorted futurists and speculators, myself and my team wish to propose a simpler, better, and far safer solution that also builds on existing research into mind-machine interfaces, but with emphasis on the mind part of the connection, not the machine. Our proposal relates specifically to an existing useful similarity, one which occurred to us late one night after I fell asleep during a gaming session with the rest of the team.

"The game was designed to suspend disbelief, make it hard for the players to tell whether or not they were still in a dream, and whether any of it was real or not. It was hauntingly beautiful and evocative, and after I was out, I watched everyone else play for a while and then I fell asleep, and I dreamed about playing the game. When I woke up, moments later, there was an interval in which I had trouble telling one from the other, and so I had to explain to everyone what happened.

"Which got us all thinking, there is a similarity here that exceeds mere chance. When you dream, your brain is performing what are essentially complicated housekeeping tasks, organization and correlation of actions and memories, the assignment of meaningfulness to what would otherwise be nothing but raw data. The dreams themselves are sometimes described as 'process narratives' because their outline is an abstract interpretation of the underlying events being handled and the way this is being done, as a small trickle of the conscious mind senses the action underneath.

"If you are able to remember your dreams very well, you may recall occasionally having found yourself, for example, performing some sort of seemingly meaningless repetitive task in response to stress or overwork. Your mind is trying to process the immediate data overload, and it doesn't have time for the broader, more grandiose and overarching conclusions you might experience in some other set of circumstances, when you awake with a feeling of revelation and understanding, after a long restful night of sleep. In my case, for example, I often find myself exploring a complex maze of buildings and corridors, like some sort of vast aged academic or institutional building full of add-ons from different eras, either looking for something or trying to find the exit. When I do, there is often a sense of travel, as though taking a ride or getting a vehicle, as if having completed the task, my mind is moving on to the next and setting up the next set of circumstances.

"The critical insight here is that there is a similarity of the content in games and computationally mediated content, to the process narratives in dreams. I grind levels, searching endlessly for some specific thing or number of things, looking for an end-point at which the big problem is resolved by generating a solution. At which point I then travel onward to the next stage of the problem.

"Likewise, there is a similarity in dreams to the design objectives of gaming, which seek to create an enthralling narrative into which the user will be drawn as deeply as possible, evoking emotion and feeling, as though what was happening were real, using any potential trick of perception and feedback to entice the player to keep participating and feel more rewarded. That numinous sense of false significance when you awaken from an 'important' dream, is the same thing you feel when you finally play to the conclusion of a story arc and unlock the ending.

"Why is any of this useful in a mind-machine interface context? Because it gives us another, much better and much safer way to do input and output with the same results. Your mind already has a signaling mechanism that will let you experience something else, happening somewhere else, that won't override your body or allow it to be misused - it's called a dream. And it can use very small amounts of data to create a very complex story very fast, complete with an intrinsic significance, emotions, an assumption of context and memory, and any feeling you can yourself imagine based on what you already know. So imagine what it could do with a little more organization.

"I'm sure many of you here will have woken up once or twice from a dream in which you literally remembered a past different to your own. Something did or didn't happen the same. Or a dream in which something, that you can't quite remember, was incredibly important and evoked all sorts of complex feelings and emotions. Or even a terrible jackal-at-your-back, where you got chased to the edge of a cliff and something awful swept down on you with tooth and claw and killed you for certain, but you woke up panting and shivering and you were fine. But it's all kind of vague, as you can't remember the exact details later, and it's impossible to explain it to a friend, in the same way that it's hard to convey the experience of a game without having played it.

"Now, imagine that we impose some basic data structures on the same thing. If you've never ever smelled the scent of crushed needles on the types of silva that grow in the far north, or seen and touched snow, you can't dream them. But by giving you that data as a memory of winter, bundled with the sights and smells and tastes of the environment, we can give you the ability to do so.

"How your brain handles that data is up to you. We're not imposing it, we're simply providing the materials, as it were. Your brain interprets all the data structures and self-elaborates on them, to embroider a whole complexity of meaning and context. There is snow there, silva trees over there and rocks of a particular geologic type behind you. If you touch any of them, there's a referencible memory of how they feel, but it's all a suggestion rather than a command - you are performing an act of self-creation as you go along, making up the world around you. You find your own relevance in what you see and do, but it's not enforced. Similarly, the interface can pick up secondary cues based on simple existing outputs from the users mind and work them in to the experience, but it's not invasive, it's responsive. If I meet a traveler on that snowy pass, and think he's suspicious and up to something, the system can use that to create a story with more depth and content, either by letting that suspicion imbue remarks and comments with more significance and context, or doing the opposite and implying beneficence despite my initial response. This also addresses the issue of how to create any complex non-player behaviour without having to model a real mind - you can have a meaningful, life-changing conversation with yourself, or swear eternal revenge against all that's evil and unjust in your own mind, once the system has learned enough.

"Because the data structures involved are far more complex and specific, you do lose some of the benefits of compression that allow deep and complex dream narratives to occur in seconds, or in minutes at most. We're still working on the exact trade-offs involved and how to do multi-player if the participants think at different speeds, but it seems workable with a basic variable detail slider that lets you feed more or less data to adjust the subjective duration. You can still get some fairly serious stuff done really quickly, or even sleep after a fashion to dream inside a a dream.

"Now I know I've talked it up, but here's the part you've all been waiting for, the demo. You've all been invited because you were kind enough to participate in one of our previous studies for the neural clip technology, which reads mind states for use as a control device to let you interact with and talk to intelligent systems. Which is all very nice, but now it's time to let the systems talk back and show you what's going on. There's a built in medical monitor, part of the my health system we worked on back before that, so it's completely safe and should anything go wrong, it will simply wake you up. You can wake yourself up, in fact, at any time - as it takes relaxation and a voluntary suspension of disbelief, to accept the input in the first place. We've tested much cruder versions of this on ourselves for many hundreds of hours, with no ill effects."

~*~

Playing along, Sethkill picks up the neural clip, which is a far clumsier and heavier version of the same thing he's already wearing back in the lecture theater, and has a moderately sized box on a lead that handles the actual processing. Keselt smirks at him, takes off the glasses and puts on her own headset, then leans back and relaxes, recursively re-entering the receptive state.

The drop-in is kind of rough, like a sudden frame-jump rather than more evolved cross-fade, and the landscape of the test environment is somehow sparse, which he understands abstractly is the result of fewer and less detailed mental cues for his mind to seize on. The wilderness in a modern version of the same, no matter how empty, would have more cues of the exact nature of the empty space, requiring oddly enough not less imagination and mental concentration, but more to supply all the requisite details. This is sort of like someone labeled the mountains with words saying 'tall mountains' the snow with the words 'cold white snow' and so forth, although it extends to all of his other senses as well, including the promised 'feeling of winter' and 'memory of journeying' to accompany 'significance of what lies beyond the pass' and other assorted intuitions.

He explores the environment a bit and finds both 'troubling blood on snow' and 'angry carrion bird' among a multiplicity of 'tall silva trees' that have been placed with limited regard for the real world factors of an ecosystem. Checking, just as a precaution, he finds 'sharp hostile sword' seems to be already present at his waist and he is wearing 'crude leather armour'.

It's simplistic, but also an achievement of sorts, like the invention of writing or the printing press. It's not really worth looking at that long, because it's not really that interesting, but he does it the honour of inclining his head toward the conceptually snowy landscape, an imaginary gesture in a simulation running inside of another simulation, worlds upon worlds forever without end.

They sometimes call her the Mother of the Weave, although the name escapes him momentarily due to the intensity of 'memory of journeying' in the same way that it's sometimes hard to recall real world facts inside a dream. The weave is its own thing, and here they're trying just a little too hard to play up the dream aspect, something that will be reserved for more special moments in a future iteration of the same, like an overused special effect. He knows he will be able to remember the exact details when he syncs out, so it's no cause for concern.

Multi-player has not yet been enabled here, so Keselt is in her own instance. She's probably doing something unexpected, like trying to hunt the black carrion bird, to see how well primitive weave constructs like this can handle novel events. He misses her, even though she's sitting right next to him in another world no distance away. At least the simplicity of the snow is peaceful.

~*~

"...and so that's what you might call the experiential aspect of things. We hope you've enjoyed our little presentation, and we're not even going to hit you up for money or good reviews, because it's clearly awesome, you can see it's awesome, and we know you're just about to struggle really hard to try and explain exactly why it is awesome to your friends, when only seeing it for themselves is going to explain it. That's why we're giving you, for free, the unit you've just tested, as well as an extremely improved version of the automated calibration software for the neural clip, so you can show them. It works with all other standard devices, and it's only going to get better."

~*~

Keselt is intently engaged in a leg-wrestling bout with one of her female associates in sociology when Sethkill walks in. He pauses to let them finish.

It's considered to be a polite convention to make like you've forgotten what you saw, should you ever have encountered a female friend, sister or classmate at athletic activities for which going completely or partially naked is the norm. In return, they'll extend the same to you, and make like it's perfectly normal if they happen to have, say, seen you getting changed in the locker room after swordspear practice. And because this is all perfectly normal and socially acceptable, it removes any later awkwardness at, say, meeting a pretty sethuress whose tight sweaty spade you've gotten a really good look at. But that doesn't mean you don't think about it later, in private.

The excuse is often aired that it's good for everyone to get the occasional look at one another, and have a rough idea of what's normal and just how widely the sethura physiology varies. It avoids a sense of mystique growing up around one anothers bodies.

Keselt is only passingly good with a swordspear, but the leg-wrestling has always been one of her enthusiasms and she frequently surpasses herself with unexpected moves. Hands held together behind her back, wrapped in two twists of a heavy red-and-black woven cord as prescribed by the original tradition (freehand is allowed in informal matches, but is considered far less technically perfect) she's stripped down in advance for ease of movement and does a little bouncing dance, to hop on first one foot then the other, limbering up.

The two of them then kneel on the mat facing each other, in a deeply submissive pose with their lower set of knees on the floor either side of tightly clenched haunches, arms behind their backs, and lean forward until the flat of their brow-ridges touch the ground. Then they both spring up to their feet abruptly, to challenge each other.

There are claims that this is a tradition that started in the halls of the den-mothers and which has picked up various elaborations through subsequent cultures. The mainly female association of the activity supports this, it being less likely to end in a painful crunch of balls, but the bowing and all the submissive display suggests something that might go on in a later era, with wives, daughters and sisters of the nobility competing for rank and prestige beneath the watchful gaze of clan-lord and court. It is, after all, an all unarmed activity in which there's nowhere to hide a weapon, which incidentally provides cheap thrills, shaming the loser and glorifying the winner.

Keselts strategy is good and she always keeps one knee up in excellent form, raised to the level of her lowest pair of nipples which is the, unofficially, desirable height. By leaning out and hopping a little she makes it hard to judge the best line of approach, and sometimes she swaps from one foot to the other, generating a possible opening to lure her opponent in whilst keeping herself fresh.

Sethkill waits politely and enjoys his view of the pair of them striving out for position. This is all a perfectly healthy and socially acceptable activity, after all, and he needs to know exactly what it is he's going to forget all about later on.

~*~

After a little toweling off...

"I found something you'll be really interested in," exclaims Keselt the next time they meet without so much as a greeting or hello. "A hidden lagniappe. Like, literally a lagniappe. It's in that recursive weave record that we were experiencing the other day."

"What were you doing digging about in that?" asks Sethkill, genuinely curious. He can't recall any obvious reason she'd be doing that, let alone finding secrets in it.

"I enjoyed being the sethuress reporter with the visor. She was a total bitch you know, but snippy and clever with it, to the point of being irresistible. The 'original sim' was ancient but the framing story is a lot more recent, and it has proper personality and dialogue prompts, if you want to turn them on. So it turns out they didn't model just the press conference, they did the entire day, or at least as much of it as they could reliably reconstruct based on the surprisingly large number of memoirs and recorded points-of-view and what have you for the whole thing. The conference was just what was inside the frame, but there's a whole bunch of other stuff that's outside the edges."

"And what, you went looking through it because you were still feeling a tinge of reporter?"

"Yes! It was fun being her. But there's a scene afterwards, in which the character you were, meets up with the character she was, and they have drinks. Here, fold in, I'll show you."

"What should I do?"

"Just play the day as it really happened and you'll see."

Back in the outer simulation, Sethkill arrives a little later in the day due to the subjective duration but it appears she's allowed for this. Her eyes, behind purple wraparounds, light up when he finds himself arrived in the middle of a scene mid-conversation, replacing the simulated personality of the original participant.

It seems that after they sat near each other at the conference, the two ran into each other again at a bar in the venue, and then took it to dinner later that evening. She was all sparklingly witty with a vicious sharpness, he was appealingly sethuranly and oblivious, and it went as such things tend to do, within the rating limits of whoever assembled the data sets.

Sethkill has instantiated near the end of the initial chat-up, so he obligingly and gamely goes with it, doing the dialogue like it was karaoke, having enormous fun because she's his best friend and it all feels suitably outrageous, like singing to your girlfriend in a club. She's having every sort of fun too, throwing in amusing gestures and expressions that won't quite derail the narrative.

They drive through a different version of the city that he isn't familiar with, manual controls of an honest-to-goodness groundcar of a sleek and sporty overpriced design, and if he wasn't practiced at this from playing other games, he's certain he'd have already crashed more than once.

Direction markers get them there though, and they sit close over a small table in dimly lit corners to finalize the conversation that's a negotiation that's the last stage of a seduction, making sure at the last second that they're both sure this should end in a bedding. Not that they'll get to see that scene, he imagines it ends at the restaurant exit or the hotel room door, but it's obvious what it is.

He's talking outright nonsense about how interesting the new weave technology is, and amazing, and how it's a whole new thing the like of which no-one has ever seen, but his mind isn't really on it because, well, a stunningly hot compellingly bitchy sethuress, really amazing tits once she gets a little loose and unfastens her top, dark nipples sort of puffy and hinting at more while keeping it strictly suitable for a public audience, something mastered as a part of her job. When he drops his hand to the table, intending to pause for a moment before picking up his shot glass of something wicked in its old-fashionedness, she abruptly puts her own palm over his and pins it to the table, an uncannily intimate gesture in the way she intrudes on his personal space, carefully touching at the hardened backings of his hand and feeling for the shape of his grasp.

"Oh, you poor stupid fucking moron," she smiles beatifically, apparently without any malice at all and indeed with genuine love in her voice. "Don't you see? They've reinvented the oldest thing in the book. It's like those stupid unrollable comms screens which look like some ancient parchment scroll, with a spinning rod on either side and a handgrip. They've reinvented the vision quest, like some ancient shaman, only now the prompts are provided to you so you don't have to learn them. And of course you don't need to starve yourself into exhaustion or take drugs, which I think takes all the fun right out of it. All the vision quest with none of the mystical enlightenment."

Sethkills next prompt reads (confused silence) which he thinks is about right.

"Oh don't worry, I'm not against the idea. I'm going to write a brilliant review of it in fact, after we leave the hotel room and you help me bundle up all of the sheets we've stained. But I can think of another reason why the companies will back this, which is because it takes yet another potential source of wild-card magic off the table. Why would anyone go looking for real pain or exhaustion or starvation, real drugs and sex and violence, when they can have them at no risk or cost inside their own head and invite friends? If the system forces you to bail when you can't take it anymore, that's an automatic cutout. No-one will take it far enough to actually change themselves."

"Surely that would be a good thing?"

"Come with me. I won't demand anything you don't want to give. No strings attached. It'll be the fuck of your life. But I want you to remember one word for me."

"What?"

"Transgressionism. That's going to be a thing. Trust me on this."

She grasps his captured hand and leads him firmly out of the restaurant, clearly a sethuress who knows what she wants. Appreciative male eyes follow her, and envy him, on their way out of the bar. As they walk through the door, as Sethkill predicted, the weave unravels suddenly and there are no more prompts.

How authentic to the real any of that was is anybody's guess, especially since they were basically playing the characters to a script, but Keselt once again anticipates him. "I checked. That scene is genuine, although it only appears briefly in one single memoir. It's not an artifact or something as simple as a cracked copy. The memoir doesn't even go all the way to the end of the conversation; that was extrapolated from mouth movements based on a security camera in the bar. That's why it ends where it does."

"It's not exactly hidden though. I mean, it's an official course construct. Anyone can view it just by playing through to the end."

"I don't know exactly what it means either. But it's definitely a secret of sorts."