《[-03] EMPTY HEART EXPANSE》 00
One day, I dreamt of something perfect. Other than myself, I mean, ehe. It had the same sort of light though, the kind of bright luminance chocolate has when it melts in your mouth and takes away all of your worries. It was so much vaster than I was. Brilliance? Grace? All of humanity in their city. I was at peace. It wasn''t my peace. In that dream, I reached out with my hands, clasped at the perfect thing. I tarnished it. Perfection doesn''t meet with perfection, it turns out. I toppled over, after that. I''d reached too far, my hands were covered with black ash, clothes stained with ambrosia from the white rain. White water. Black ash. I lay atop the debris. I looked at it. It was a thousand thousand ruined parchments. I read them without viewing them. They were really human constructs. They weren''t, because I couldn''t see any flaws in them, but you could call them the embodiment of human ingenuity, human talent. (For a second, the thought of all that was inhuman and all that was denied human crept into me, but then I remembered that I didn''t actually care about things like that, and I was in my peace again.) My friends who are actually good at biology or trivia tell me you lose language processing in dreams. Well, not me, because I''m a prophetess, and not here! If I had left them intact, I would have been able to replicate them. One set of texts had not only perfect songs with a resonant and positive effect on their listeners but perfect notation for them, and mountains and mountains of description of the theory and the methods through which it was created, with proofs drawn from the one consistent and complete maths linked to the unitary science, with methods of argument from a rhetoric that reaches out to all of its victims not only en masse but individually, immediately working out how they work things out and moulding itself specifically to them as well as mastering those general techniques of persuasion. This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. I can''t even say that last thing consists of a talent different than my own! Did I see something better than me? That can''t be. I''m perfect. Whatever. What was tarnished was tarnished, whatever it was, some fantasy set of skills that abnegates the need for hard work, humanity''s armada against its conscious enemies. Some pages were missing, others were stained with ink, others were burned with some idiot child of light''s mental magnifying glass. I began to pick up fragments, but what was not stained with white water was tainted by hands full of black ash. I traced the rips, vicious, ursine, obscene with my dainty little index finger, the one that had caused it. Ah, every tear I had made had killed an art. Or just art in general, unified art. There was no longer a way to describe the gashes. I woke up. Screamed through the princess curtains. Found I hadn''t made a sound. Everything was silent, and the night was black. I stumbled about. My television was still on. A military teletext channel, teletext like it wasn''t 2067! The dumb default set by my father. Its blue glow reverberated through the room. There was nothing else really there, not even me or all the things I owned and commanded. I threw my pillow across the room, a notable distance. I stomped over to my bathroom and looked at my face, flushed, nipped at by the vaguest spots of acne, the dye that kept my hair blonde instead of nearing brunette running its course, like that wasn''t the least of my concerns, I hadn''t tied it up at all so it was really my fault but it was so fucked. A prophetess is allowed to look crazy, does it mean she should? A prophetess bears maddening dreams and their consequences. Does it mean she wants to? I considered going down to the kitchen for chocolate. Some expensive brand wrapped in sweet goldenrod, a real pick-me-up, but all my friends would be cuter than me if I put on too much weight, and I''d have to brush my teeth again. Couldn''t be bothered. So, I threw myself back down, didn''t text any of my friends. Won''t have them worry about silly little me. I did a little dream interpretation. White water. Like the hotel? Black ash. Sounds like her name. Brackash, Carmen. Her parents renamed when they got married or whatever. I hate her so. I''m in Indianapolis, she''s in the Second City, we''ve got the entire Atlantic Ocean, all of Europe and then the Persian Gulf separating us. Just kidding. Since she reflects every unnerving psychic phenomenon, every time I get a dream like this it''s like she''s in my head again. Ah. I rubbed my face into my pillow. Closed my eyes. I can''t waste time until the next morning, I have class tomorrow! It wasn''t easy, but I went back to sleep, dreamlessly. 01 hannah Hi im gonna be streaming I''m at school?? but. but but but Shouldn''t you be in school too Is it a British holiday yes its IDOLLASTER release day What''s that havent you checked the group chat weve been talking about it for weeks I mean yes but there''s 34 of you And You''re all active somehow anyone would be active for you! Ok Well anyway answer the question Didn''t get much sleep, so I was in early. Hair had been washed, brushed. Dyeing can wait. (Dying can wait, forever.) I went to a private school which didn''t have a bus. Other people usually drove me places, but my parents were in Dnaburg or Dvinsk and they hadn''t hired a chalet. August had burned like the sun, so by some new law we were punished with a cold September. Half-asleep I had decided that cherry pink or gold or goldenrod or dull silver or platinum didn''t fit. Neither did black or navy blue, which I think are more domineering and striking colours, but they didn''t suit my fancy. ...what, you think black on top of biege is fine? In a true winter, yes, in this deep winter, no! Biege on biege is practically incest right now, maybe marron or chestnut with a waistcoat but my oak brown waistcoat is in New York, raincoats too heavy, fur coats too gaudy. Sure, you can come up with so many passable combinations, but do they past the test right now? Stop caring? Then I''d fall from the top. It was cold. There was no poetry to that, or even prose. It was just cold. My thermal socks could only go up so far until they''re not puffy enough to work, and of course since I had no coat I had no gloves or scarf. ...a scarf probably could have worked with this outfit? Ah, shut up. I kept walking, reached into my pocket again with my numb fingers. are you familiar with idol culture (I wasn''t.) *taps you* Whatever ill keep going. ok well youve gotta know about namco bandai (I didn''t.) biiig gaming company from before zkt (What was ZKT... ȫƽy? What''s...) they make things other than pacman you know (...the game Lyn programs over and over and over to test out the firmware she makes? Did she not come up with it herself?) one of those things was an idol-management simulator called youre never going to guess this one idolmaster (I never could have guessed that one.) well The Idolm@ster. you know how important symbols and styles are! unsurprisingly idolmaster is a management game where you''re a producer for an idol company trying to gain as many fans as possible within a given timeframe So like Thirty minutes real time? ... fictional! time-frame (Why did you add a dash.) How long is it in fiction it depends but in the older games it was seasonal! anyway you get to interact with and play minigames with your idols to level up their stats while getting cute little visual novel story interactions What''s a visual novel. Can''t you see any sort of novel i know youre sheltered but come on google it Fine (Later, I''m minimising my hand movements until they get less numb. I''ll just pretend to know what she''s talking about until then.) anyway the us went you live there you know what i mean Sure (Maybe? That''s one way to put it?) bandai namco got surrendered in the emergency measures and since then the ips been kinda dead and you know we live in a more enlightened, more Open age. we understand the travails and tortures idols go through more intimately now, we''re less apathetic to what happens on behind the stage well im not an esper so maybe i shouldnt talk I''m not one of those weirdos who gets feedback from watching videos (I was.) huh info Info? yeah you just gave me some Oh What''s idollaster That has an L i was getting there! a few years ago a few groups decided to make a spiritual successor 34k from the idol fanbase. theyre all weirdos but whatever (This all seemed pretty weird to me...) lunatic cornerstone from the management sim enthusiasts Is that different from the idolmaster fanbase yes theyre into management sims in general like games where you have to give a bunch of orders and keep a bunch of stats balanced within a time limit Fictional time right i mean real time as well Video games are confusing Time is time Time is time. I could walk the path to school automatically. It wasn''t even being lost in my own thoughts at this point, I was just there in one instant, gone in another. Doing so wasn''t as dignified as I would have liked it to be. It was so mundane, dry, dreary in a normal autumn - how do you think it''ll make me feel in this winter? I''d rather be driven. Only I wouldn''t, because I could hardly sit through those interrogations that come from my parents through our servants, always ending on the same fucking topic. Sure, it''s fine that you''re passing, but why don''t you care about the laws that define the world? The laws that redefine it? The new secrets, politics, history, future. Please forgive me for not sticking my hands in the dirt to find out what''s wrong with the fucking soil. See, I thought about Brackash a lot because her parents and mine are friends, in so far as either of them can feel friendship. (I came to my school''s reception while thinking about this, and scrape-scraped my boots on the entry mat like it doesn''t wear them out, like the things I own weren''t better than damage.) I had to deal with her about once a month. More times in bad times, less when I was lucky. Personality-wise, Carmen was the child my parents wish they had. She was inquisitive, obsessive when it came to tracking events, a dazed girl in an observatory. I''d like to say she wasn''t a prophetess, but she was, a little bit. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. Conversely, luckily, I was the child Doctor and Doctor Brackash wish they had: easy-going, a social butterfly, perfectly and utterly normal. Hannah Westmoreland was special and not at all noteworthy, and didn''t everyone love her for it? Even if my smiles and my confidence grated against you, my light and my charm redeemed me, didn''t it? It redeemed you just as much, so both of us were and will be happy. Maybe it sounded like I was ranting to myself as I turned through empty corridor after empty corridor, looking for homeroom, looking out the window at the student athletes training in the morning for what''s left of the sports scholarships. Every little edge helps. I was above ranting, though? Everything I had said connected perfectly. It always has, and always will. Oh well you''re not gonna like IDOLLASTER then Why not Don''t worry I''ll still watch you when I get time lc were famous for making difficulty mods that stretched your attention span and reflexes to their absolute limit there was a rumour that bamako and isfahan''s intelligence services contacted them for their esp programme because some people entered altered states while playing Is that why you''re playing it im playing it for the challenge! do you think i''m like lav or elly? that i dream of entering heaven bodily like dante? becoming another oppenheimer? those two are fucking crazy im just cammy. the stupid neet little sister who plays video games all day Don''t sell yourself short! (I think that''s how she does the enthusiasm...?) well im short and i dont have a lot to sell apart from my time and my skill im just in it for the fun and a pittance of cash but mum wont kick me out yet (Did you know British people actually say mum? I didn''t figure it out until I was seven. This is a really dumb aside but I genuinely did not believe it at first--) And your loving audience (I get nicer as I get warmer, and I''m walking through heated corridors.) ehe heh! anyway IDOLLASTER is meant to be for a less hardcore audience so it needs something which offsets all its difficulty thats time travel Time travel didn''t remind me in the slightest of Carmen, so it was fine with me, even if I didn''t get it. I entered homeroom. Our homeroom teacher, the bastard, hasn''t arrived yet. The analogue clock ticked away on the wall. It was one minute to seven. I liked it when analogue clocks are near hours, because I had never been very good at reading them. It was seven. Class began at eight. Tick. Tick. Tick. And our time was never time for Carmen, who could read a fat German philosophy book in mere seconds and learn not a single thing about ''being-there.'' Personality-wise? Like she had a personality, like looking through her eyes wasn''t wrongness. The curses I saw in full form when I dreamed or my light was brought in the world, that everyone in this forsaken land, on this forsaken planet could always see in part, that divined, guided, twisted their lives to their non-intentions. I slumped over the desk that was assigned to me. Maybe my head went hazy for a second. But then I saw it when I closed my eyes, through my annoyance, disgust. (Rage, fear, revulsion may be more accurate, but aren''t those improper, unlady-like things to feel?) If she doesn''t perceive time like us, tick-tick, what does she feel? In terms for us humans, a bunch of points in similar locations all at once, able to shift through them like they''re nothing, looking down on you for being a rank 7 esper but still so bounded to ''fickle'' constructs. I had just lied. How could she look down on you? There''s no down in that strange land where arrows go fiveways. Or the other one that steals your parks and their organs and the organs of their organisms, reorders them according to its sorting algorithm, and sells half of it to the third-sphere. I opened my eyes, rubbed them. I wasn''t crazy for not being interested in that, sorry! Even if I was bound to it, if that was my natural talent. I checked my phone. *taps you* Obviously the technology doesn''t exist to do that in real life so it''s easy to keep track of yes it does ask tammy! Really? lmfao I sent a sticker of a crying bear holding a broken heart. Camilla ''reacted'' with laughter. theres no character death but theres character burnout it takes place in a comfortable sequestered world Is that why you like it thats why you should watch me play it sequestered doesnt mean everythings great! and its not like the old IDOLM@STER''s plots were all sweetness but IDOLLASTERs gameplay loop is about seeing how long you can keep going through adversity your idols WILL pickup incurable maluses over time and on your first few dozen playthroughs you WILL eventually enter a state where you fail every show you enter Do your idols quit no thats character death But they''re still alive? thats functionally character death. you dont die and you dont get eliminated in IDOLLASTER. every idol will march forward under the starry sky, even if it''s like theyre possessed, even if they cant take it anymore! So determined of them well its not an easy game so im going to need your LIGHT cheering me on to finish it! I''ll watch it during a lunch break if I get time or Indianapolis group does youve gotta recommend me to them, these are women with lives I''m a woman with a life I wasn''t. I took my school laptop from under my desk. Didn''t even open it up. What were we doing last week? Who knows? Who cares. I went back on my phone, went to one of the time-waster social media apps. That''s a dumb name for them, isn''t it? You can waste time just as easily on a chronological or social organising app, if you really know what you''re doing, if you really get focused. Just as I was about to ask myself ''what''s the cat doing...'' a thousand times, the door opened. A student dressed as a generic office lady. Brunette with cropped straight hair, crimson lipstick, okay eyeliner. The clattering of high heels with little knowledge of how to walk with poise. I didn''t recognise the brand, didn''t think it was worth seeing too far through the new girl to find out. She was monochrome, which suited our deep winter, but does she know how to do it? The dainty chessboard-checkering of her jacket irritated the eyes, and her white undershirt gave the outfit a more cheery feel than fit the day. She walked over to the teacher''s chair, sat down, put a rucksack on his desk. "Oh, are you Hannah Westmoreland," the girl said. "I am indeed," I replied. "What''s your name?" "You can call me Miss Owens. I''ll be replacing Mr Pratt from now on." You''ve got to be fucking kidding. "What happened to him?" "Fired. Skill issue." ...skill issue? "What do you mean by that?" I''ve never heard anyone say that in my life. "East and Midwestern are incredibly unsatisfied with the quality of their research output compared to the Far West, London, Kinshasa, the Second City and other places, so the Commissioner for Indianapolis and the Cities of Indiana is working on a number of experimental pedagogical reforms, and has decided your school is a good place to start. As a Second City graduate looking for a job, I guess it''s down to me to implement them." "I suppose Mr Pratt would be unable to?" I said, and I meant ''you''re from the Second City? God save your soul.'' At least that explains why she''s so young. "It''s likely. By the Commissioner''s honour, he was transferred to Beech Grove, if you''re worried about him." I wasn''t. "What do these pedagogical reforms consist of?" "Do you know about the Second City''s four paths." Unfortunately. "Yes. Auctoritas, Veritas, Humanitas, Litteras. Would you like to bring them here?" "No, that''s plagiarism, but the ethos behind them is the union of a number of different conventional, pre-Raid sciences into a single discipline with a compelling idea behind them." Which is stupid because they''re chosen arbitrarily. "They''re chosen arbitrarily." "Exactly." Owens, you''ve lost me. "The Commissioner wants to create a rigorous course that will both inculcate the ability to carry out a number of mundane but professional tasks without erring in the slightest, make discoveries relating those mundane fields to the cutting edge of preternatural research and name and define these relations. As in the Second City, this process is both artistic and scientific and includes humanities and STEM students equally. You were sent to New Stokes High to lead the world, were you not?" "I was," and to study with an extracurricular passion that these reforms have made curricular. "You''re more talented than most, Hannah. I believe you''ll excel." "Why, thank you," and then I asked Camilla when she was beginning the stream. hannah pay attention!! it comes out today (my time) so i cant do an early morning stream!!! Really? Really. 02 Tamara, my perfect victim, would be subjected to every little anxiety I had as time ticked up to eight. Well, if you had found someone who was really absolutely dependable, wouldn''t you depend on them absolutely? Fill them with your light, eat away at their time bit by bit as you worried that some incorrect colour had entered your monochrome school world. Yes, monochrome, black ash and white water and doctrine and inculcation but no inoculation, it was sterile, an empty stage without a cast or a chorus. I just went there, I was just popular. Things just happened. But Hannah, Hannah Hannah. Half your clique, your beloved besties were drawn from New Stokes High, half your clique was from your old middle school in New York. That left three people, the dropouts Tamara and Camilla, who were really different but united by some perverse law of symmetry, the same one that made everyone nickname them Tammy and Cammy, and the pole star Giovanna. That girl was a breed of her own, a different kind of light source and completely immune to my magic. Yet she followed the rest of us, because...... What was I saying? Oh. "Are your friends monochrome? Do they not matter to you? Are they not even pieces on a chessboard to move around?" For one, I didn''t know how to play chess. I know how to set up the board and all the pieces move because Tamara and Eliana were going through chess and shogi variants in the group chat, so I saw all the charts and memorised them. I didn''t exactly know what you''re supposed to do in chess or shogi. Or go. I''ve played checkers. So, maybe I could move them up and down and left and right and in Ls and skips and jumps, but I couldn''t make a grand plan to win the game. What kind of idiot manipulation is that? But I was sidestepping the point, wasn''t I. School life or school existence was a dark room with a little light in it. (I was the little light, of course.) My dear friends had colour. But, a dark room was very never colourless. Night vision was conferred to humanity by the rods in your eyes. The cones, which could detect colour, were inhibited in darkness. That was a cool fact, wasn''t it? I couldn''t remember it for the life of me in middle school until I had begged Tamara to help me revise for a biology test. She had spelled it out for me. "You''re a genius with some talent beyond talent and you didn''t know this." And shamefully I had said "Tammy, I don''t." "How." "I don''t really do anything in class." "Aren''t you normal. Don''t you talk to your friends." (Tamara barely attended class even then, and my united group chat didn''t exist until I met Camilla on a holiday to London a few weeks before I moved to Indianapolis, so she didn''t know them. She knew them intimately now. You will see this.) "I''m perfectly, angelically normal! But I don''t. It''s weird, isn''t it? At break, I can talk to them a little, organise trips and outings and dates and beachside holidays together. But I feel a little limited, a little denied. A little empty. Outside of school hours, I can talk to them normally for hours straight. Inside lessons I don''t focus or unfocus. I''m just there, sitting to attention!" "That''s..." "Perfectly, angelically normal," I had said. "Weird, even amongst the majority of the student population who can barely tolerate schools." "I''m not weird," I said, and I psychically pouted. Well, I didn''t do anything psychic intentionally back then, I pouted and Tamara just knew, since Tamara picks up everything and since phones are psychic power. Still, I tolerated the indignity, since Tamara would bear everything for me. As she did now. Return to the present and monochrome (for now) day, in the cold of the deep and early winter, back to an empty stage where things just happened to me or to others, where I was the main character but the projector never seemed to be playing and so I would never be embroiled in gossip, crushes, spats, rivalries and failed classes, which sat uneasily with me but I hadn''t minded until someone Relevant had begun to meddle, so I began to whinge at Tamara with: Hi Good evening You live in wyoming it''s earlier in the morning for you I haven''t slept You should sleep. Is that an order No I need you. And I did. What for Ah, many things I know. Sorry Don''t apologise, it''s unbefitting of you Unbefitting Tell me what''s wrong Someone has filled my empty world You fell in love? Who''s the boy I can tell you''re trying to put me at ease because you''re not even calling me gay for once. If you need me to continue teasing you as usual then that''s fine The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. But no I''m not in love I''m in hate East and Midwestern are conducting an ''experiment'' on my school And others but isn''t mine the important one Do you want the cute answer or the honest answer Honest no lol Tammy... She was about to say something completely uncalled for and mean, and I just asked for it. Well, Tammy was my greatest helpmeet, and I was always right, so Tammy would be right if she was mean, so I''d be receiving correct advice. ...that is what that word means, right? Since world initialisation and the garotting of American prestige by the Condor Raid, American private schools have essentially been a resource liability While private schools in Britain were the vehicles through which it revived Protestant charity and ''Puritan austerity'', those remaining in Europe were flattened into German-sponsored gymnasiums or French-sponsored lycea and those in West Africa house religious staff fleeing a disillusioned world or are funded by Russian-backers in a resurrection of old Soviet policies of international education, private schools in North America have remained as they are prior to esp They provide a comfortable, well-funded, extracurricular-focused life to a vanishingly small minority of pupils who are either part of the new or rejuvenated ruling class of the many new megacities or will vanish with the old ruling class in the dead and dying exurbs And what good is having a comfortable life in a world with cold and without comfort And what good is having extracurricular after extracurricular in a world where the leisure activities have all been distorted, and the curriculum is totally insufficient to deal with it So the important changes need to be made to the neglected public and charter school, where so much potential skill has been left abandoned under the ice, or worse, rotting with the corpses and now has to be fished out See, it was mean! You just knew she was thinking something mean when all the dead and resurrection metaphors came out, our little Lazarus. Lazara? What happened to the ones in South America and Asia and Oceania and the rest of Africa (When she said something mean but so very true, I had to deflect, reflect.) West Asia and North Africa are generally testing grounds for Second City pedagogy but otherwise nothing as much. As far as I know and I don''t know everything You do I know everything and you know more than me Shut up Also Second City pedagogy what''s that They replaced my teacher with some like twenty year old from the Second City 20yo Second City Burying the lede much??? What does that mean Like a newspaper I haven''t read a newspaper since I was eight. You and Lucy have less boring analyses :) ... I did read online news sites, and Tamara knew this, but she also knew that I wouldn''t count it since the internet isn''t made out of paper. In any case, I had actually never heard this phrase before. I mean that was the critical part, wasn''t it Probably They''re not normal, there''s something wrong with them I know Of course you know You and your Carmen She''s not mine Unfortunately the critical part is I belong to the mundane world, mostly I can be there for you I can be there for the rest of the Indianapolis group I can tell you the history of the Second City But only you can describe their wrongness, I can''t predict this shit You''re our prophetess I am So suffer a little, and then describe it for me I''ll help you cope, and you can protect everyone from their strange colours Okay Thank you for being here C''est rien (She always does this, knowing I don''t know French.) It''s everything. To describe what was wrong to Tamara, something must have happened. Even at a monochrome school, things happened, I could describe them. Even if never to me, even if I could only act elsewhere. But nothing had happened yet, so I couldn''t describe anything. So time ticked up to eight thirty. The people in homeroom who knew my power but not me filed in. The main cast filed in, four out of fifteen of the people I met and loved in Indianapolis. They spoke, a little, but they knew what I was like during lessons and were content to leave me be. I had explained the situation to someone, they explained it to someone else, and there were titterings and Owens introduced and introduced themselves. But then lessons began, and so Owens began to teach in her style, and the empty world filled with her favourite colour, a sweet melting goldenrod. 03 Please trust me. Please trust me. Please trust me. Please trust me. Please trust me. The prattering of goldenrod or the dry droning of silver. She didn''t even speak with her own voice. It disgusted me, and yet, I listened on. Not like I had much of a choice. You hair''s long enough to fit wireless earphones under? Of course I knew that, I''d done it before! But (and here I checked, because little tests of sheer magnitude don''t incur any cost or notice) a rank 2 esper is still an esper. Someone with the Second City''s power is still powerful, even if they lack any kind of grace. An esper will still die if you put a bullet through their brain. I was histrionic? No, what did you mean. I totally hadn''t figured that one out. But, imagine. Thirteen years of an ordinary school life where there was nothing at all for you to care about during those hours. Desperately clawing against the walls of little box-reality to find people to make it worth it, to share your light with. You have to, or the sun will burn through your empty heart. I got used to it, so used to it, and then it just up and up disappeared with, like, the flip of a coin? It couldn''t even be taken away in a nice way! It had to be through someone suspicious'' meddling, some kind of dark magical, mystical force that anyone with any light could tell was anathematic to world happiness. Forgive me for thinking I''d be shot next. It''s ESP, it''s prophecy, you just know these things. And she kept talking. I mean, of course she did. She was a teacher. I checked the clock. It was some small amount of minutes past eight. Not very many. Wouldn''t make sense for her to stop so soon, would it? Please trust me. She said it without saying that, but I knew, so so much better. A rank 2 could shoot a rank 7 dead, but so could anyone. When it came to thoughts, feelings, intentions, concepts, my intuition would beat hers ninety nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety time times out of a hundred thousand. See. Or listen, or don''t, I''m not telling you to. She mentioned that she was a Veritas student at this point. That''s, like, the maths course. I have never really liked maths. Who even does. If you were to pigeonhole me into one of the Second City''s four boxes, I''d end up in Litteras, wordsmithing, only smithing isn''t right. Is it. It''s too mundane, too dirty. Fashioning would be apt, or calling hearts and souls. The denizens of the Second City say they can do that, no they can''t. I could. I will always be able to. See, light will always shatter dark magic. Listen. I didn''t need to, not to her words. The only ultramodern maths I would let myself be taught was the famous and beloved chance calculation, one in ten to the open bracket x minus y closed bracket, where x was the rank of the stronger esper and y was the rank of the weaker esper. In the most miniature psychic (psychic, not psychokinetic, you''re in Miss Westmoreland''s class and I''ll never deceive you, I''ll make the difference very clear in a second) spat between two espers, that was the chance the weaker esper had to prevail. Unfortunately for us less weak espers, even a minor psychic war could consist of millions of little clashes and contradictions, turning the tables, equalising the board. See, see why if I was so paranoid I didn''t go crazy, fight my little war, run paint cleanser all over her silver and gold. She was twenty, twenty one, right? Certainly looked the part. Sure, I didn''t know how she''d teach (and also I wasn''t paying attention), but I did know she was trained to teach, and trained to deal with psychic power in excess of her rank, whereas I hid from all training, ran from all standardisation or codification. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. In other words I''d lose. The darkness bred witches and witch-hunters. I''d lose every curse, blessing, prophecy, mystery, spark of light. I''d be impaled with something else. Hey! At least I''d be well-educated, ehe. Please trust me, she said. I could never, I didn''t whisper back.
It was like a house renovation. It moved quickly with little resistance. She could have had her colours and palette without her psychic power. Her psychic power? A misnomer, really. The psychic power of the Second City''s initialisation system remained the Second City''s, a loan or the smattering of a witch''s kiss on your neck. My head was clear in a classroom for the first time ever. There were no words for that, nor would there ever been. I could psychically transmit many things, but not that weird phenomenon or the empty expanse it had ruled me during. That part was some warped miracle, not her personality. I hadn''t been listening to her words for minutes, and now I was, little by little. What wasn''t any strange power was that she was liked. A radiator did little in the deep winter, so it made cheeriness and admiration so much more apparent in my head. Although maybe everyone was likeable compared to the fucking geezer. I didn''t even want to bother with that one. East and Midwest could have dropped him in the Atlantic or Lake Chicago for all I cared. If the Second City gave you psychic powers, then show us, the class asked. I hoped one of the four said "actually Hannah''s showed us enough out of class as-is" but that probably didn''t happen, let''s be real. So some Luke stood up, flipped a coin. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads. And in my head the flash of a silver pen-knife severed the Linnean hydra, over and over again. Was it psychokinetic or just purely psychic? Did she twist matter or the world? I watched the coin in midair. It turned out coins fell pretty quickly. I watched the light. I was always watching the light, except when I had my eyes closed or was stuck in a dark closet or something. That''s how vision works, after all. Standard vision. So what could I see spinning around or spinning the coin? He flipped it again. Heads. It fell too quickly. He flipped it again. Owens said, shout when you want a tails. Cee (one of our holy quintet) said ''make it spin in the air.'' Thanks, traitor? Why''d you pay attention to her. (Absolute loyalty had typically not worked in classrooms, but that didn''t really matter because they were monochrome.) It did. (Or maybe it only didn''t work on monochrome classrooms.) After all, it spinning in the air let me look at the coin for longer. And I was so, so curious, absolutely craving to know. Probability or physics or both. I caught the coin. Huh. Huh????? Probability or physics, Hannah? A house demolition or a renovation, Hannah? Anything can happen to anyone, Hannah. Amelia Owens does not control fate. Nobody can, you idiot, so-called, half-baked prophetess. Not without your brilliant glow. That coin flip was just a petty rank 2 trick of the wind, and that''s what caught your interest? Hannah was so bored for so long. (I wasn''t bored, I was disinterested?! Or stuck in a psychokinetic war between my feelings and boredom.) Apathy doesn''t look cool on anyone. I was more talented than most people. I could rise higher than most people. I was the main character, wasn''t I. I looked at the coin. A British penny? Who was Luke. Wasn''t his life so interesting. Didn''t you want to peer into it, guide it to its highest point, or its lowest point. My light had a certain peak. Resonating at its peak, it gave people a certain purpose, one that I didn''t usually follow. I just wanted to live my daily life. I could live my daily life at the highest point, couldn''t I. I (like any other student) could find something brilliant in daily life, something that made living really worth it and proved myself in this forsaken world. I could make others find it, with force or command or manipulation or simple sweet guidance. Ehe. I stumbled forward. Wait wasn''t I sitting at my desk a moment ago wait why was I standing 04 At the end of the day, I returned to homeroom. I played with Owens'' graphing calculator. It was from Texas Instruments, a company that went over to East and Midwest and not Anaheim or CDMX. Tammy had hold me that the Commissioner at the time had leapt for joy when the exclusive contracts were concluded. Why? It wasn''t for her to understand, it was for me to understand, she had said. She was a receptacle, and I was her prophetess. Some secrets belonged to the world community of espers. Except that''s not really true, I had replied. After world initialisation, hadn''t the curse (Tammy immediately replied it was a blessing) of psychic power bled, bled bled bled, inkstained and stolen every single facet of human life? If you could name it could be sensed or extrasensed and therefore psychically manipulated. What else did she mean whenever she said ''phones are psychic power?'' That didn''t counter her point, she had replied. But it did, if you were involved with something you had the right to Know. Of course I thought that, she replied, and stared forward blankly. You''re a rank 7. This world is your birthright. And for the rest of us? Owens had said something along those lines when I had came in. "It''s the girl who owns the world," more blank than she had been in the morning. Which was strange to me, since the school glowed with her goldenrod, her sparks of silver. Well, those of others, probably. As I said, the power of the Second City is shared, even if they say it''s ''yours to keep.'' "What do you mean," I''d replied. "You know what I mean. And furthermore, I gave you the power to realise it." "I actually don''t?" "Take a seat." (I did, at that point, dragging a chair at the front that belonged to nobody I knew beside her desk.) "You think of yourself as, maybe you don''t say better than others, but brighter than others. More luminant, more deserving. Worse, you absolutely can back that up!" "I think that''s better." "Shut up. You''re the one with the talent. And you use it, consciously or otherwise, to make yourself live an easy life, a life that''s easy because nothing happens in it. Maybe the monochrome of darkness-" "The what," I said, knowing exactly what she meant- "is some affliction of your ability, completely unrelated to your conscious or subconscious desires, I don''t know, you''re pretty easy to read but I don''t have the raw power to interpret, but anyway in your personal time it''s not like you do anything with your ability, you just play about with your friends, shopping fine dining whatever. You have zero social responsibility." "What a disgusting phrase," I replied. If I had been read there was no point in keeping up pretenses, was there? "What''s so disgusting about it," Owens replied. And I decided that if she couldn''t figure out why I thought that after having read my mind so casually, after making me participate in her little class demonstrations automatically, she didn''t deserve an answer. So I took her graphing calculator off her desk and began fiddling around with it, and she just continued to wait for my answer. ''Oh, but you came to her room.'' Shut it she invited me. I know she did because I share my light little by little I don''t correct or purify every damned little deviation seamlessly, like whispering, better than whispering. The only perfection there is is my own as it exists, damn it. Damn you. Damn you! She took it well, took it lightly. Of course she did, set out the little damned prop for some unknown but very definite purpose. People who believe in social responsibility don''t believe in fooling around, wasting time, burning resources, letting things be. They''re always caring, desiring, avaricious, invested, dictate a certain result to you, a single goal that everyone in ''human society'' must whittle away at their time to achieve. And they''re really good at it too, turning little moments of play into lessons. Nothing was ever without purpose. (This, of course, was why my parents just couldn''t abide their dearest and only daughter making sure she passed and only passed. Her light couldn''t be a taste of heaven. Hannah had to become worldly. Damn you.) I added numbers over and over again. I subtracted them from themselves until they hit zero. I typed in random equations and the calculator solved them. I typed in random equations and it plotted them. Started a statistical table but couldn''t be assed to finish. Went into the distributions option and pressed random numbers to get bar graphs and bell curves. What was going on there? If you can''t tell, I definitely wasn''t paying attention in that class, ehe. Went to the physical constants section and only then did Owens turn around and say, "you of all people should probably be careful there." This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. "It''s just a calculator. There''s no meaning to it." "It''s not just a graphing calculator. It once was a living person, with real dreams and real aspirations. Then I caught the bastard and transmogrified him with scientific witchery!" "What?" "I''m just joking. It''s a calculator. But I believe the world is meaningful, if not fated. Every little moment," and I have to interrupt, trite phrase, "you spend doing something has a little purpose, some more than others. It''ll inspire you later or help you cool off from a hard day. I think that mindset makes the world so much less dark, and shouldn''t we carry that forward in the way we interact with others?" "I don''t care for the dictatorship of meaning. It''s possible to do whatever with others without any consequence as long as you don''t hurt them, as long as everyone enjoys it." That was the ethos of my light, after all, even if the likes of Tamara found definite purpose in it. "Ah. So Hannah''s heart is cold and empty." "Judgy. So you''re so damn caring and warm-hearted? I haven''t stopped the world or anything. I haven''t deprived anyone of anything! My power creates a place of unity and respite." "Unyielding-" "Well, what have you created? Nothing, I''m damn sure." She read me. Ah, so it wasn''t that I was too prissy and polite to swear at a so-called fucking teacher. I was heaven and I''d damn my enemies to hell. Evangelical background- I flicked my wrist. Ameli- Owens snapped back to her reality. I remained in mine. (Didn''t everyone. Did everyone?) "Well, read me back?" "Do you people do that so casually in the Second City?" "Only during arguments." "Damn disgraceful. You''re so far beneath me." "I won''t even deny that." "Well, I don''t even know what you''re fucking playing at? So stop meddling-" "Other people are still here, you know. Maybe it didn''t matter if anyone but your little friends heard you before, but it does now." "What do you mean." "Isn''t it damn disgraceful to see someone so much better than me stagnate and call it heaven." "I''m not stagnating, I''m just not rising." "So-called heavens. That''s what I gave you the power to realise, you know? Your heaven. I''ve graduated from the Second City, I''m a teacher, isn''t psychic development what I''m supposed to do?" "The power to realise my heaven," I repeated, monotone. (Monochrome. White, which contained every colour in heaven and earth and hell.) "I like answers to rhetorical questions." "I like answers to my actual questions." "Then put a question mark after them?" "It''s not like you can see that?" "Well, if you can, it''s working better than I expected." If I could what? See question marks in the way people speak? Isn''t that a silly thing to do. Owens was obviously using a metaphor. You don''t say question marks, you raise your voice a little higher when you want to ask a question. And then the sea of texts I foresaw in the earliest morning fell upon my head, the little descriptions of projects, obsessions, contributions, things with purpose, not of play, and I drowned for a second in air, my breath not working properly, entirely well. I rasped, gasped, hand slid up to my neck. Owens rose, patted my back but nothing was caught in my throat was it why would I work and then the humanity''s beloved cherished texts came from my mouth choking like sludge oil angels'' tears ambrosia perfect imperfect disgraced with the malfunctioning of the human body and then, then there was none and I was standing again why was I standing no not possessed by her possessed by everything and then I fell down to my knees and tried to scream. Nothing came out. Owens knelt down. I looked up vacantly at her monitor, at the ghost, palimpset of some erased and rewritten token reply. "What. What''s working better than expected." "You already divided the world into people who were relevant to you and people who aren''t-" "People who are Relevant to me and people who aren''t." "That''s what I just said- oh, okay. So when your power went obviously a little haywire, I amplified that importance. Encouraged you, it, you to draw in more and more people into your world, and moreover, make more things matter to you, things happen to you inside and outside of class, so you''d have to do things, make changes, face and repair adversity. I''m not even saying that you have to be a good person or anything, but at least do things other than keeping yourself safe. Wouldn''t want to end up killing yourself from the emptiness. I nearly did." "Did you now." "Yeah. Probably shouldn''t be venting about it to one of my students." "Shouldn''t be fucking around with your students'' worlds, either." "All teachers do that, whether they like it or not. And, while I''m not saying you have to be a good person, I want to do good, even if it hurts. Help my darling best friend with his games company, save you from her stagnation, Carmen from her desp-" "Oh fuck Carmen why would you want to save fucking Carmen." "I hate Carmen fucking Aletheialand, don''t get me wrong-" "Oh. You have a Carmen as well." "...oh? Do you know Brackash or Cauchy." "I thought there was only one Carmen." "Do you not know." "Know what." "I guess I didn''t read that far, if I missed that you knew a Carmen." "Know what." "There''s multiple of them. The SEER dictates the circumstances of their births, the infliction of their power unto them, every four years. Aletheialand, Brackash, Ferret, their parents abandoned their old last names after marriage, Cauchy, Dedekind, Erdosh, I think their parents were shipped together by the SEER? And we, well, the Second City Council just decided to name them after mathematicians after that." "Oh." And I told myself, I couldn''t give in, my friends still need me, my light, that I could keep everyone safe from tampering, that I could create a pointless elysium detached but not cut away from the world, that I wouldn''t be given to meddling, the weird things I saw, that urge to perfect things with my life or the desires of others for me to do something important. And I was too tempted by the strange meddling or the sleep or maybe the shock of my fate, hate- I fainted. 05 What separates a deep winter from a real winter? The length of day? Of course not. Look at the sky on a winter September, April, June, July. You''ll be able to see it then, the pall of darkness, its strange expanse. Suddenly the sun is painted on the sky (although not to the same extent, not with the same style or impressionism as Starfall 2046, the third and final rank 13 event, if the world of ESP is foreign or unnatural to you then keep this difference in mind) and follows a strange, unreal pattern. "Unreal is imprecise," Tamara said the year we met, 2062, which had also been the only year without one in the past seven years. "It''s not like you''d get anything other than real numbers on meteorological equipment." "Aren''t all numbers real." "No. The square roots of minus 1 aren''t real, I think." "But they exist otherwise you wouldn''t be talking about them," my little twelve year old self had replied, and honestly I had been completely correct. Still was. "Yeah, but they''re not called real, are they." "That''s stupid. They should change it then." "Too late," Tammy replied, already sullen at thirteen. Wait, you say. "If you met online, how could you tell?" I''m a psychic, of course I can tell. I made myself familiar to her, and she was rendered familiar to me in my minds'' eye, a possession of my heart. Amelia Owens, can you hear me? Did you spirit me back to my bed or whatever? Time is time, space is space, that''s unholy, but whatever. How could my heart be empty if all of my friends were in it? How could the world be cold, so cold if the warmth of humanity always burnt like a furnace, kept burning as long as you ate and continued to breathe oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, synthesised all of the chemicals you needed to live normally? Happily? On a day to day basis. Through the trickery, cruel machinery of the deep winter. I raised the strength to get out of my bed, groggy, fully asleep, eyes not seeing but still seeing, the body moving with the order, the feeling of rightness and the knowledge of the real world that it needed to have with function. (But I can''t be in two places at once. Time is time, space is space. I can''t end up like Carmen. I was the main character, so was she, and she used her powers to reach out desperately to people she simply wasn''t person-like or sufficiently human enough to ever be able to understand or help, so she tampered with them for her own goals or amusement. She was part of that sick lot who believed so harshly in bettering others, the other faction that my parents and Amelia and maybe everyone else but my cute little friends belonged to, grouped together in history, pointless history even if their contingent goals were so disparate, anathematic, my enemies, Catharists who would never be able to see any Heaven on Earth-) I came up to my window, past my princess curtains, past my actual curtains. (And for my second I saw someone with auburn hair that blazed like another sun on my windowsill, but then I saw them in an old European city, with bright pretty hair and a sky that was grey and not tinged purple and towers and medieval architecture and then as physical as anything else the masoned minarets of tradition and ritual, etched-in in every age, as easy on the minds, as brilliant an architecture as any real. And then I blinked and the city faded into dust.) You could tell a deep winter was a fake winter because right now it was raining, ehe. No, I''m kidding, like it had rained in the winters I had when I was a kid. The real ones, on the years without the deep winter phenomenon, although that phenomenon was older than I was. It had started with the Bylight incident, the second of the trinity of rank 13s. The fictitious (they didn''t know that allegedly but come on, you could tell. Oh, you couldn''t? I''m sorry for being rank 7 I really didn''t mean to be so good-) Latvian and Latgalian Army had demanded the reversal of the liberal language policy Latvia (along with Estonia, Lithuania) had negotiated with the defeated and West-looking Russia. It sought this through low level terrorism, the bombing of Russian-language schools, Orthodox churches, the cutting off of tongues "like the yama did to liars." A distant cultural reference. Maybe the first sign that such a drastic nationalist campaign was possible but not real. That was hard to believe for those of us in the age of cities and broken nations, but Tamara had obsessed over the mundane histories to figure out the preternatural prophecies and explained the history of nationalism in the Baltics day after day for FUCKING WEEKS, I could never forget it. The next sign was the number keeping. Bank balances from the Latvian numbers, but sometimes errors in recording would make them show up complex? So many euros plus i euros. "I have a trillion imaginary euros," I had said. "Well, you probably do. Esper." It wasn''t dear prophetess. Tamara wasn''t rank 0 (well, she wasn''t an esper, so she wasn''t a rank 0 candidate, they''re the only ones you can guess the rank of before you awaken them), but she could imbibe in my light and retain her hostility. I''d usually hate that quality, but it''s Tamara, it''s admirable. Anyway, like the temperature records in a deep winter, or the rainfall records in a deep winter, or the snowfall or the path of the sun or the stars in the sky or the changes of the foliage or the wildlife, strange things crawled through the patterns. If you were to tilt your head at one of the bank balances, or inspect one of their checks, you''d see deeply impossible things. Deep, ehe. Of course it went deep, do you know how far rank 13 is beyond anything human? Rank 7 was our barrier. No amount of lust for Europe could get any Russian government to okay a fascist militia slaughtering Russians, let''s be real. A strange phenomenon had happened during the Condor Raid. ... A strange phenomenon involving nuclear weaponry had happened during the Condor Raid. During one of its aspects siege of New York, where the city clambered above the nation and earnt its right to continue to exist unlike so many other things, a low-yield nuclear weapon was detonated against it. The American army had been pretty desperate, hadn''t it? So was East and Midwest''s, huh! Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. Unexpectedly, it had killed the damn bird immediately. But its corpse lay there and continued to move, unaffected by our laws. It declared its own, the Edict of Ultrablue. Brighton Beach remained under its spell. A strange phenomenon began to work against the Latvian and Latgalian Army. Russian intelligence became absolutely convinced of the support of the Latvian government for the terrorists. Actually, they had absolutely convincing evidence. More than that, the evidence illustrated that the terrorists were absolutely possessed by a strange animosity. It was infinitely behind, infinitely beyond human conflicts. Maybe it was hatred of humanity. Maybe this was just the form it took when it took this orientation in our dimension. All you had to do that was look at the patterns and past them, and enter mentally, physically, they''re the same thing (time is time, space is space) into the world of the anomalies, of ESP. In any case, the FGPU had seen what happened to America. Wouldn''t Europe side with them against a Latvian government which revoked humanity for a temporary edge? After all the political concessions, the economic concessions, the treaties that ensured an imperialist Russia could never exist again... A warm August. (Did you know that''s from the same root word as authority, auctoritas, augere? Oh, sorry, Carmen, nobody fucking cares...) It''s sweet. This sweetness was probably ensured by climate change, but did that matter? We have free energy now, even if we have unfree reality, and wasn''t it better than the cascade of rain on my windowsill, flowing with strange and sickening patterns, with a bitter chill beyond emptying the world of energy? Don''t get used to it. Russian nuclear command felt so just. And more than that, they could see the accursed city. It was Latvia''s second city, Daugavpils. Only it wasn''t, really. Daugavpils belonged to humanity. The city they saw in their dreams after conferring with the FGPU, the Duma, the rest of the GRU, did not. It was beyond flaws, beyond life or death or the home of necromancers. Scientific witches, even? Hate, since that''s what they called that strange side of the thing that possessed (or spoilers, one of the components of the things that made) the Latvian and Latgalian Army, lied there. So it was ''hostile'', or ''lacked good intentions.'' Europe knew anomalies were consciousness from the strange events that had rebounded from the Condor Raid. That city could not be allowed to exist. It would be fine. Nuclear tests done between 2040 and 2043, the year of our story, let''s not get so lazy about time (is time and space is space) shielded humanity from the radiation spread by nuclear weapons. Oh, tests? I meant the strange patterns on the reading that only Russian nuclear command could see, keep up. Or don''t. Astrakhov and his allies were awake. The rest of the Russian military were asleep. Only force of arms could wake them. Only psychic power could save the president, who was read and had lines inserted into him, whose commands cleared the way for the limited strike, the first against an inhabited target since Nagasaki. Not a word got out of Russia until his speech, a speech that scorched the world like the speech of President ?, number fifty-three. (Mom, Dad, why do you think I don''t want to get anywhere near politics? I''m the most important person in my world. I care about the Relevant, and now I see I''m really capitalising it, not the Important, although I feel an urge, vague gravitational attraction? Did Owens graft that on to me. Agh! Sloppy. Disgusting.) The European army wasn''t watching, no, not in the slightest. So they didn''t notice when two hundred thousand people disappeared. Disappeared? Yes. Look through the radioactive dust. That''s not a mirage. It''s very real, even to unawakened eyes, even to the eyes of the many rank 0s who walk around this warped world seemingly untouched but actually not able to fight back. Pull back the curtain of dust. There it is! The second city the Russian generals saw or prophesied in their dreams! The perfect one, but not humanity''s perfection. A wondrous city without life or death but with necromancers, revealed to the whole world at once! The Duma pulled a rotting copy of the Collected Works of Stalin from the garbage, purged the military. Ehe, Ehehehe. What good would that do at this point? The shock of the blast gave pattern searchers across Europe, even in China, India, Australia and Toronto a revelation, a weapon, one that prevented the bastards from suckering themselves in so, so deeply. There was no need. The devil esquire crawled from Lake Baikal. It perched for six hours and sixty-six minutes (indivisible) and began to talk. The shock of the blast gave psychic power a weapon. The fictitious Latvian and Latgalian Army lost its secret command, sure, but the anomalies cutting through their world then figured out how to come up with as many armies as they needed trials. So Eurasia went to war up until the sky over Bethlehem dripped paint in 2046. Up until? Once the devil began to talk, his cruel worlds turned into storm clouds or enchanting snowfalls. That caused the warm August to fade. That was the deep winter, cruelty or the nuclear bomb! (And only one other had been fired since, because I wasn''t Tamara, I didn''t study these things I reminisced and saw weird sights in my dreams. That was the Democratic People Republic of Korea''s siren song before reunification. It, of course, was immediately consumed by the Edict.) Ah. Fuah. Were my eyes really open. I touched the window, jerked back from the frost. Don''t worry. Since I was full of light, I was full of warmth~. I wouldn''t succumb to the cruelty or meddling of others. I could weather the weather. I would weather the weather for everyone. I would beat History and Importance, even if their fragments surfaced. I would pass high school. I wouldn''t drop out, I wouldn''t try exceptionally hard. I would brighten others days. I wouldn''t outshine them. I wouldn''t blot out the world anymore than I had to maintain my private Heaven of thirty-four or so people. Maybe thirty-seven. It seemed like a good idea. I''d break past my instincts. I''d break past Owens'' instincts. A draught crept in. Still, I felt determined. That was Monday. Tuesday would pass. I was so very sleepy, still. Well, I had fainted in class, of course I would be. Tamara was the only person I had told about Amelia, but the holy quintet would mention it in the group chat, so everything would be okay. Maybe I should make sure it was okay. I was so very sleepy, but I could reach out and reorder things in my dreams. I was an esper, a prophetess, a healer. I had to make sure everyone was health! Had enough magic to go through their lives. That Amelia hadn''t done anything more untowards to ensure that I would have to Act. But, but. I crawled back into bed. Changed out of my stiffer outside clothes into a nightie. Went to sleep.
Humanity''s perfect musician or the perfect musician of human annihilation? A self-proclaimed stray or guard dog. A listless boy looking for another system of magic. His girlfriend, who tires of her dutiless sisters, who is willing to burn her everything for love. A full girl who loves psychic power, can record it, can''t feel it, is willing to do anything for it. A girl who doesn''t care about her. Her oldest sisters. Their younger sisters. The researchers all around them, who will ensure humanity and its reality spans galaxies, survives eternity. Other sets of sisters? Someone, something like all that. So many things like that. Nobody controls fate. Everyone chooses their own fate, after all. A rank 7 can blot that out. Your light can blot that out. It has to, or you''ll be. ARC ONE START
Hannah Westmoreland RANK 7 [Heartfelt Fancy] HP: 20/20. MP: 1815/1815.
ARC ONE DVINSK 1912 / DAUGAVPILS 2042 They could understand thought before this, and where power could be found. But isn''t it funny that they didn''t understand biology or taxonomy? It''s hard to remember, especially when you''re so selfish, keeping track only of what''s relevant to you and your dearest. It took Bylight for it to understand it. That was a strange little set of vignettes, wasn''t it? Do you think she gets it? Do you? On one hand, she''s beginning to see everything as text. Isn''t the dream of a rank 7 to be able to read and rewrite the world? In this world (and it''s not the only one, dear reader), someone with sufficient power, light, or colour can choose the fate of another. Anyone who looks in the right way at another, has enough skill or fire to back their wishes at a top can give choices, or decide given choices. They don''t even have to be an esper. They just have to be at the top. It''s pretty cool, right? Like a choose-your-own-adventure game or a quest! Oh, I don''t think Hannah knows what those are, ahaha. She''s kind of sad, really, but so am I. (I''m a better person than her, so it''s totally fine.) Her thoughts came at you quickly, didn''t they? She didn''t tell you much about our world until history became Relevant to cruel winter, nothing about her monochrome day to day life. Reader, what if you were playing at home? What if you were the one taking the choices? Surely you''d be thrown off? Feeling defeated, "I don''t understand the controls, what''s the FUCKING point of playing this. I''m not invested, it doesn''t matter, it''s ir-Relevant." She''s chosen a silly little war, hasn''t she? In my dorm, me and my roommate play the classic game of Free Will against Determinism. My dear roommate, who has nothing and wants everything, plays Determinism''s side for some godforsaken reason. Or a god-ordained reason? She has a little bit of a god complex. All this world has been in part awarded to me, rightly or wrongly, it''s just how this world works, but she thinks it''s all hers? She''s actually worse than Hannah, it''s awful. And I have to stay with her for the next four years. (They split partners at the end of the Baccalaureate; you have to choose to keep them, but again in this world you can never really be sure who''s making the choices, and once two people are tied so thoroughly is cutting the knot so easy? My roommate''s such a pest. Should I take the K-system to Abu Dhabi for some mosquito coils?) There are certain advantages to the game of Free Will against Determinism. Most importantly, it tells you your nature or the nature of humanity and human civilisation, how far you should go, how long you should be willing to suffer, and how to spend your life. A lot of psychic wars are like that, the one Hannah and that teacher (and the people behind her) are having included, right? They''re wars between concepts, wars about how to think, but the war I''ve chosen is the substrate of all that. Hypothetically, if there was a world without psychic power, without the grafting of concept and perception to physical laws, and most importantly without the strange rules dominating choice, then you could say "we''ll live life as if we were perfectly free, carry out judgments and execution as if we were perfectly free, there''s no point in actually worrying about it." You could confidently say "I experience free will so it exists" or "God determines mankind''s actions perfectly and serenely at the beginning and we carry it out to the end" or "God gave mankind free will, He wants to see you deviate, judge you as worthy or unworthy" or "assuming free will is as silly as assuming God exists" and then laugh and go, does it matter? I''ll carry on. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. Carmen can''t carry on, you know? I just can''t. And neither should you, because there is no world without psychic power. "Actually I can''t ensure that my friends have perfect and undying obedience to my cause using my brain waves?" Then you definitely don''t get it, and even Hannah gets this bit without my flat''s secret knowledge so you should probably be worried! Tamara, 04. "Phones are psychic power." The ability to communicate instantly, to share snippets and recordings of reality is so trivial it doesn''t need to be considered or begin to prove my point. What about the ability to access information from anywhere, books, journal articles, reports, statistics, such that anyone can begin to develop any skill without trekking physically to a master, even if there are very few autodidacts who can do it all on their own, most are idiots. I don''t think that''s convincing either. What about all the labour you command? Suppose you can afford six horses...? No? That''s just the modern economy, that''s capitalism, that the neoclassical school presents all of the modern economy as merely a gestalt of fleeting desires means nothing, indicates nothing to you, certainly nothing supernatural, doesn''t verify the ramblings of a crazy girl in a crazy and ''fake'' world... fine! I''m shy, I''m socially anxious, I get neurotic around people I don''t know. I won''t judge you, I won''t challenge the scientists, I won''t finish or belabour my point. I hope I''m not nothing to you, though. I''m so desperate, maybe I could inspire you to do something really bad? Hah. Haah. Fine. In the view of this world that very definitely has psychic power, the question of free will and determinism decides the ordering of choices. Do they come from a single source at the top, a logical ordering of things, a rational set of rules in the maddening chaos, or do they come from the irrational clamouring and clashing of myriad Willed people? (If this world is fake, then surely it''s determined? No? Are you an idiot? An author could simply write many iterations of the same story, multiple endings, like anyone higher than the top can take multiple contradicting choices at once.) If you know your alphabet, if you''ve been paying attention, then that''s another I-R pair. Importance vs. Relevance, Hannah''s stupid, selfish battle to protect a meaningless world from every single person who cares about anything. Have you thought about it? Tamara cares about her. She sees psychic power as a form of prophecy! She''s totally fucked. Then, we can carry Irrationality vs. Rationality into that, which smuggles my conflict into hers, but also allows us to look at disordered thinking in a world permeated with psychic power. (I''m so desperate, I have to ignore my anxiety and ask if you''re really normal. Since you, or anyone from any sufficiently advanced world orders the creation or the death of an unimaginable amount of beings, like three-quarters of you feeling beings like it''s nothing, travels across a country and commands [contractually, it''s a kind of living] people to travel across the world every day for every little good, a power inseparable from you that dictates every aspect of your thought and being, a power in that sense is identical and contains identical potentials to psychic power. But I''m so fake and you''re so real, I''m crazy, forget about it. Non-stick pans aren''t psychic power, after all...) We at the top can create and rewrite lists of choices if we''re powerful enough, so, let''s go back to Hannah, who has been forcibly reminded of her potential to do this, let''s look at her daily life, other people''s daily lives, see what she does, see what comes out on the top. But we need to take each day or actually every little cute moment of certain people''s cute daily lives in two steps, an important one and a relevant one! An irrational one, because history is sordid, isn''t it? And a rational one. 06i and 06r! I think it''s super cute. I''m a maths student, sort of, like three quarters of the stuff we do in the Veritas line boils down to maths, doesn''t it? In maths, we use i and r as series summation indices for when you''re going through a list and adding things up, and that''s precisely what''s happening in this psychic war. We take a bunch of moments, we add them up, we demonstrate something, we repeat, sorry to everyone else who''s faker and simply lesser than us! Rinse, repeat, endless stories, endless attempts to inspire something (don''t look at me distrustfully, I wouldn''t tell you to do something horrible...), endless tries at learning about the world. Rinse or repeat, until we fall off the top. Will Hannah stay at the top by the end of her and Amelia''s trials? 00i (Did you expect me to carry on as I was before...) I was Hannah Westmoreland. I was 17 years of age, born on the 12th of August 2050, a high school senior. I was told that was an auspicious date, exactly ten years after the Condor Raid or the world initialisation of psychic power, about a year after the fourth rank 13 incident failed to materialise. I never figured out why that mattered, but auspiciously I turned out to be naturally gifted with rank 7 extrasensory perception, the highest rank a person can hold and remain human. Or something like that. As I grew up, I figured out that psychic power and humanity were incompatible. I was raised around a daughter of psychic researchers who was also rank 7 - probably naturally as well, they expected me to care, I didn''t - and convinced that psychic power was absolutely immanent to humanity, that the ability to bend reality with our minds would have made itself obvious in some form no matter what. Couldn''t have been more different than me. We had the same accursed dreams of strange landscapes, processes, conversations, some translatable, some not, but she always seemed so better able to bear them than I was. Her parents were more willing to make her bear them, too. Maybe they hated her? I certainly did. It wasn''t like my parents liked me too. They expected me to raise myself, so I did, poorly. Now I''m nearly an adult! Poorly. At least my beloved clique will support me with undying fervour, right? Ehe. But anyway, sometimes I would see her and I would have to talk to her, it would be impolite not to, and she''d clearly have been crying for a ridiculous amount of time, maybe over nothing, maybe over those things we have to pretend belong in this world with a smile on our face and a cheer in our step, and I wouldn''t want to, but I''d have to, and she''d stare at her laptop for a while because I don''t think she liked me or indeed anything human very much either and play some video game that I didn''t really understand and couldn''t really follow and say weird things to provoke me. "My dad told me to ask why you got sooo many friends the moment you entered middle school but I still have nobody." Because your personality sucks, I would think, but I would reply "I don''t know?" "It''s a shame that they''re all worse than you, right?" "Are we supposed to be better because we''re better espers." "Ahaha, maybe? But you''re supposed to be better than everyone because you''re so bright and I''m so dark." "What does that mean." "Mirrors don''t give off any light, Hannah." (I think this was just before my first conversation with Tamara. And Tamara had said, later, the moon was a giant disk. Carmen and I, like the sun and the moon? But what of Earth?) "Well, your eyes are pretty red. Don''t they glow in the dark." "No? Why would they. I''m an albino." "You have black hair." "And you have blonde." Deflect, reflect, "I was thinking of dying it platinum this weekend-" But she had no feminine hobbies, if hobbies at all, and said "do as you please but face the consequences for it. Have you ever done anything of purpose?" And I replied "no, purpose is cruel, history is cruel, I don''t know a lot about it but I know it won''t ever end well for me. I just want to have fun with my friends!" Fun with my friends, something which she didn''t know and would never know because she didn''t have any because she couldn''t pretend to be normal for a fucking second. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation. "Ah, that''s cute." "Cute..?" "You''re cute." That was the first time she faced me, then. Fake grin, wide eyes. I turned to the screen and the screen said YOU DIED, my fate if I lost focus for a second. "I try to be." "You really do. I don''t understand you." "I don''t understand you either..." "I don''t really understand me either. I don''t even think I really exist. If you walk too deeply through the world of thought, everything''s fake, you know? Or rather, everything can be rewritten, overwritten, nobody matters except whoever''s relevant to you but also they don''t matter either, because as long as you can think and interact with them you''re changing them, and isn''t changing someone anyone with sentience''s way of showing that they care about someone else, and..." and she took a deep breath, and I didn''t follow, or maybe I followed and I disagreed with her, like people had individual personalities and that was meaningful (let''s pretend meaning wasn''t a curse!) and they shouldn''t be violated but talking to them wasn''t violating them but you''d be damned if Carmen ever ever let you get a word in, "...and-and-and like less philosophically I don''t feel real, like I''ve been here for a quarter of the past few weeks, and it''s not even like visionary stuff ''cause obviously I don''t see or read things in the same way as you, and I haven''t eaten since yesterday morning and-and-and..." I went out of the study room to a snack box in the kitchen, fetched a packet of chips, gave them to her. She opened the bag and started chewing and retched immediately, and I just felt dismayed and I went down and I had to catch her as she dribbled empty sick into my perfectly good clothes, and then she laughed. And she was at her cutest when she was filthy? No-no-no-no, I don''t think like that, first thing I''m straight, next thing I''m normal- "Cute. You''re so cute and kind and bright and caring." "I don''t care about you at all," a blatant lie, her brittle, pallid, short body in my arms, her warmth (the heart is like a furnace) even despite her low body temperature, not even her squirming but a pathetic jerk. "Really," she said. Stand strong. "Yes." "Nobody ever pays attention to me," she whispered. Grasp. Her little self-starving hands rose up around my neck. The flesh was weak, the mind a portal, she had the strength if she wished for it, I had the weakness if she wished for it, and she had let herself rot, and a rotting corpse dragged me to Hades. Reel and the world became fainter, I don''t even think I resisted, I didn''t care but I cared, I hated her absolutely and there was no saving Carmen and I would just carry on, except I could and I grew weaker head blue vision blurry and it wasn''t even like this was an uncommon result this was in the parameters the elder Brackashes said that if their daughter succumbed to animalism it''d have to be battered out of her but it wasn''t even like the stupid thing I didn''t care about had ever been treated like a person by them and she let me go and she let me go and she let me go and she hugged me back. "I wish you cared about the things I did." (The future Veritas student could see the truth, and didn''t say I wish you cared about the things I said.) "Perfectly, unpretentiously, obediently. I want freedom to actually exist..." "There''s freedom in unimportance," I said, continuing to talk, coldly, imperfectly, pretending. "No, there isn''t. I wish you always chose correctly. I wish everyone did. I wish you chose to give all of your light to me, your..." life, all of you, this idiot asking for devotion akin to love. "I''ll err as much as I want, and it''ll never matter." "Yes, it will. Everything you do matters. In general, especially to me." You''re mine, she mouthed. (Okay, well, she didn''t do that, but I''m a psychic.) "Not true..." "Deny it then, but history, philosophy, science and maths exist, psychic power exists. If you want happiness, humanity or reprieve they all must be studied absolutely, you must make progress on them, you must win your position, and if you fail, it, they, I will do whatever desired to you. If you lacked the power to avoid afflictions we wouldn''t be so similiar, you wouldn''t be here..." "You should eat." "Can''t." Luckily, I saw her less and less, but I continued to hate her so, obsessively, always an unresolved problem. And I knew she was always reading me like a book, like she had nobody more interesting to care about, like I wouldn''t do the same thing if my ability was vision instead of light or she wasn''t simply a better, more skilled, somehow even more talented esper than I was. And like it or not we were somehow tied together forever, even if it garroted one or both of us, even if it was only ever for the worse, even if... I roused from my sleep, threw my pillow off my bed, stamped on it. My floor had collected a little bit of dust, so I shook the pillow, but what about my skin... A weak mask covering the organs, the lungs, the guts, the heart.