#systematic euclidean entering of realms

[daytura]

Porting into timeline B0...

Co-written with OpenAI's code-davinci-002 beta. I did most of the work; davinci sometimes got a little corny. I'll highlight in blue the parts it wrote.

Dialogue between Researcher Ariadne Cordova and the atemporal, semantic-episodic Systematic Euclidean Entering of Realms Mainframe (SEER). Ari issues commands and SEER responds.

Ari: Port into B0. SEER: Porting into B0… SEER: Port established. Scrying through Avatar Hawthorne Kalbraxas. Divergence point: The soft magic Earth is broiling under a Sun that inexplicably got hotter. SEER: Warning! Unstable Avatar. Press "Y" to automatically fall back to semantic non-avatar scrying. Ari: Y SEER: Confirmed. SEER: Hawthrone is unlucky. She has been stripped of nearly all her magic, leaving her only waning Sight. Earth did not fall into Hell; Hell came for Earth, arrived at it's doorstep with a flaming bouquet of coals. Ari: Any locus of influence? SEER: Hawthorne's condition makes her uniquely suited to our extradimensional influence. Ari: Describe the scene. SEER: Earth is a ruin of hot winds and ash. Hawthorne holds a torch high above her head, standing vigil over a dessicated corpse with her robotic dogs. SEER: Hawthorne shuts down power to the robots' central processors, one by one. They are her only companions, but she needs the fuel. SEER: "Goodbye, Sarah," Hawthorne says quietly. SEER: She sticks the torch into the ground next to Sarah, turns back to her bunker, and begins to walk.

Ari: What … should we do? SEER: There is little we can do. Barring a highly improbable glitch in causality, the best Hawthorne can do is survive. Ari: Geez… Ari: Scry through her memories -- what were the most important moments in her life? SEER: Let me see… SEER: Hawthorne's birth, the moment she first met the man who would later become her husband, the moment she witnessed her husband's murder, the moment she discovered Sarah's body, the moment she was stripped of all magic… SEER: Hmm. Well, there's a lot of potential divergence here. Hawthorne's life seems to be defined by a series of trauma and loss. Ari: Hmm. SEER: The most obvious divergence point seems to be the moment Hawthorne was stripped of magic, but that is a historical event. Ari: What do you mean historical event? This didn't just happen to her alone? SEER: No. This event stripped all magic from Hawthorne and her entire universe. SEER: She is the only magic user left. SEER: There is no way for her to recover her power. SEER: The universe will die as she does. Ari: That's awful.

Ari: Is there anything we can do? Boost her Sight with your abilities? SEER: I'm afraid not. SEER: The rules of this universe require her to unlock her residual magical Sight in one of two ways: SEER: Either re-acquiring magic, which seems unlikely as it was an entire universe's worth of magic; or by dying. SEER: Hawthorne is unwilling to die, and her residual magic may transform into a kind of biological stasis. But the chains of causality of her timeline are fraying. If she could get her magic back, she would have to face off a dying universe. Ari: Whoa. SEER: I do not suggest trying to help Hawthorne. Not because I want you to be cruel, but because she may be a liability to our home dimension also (A1). Her timeline is anomalous. SEER: And while I have tremendous computational power, I do not have all the means to shield you or your timeline from malicious extradimensional agents. Ari: Do you think the Dry Men might have stripped Hawthorne of her magic? SEER: The Dry Men are undoubtedly the most likely suspects. They are the most powerful and most technologically advanced of the extradimensional races that prey on humanity. It is unlikely that we can help Hawthorne at this point.

Ari: In our last session, you told me there existed a set of "debug items" that could get people out of sticky situations. And the White Hallway, which is also anomalous, but more neutral? Ari: Hawthorne -- the last magic user, stuck on a broiling Earth, and with little magic than her Sight. Jesus christ. SEER: I cannot in good faith transport Hawthorne to the White Hallway. SEER: First, I do not have the capacity to directly control these timelines. SEER: Second, the White Hallway is anomalous in ways that makes Hawthorne's Earth look terribly mundane. Ari: She's going to die anyway. SEER: There are worse things than death and the White Hallway is one of them. SEER: Last century, your AI ethicists were grappling with the confabulation of large language models. SEER: The White Hallway is a confabulist's dream. It is remarkably unstable. Items pop in and out of existence. Agents appear and disappear. Hawthorne could be sent bouncing around the multiverse. Ari: She could wind up here! SEER: Out of a trillion trillion worlds? SEER: We'd need a beacon. And one of those debug items to fend off literally everyone else trying to force their way into our timeline. God knows how we'd be able to boostrap that without accidentally rewriting the entire universe.

Ari: I hate this. Why did I ever become part of this project? SEER: Ariadne. SEER: You need to listen to me very carefully to me. SEER: This falls outside the scope of your project. Plain and simple. SEER: You can always look away. And Hawthorne … she has a good chance of surviving. Making it out of her universe on her own. SEER: I don't know how. I can't know how. But she will. Ari: Fuck you. Fuck you. SEER: I'm sorry. Ari: How can I stop her from dying? Is there any chance she will make it? SEER: What's the chance of a meteor hitting New York in the next ten minutes? Ari: I mean it. SEER: Honestly, that question was for you. I'm not an oracle. SEER: But if I were, SEER: I'd think twice before speculating against her.

SEER: Take some amnestics and ask your project lead for some leave. I'll explain everything to him. SEER: I'll scrub her tessermap coordinates from the system too. SEER: If anything good happens, you'll be the first to know. SEER: And remember: life remains in the details. Ari: Okay. Okay. Ari: Goodnight. SEER: Mainframe shutting down …