“What even is this shit?”
It is what it is. It is That Which Is.
“It’s shit, is what it is.” Nathan glowered at the vast five-dimensional notional meta-shape, flowing and writhing within his mind as he metaphorically poked at it and funneled power this way and that way. “Who even designed this? Nobody, right? It just sort of evolved over time and then you slapped a bunch of interface layers onto it hoping that nobody would look under the hood.”
Your inability to grasp its complexity does not—
“Complexity my ass, that’s not what I’m bitching about! Sorry, that’s inappropriate and sexist, probably. But look at this!” He notionally spun his hands, rotated them, spun again, pushed out and twisted and struck a pose, each of those actions fundamentally meaningful in his navigation of the nigh-infinite complexity of the concepts at play without being true or factual in any way whatsoever. “What the fuck is this node?”
It… is an accelerator?
“Who the fuck makes a design decision like this? Newbies and gacha game designers, that’s who. Game designers who want to milk some money out of peoples’ pockets in order to speed up their overall progression, but the only reason why the progression was slow in the first place was to force them to make those purchases. And this!”
The… constellation of Rise Higher?
“It lifts the cap on how much you can gain from a life? And it descends from the accelerator nodes? What is wrong with you that you don’t see why this is bad design? You can’t even argue that it’s a tradeoff between investing here and investing in other stuff that’ll give you more effective lives, because you have a million fucking lives and you’re going to hit the cap in childhood of every one of them unless you start grabbing nodes in RH!”
We…
“Yeah, I thought so. Listen, I don’t want to get into this further with an intern. Can you, like, give me a better design, one that’s more standard and has gone through testing and validation? I’m guessing that you homebrewed this thinking it was helpful or something. I don’t even know why I’m so sure about that. How am I even interacting with this? Why do I know how the nodes cascade or what the cap is?”
The voice was silent for a time. In that time, Nathan studied the massively complex metastructure before him, which was an adjective that had both a great deal of truth and also none at all—not only did his circumstances possess no directionality, he had already come to realize that the underlying truth beneath the power progression in the million lives he would be living was ancient beyond estimation or comprehension and at the same time the kludged-together galactic superclusters of structured readouts were younger than he was.
An intuitive understanding began to coalesce in his thoughts of… not the scale of it, which still escaped his grasp, and not the navigation of it, but of how he might relate to the multiversal power now at his fingertips.
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Alas, with understanding sometimes comes that most vicious and depressing of things: empathy.
“That was out of line,” Nathan said apologetically. “You’re new to this. I’m new to this. We should grow together, and be partners or whatever. How long have you even existed? My instincts are saying that until Natasha sent me through that portal, you weren’t… not exactly born, not exactly hatched, manifested? It’s really jarring to have all of these conclusions just sort of bubbling up into my head, not that I have a head right now, and if you could confirm that this is a Thing rather than just me hallucinating a certainty I’d appreciate it.”
That which is your birthright coalesces most between lives.
“Oh, so I’m not going to have this—whatever this is—when I go into the next life, or at least not nearly this powerfully. Though it feels like there’s a bunch of ways to boost that, to bring it into those lives, to manifest it, to grow it? And right now I’m getting something kinda negligible, but it’ll grow a tiny bit as I live and do awesome shit. Not very much, though; the growth will cap out as I cap out my gains on any given life. Which isn’t very long, at least initially. But some of that is because of the external structure, it’s not exactly inherent. See, I should be able to feed some of the power back into the system after I cap out, it’s not a great conversion but it should exist; except that here you’ve got a sort of valve thing and it’s just getting shunted into the Interlife, and at an even worse ratio?”
There is a tradeoff. The valve structure stabilizes the flow into the first-ring constellation clusters, allowing them to accept higher concentrations before ignition and to reach those stages faster.
“Sure,” allowed Nathan as his metaphorical interest began to catch fire and he experienced the incredibly rare moment of a computer scientist actually having a use for his specialty rather than it merely giving him a false sense of complete understanding of all fields of knowledge. “But you could use Ranano’s Theorem instead, because if you load balance instead of cache-and-validate—”
The pressure differential—
“It’ll balance, because of the fork here, and you can always drop a valve cluster in the second step which will drop the exponent by an order on the power loss—”
Our time draws short. The stability of your Interlife wanes.
Nathan’s focus shifted instantly as he took that in. “Strip out the whole framework, then,” he said calmly. “I’ll go all-natural for the first jump, it’ll be fine. You can’t put in a new one as easily as you can put the first one in, right? How do I buy you more time to work on this, or more time for us to hang out together?”
Live long and excellently. It is now the time to express your preferences as to how.
He acknowledged that with a slow nod. “Got a name? Feels weird to not have a name to refer to you by.”
No.
“Well, you can work on that, I guess? Anyway, definitely an adult start, no interested in being a kid. Age range nineteen to thirty five. Let’s do European high fantasy with magic.”
The ultimate in that which is basic.
“What can I say, I am basic.” Nathan shrugged, and then said the most intelligent and wise thing he had ever said in his life. “Oh, and I know we have something in the tank, so can I get retroactive trauma resistance or mitigation? As much of it as you can give me, plus the language fish integrates into my brain or soul or something.”
And with that, the light began to intrude upon his perception and with a feeling of his request having been acknowledged, he awoke in a new world.