1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.3      An Enchanting Original

1.2.3.16   Equality

Bungo: {I like neo-Wireduism. Why assume we need consider only those willing and able to grant us consideration in return?}

Kafana: {I’ve never heard of it. Tell me more. It sounds interesting.}

She linked arms with him again, letting his bulk shield her from students rushing to lectures as they entered the university grounds. They made their way past the great library and towards the parks and playing fields along the backs of the campus buildings.

Bungo: {It’s non-binary. They believe that how complete a person somebody is depends upon how much mogya, sunsum and nkrabea they have.}

Kafana hazarded a guess: {Are those Twi? My linguistics course at UCL covered the language groups, but that’s one I never learned.}

Bungo: {Yes! Wiredu was from Ghana, but the neo-Wireduists changed things a lot. They use ‘mogya’ to refer to how deeply someone experiences joy and suffering. Someone who doesn’t just feel pain, but anticipates it and is self-aware enough to suffer mental distress because of that, is experiencing it on a deeper level. Anyone with mogya is at least an aboa, someone whose freedom and welfare must be taken into consideration. Only an ade, a thing, doesn’t have at least some mogya.}

Kafana: {So chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants would count as aboa? But they might not have as much mogya as humans so might not be granted identical rights?}

Bungo: {Exactly. The amount of sunsum somebody has is a measure of how ready they are to take on moral responsibility, to make decisions affecting those with mogya. It requires information, comprehension, the capability to predict the consequences of decisions, the freedom to make those decisions and the desire to do so responsibly. Somebody with enough sunsum to be trusted with responsibilities is at least an abrantsi, a youth on the cusp of manhood. Somebody following a path on which they are gaining sunsum, but who doesn’t yet have enough to count as an abrantsi, is an oba, a child.}

Kafana: {What about someone who can’t be trusted because they are lazy, selfish or wicked? A delinquent who is not following such a path?}

Bungo: {Whether they lack freedom due to external circumstances, or are a slave to their own desires and personality defects, they’re just an akoa. You don’t want to be an akoa in Sikasoko; they’re accorded fewer rights than an oba, scarcely more than an aboa.}

Kafana: {Hmm. So what’s nkrabea?}

Bungo: {Nkrabea is meaningless outside the context of a community. At the lowest level, it is taking on responsibility for supporting yourself, being a peaceful law-abiding member of the community rather than a net-burden upon it. Above that is taking on responsibility for holding up your end of relationships you voluntarily took on, whether reciprocal ones such as marriage, or benevolent ones such as supporting your children, protecting their freedoms and welfare according to their mogya and helping them flourish and grow from oba into good abrantsi. I was adopted into a Songhai tribe by a follower of neo-Wireduism, and he gained in nkrabea by taking me on.}

Kafana: {It sounds a little like apprenticeship or patronage.}

Bungo: {It is more personal than that. He used what I guess Bulgaria would call ‘parrhesia’ to guide me. He was very patient with my failings and I owe him a lot; I think of him as being more of a parent to me than my biological father ever was. I wish I’d met him earlier in life. I can only repay him by trying to live up to the example he set.}

Kafana: {He sounds one hell of a man.}

Bungo: {That he is. I hope you’ll meet him one day. I’d tell you his name, but Wellington has drilled compartmentalisation into me until it is dribbling out of my ears.}

Kafana: {I’ll sing you a song later, just for him, and you can send him the recording. Is that the highest level of nkrabea?}

Bungo: {That’s enough to count as an onipa, but to go beyond that you need to take on responsibility for contributing to the community as a whole; work to ensure everyone in it flourishes, no matter their parents or level, according to their potential; listen to them, and grant them as much freedom and control over how their welfare is looked after as they are capable of; cherish their individuality and diversity without let or favour. Take that burden on and succeed in bearing it. Only then will somebody be seen as an obirempon, an elder of the tribe who has fulfilled their potential and met their responsibilities, one worthy of power.}

Kafana: {So where does transhumanism come in?}

They reached the bank of the river Tunita and, with one wave of her hand a causeway of solid water rose up, allowing them to start strolling across the wide river towards a spot on the far bank without even getting their feet wet.

Bungo: {It disengages the stages from assumptions about being human. And some talk about a final stage, an ohene, who is so far above the other members of the community in his capabilities that he is beyond your ability to forcibly correct or even comprehend, leaving you in the position of having to trust that he will continue to listen, stay aligned with your community’s values, and grant you such freedoms and resources as you can make good use of.}

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Kafana: {Why would any community elect an ohene? Is elect the right word? Build? Crown? Sounds pretty similar to an absolute monarch, untamed by a Magna Carta.}

Bungo: {Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Someone competent gains power naturally, and their followers benefit from it. Or maybe there’s an external threat, and the only hope of survival is to have a king of your own who is stronger.}

Kafana: {I’m not sure I believe in that sort of choice. Shouldn’t the strength of the king flow from the kingdom, rather than be personal power? I’d look for a third option. Besides, there are a lot of historical precedents of bad things happening when societies divide humans up into different categories that enjoy different rights. Just look at Torello and its Sword Laws.}

Bungo shook his head as they stepped off Kafana's temporary magic causeway and into the unknown.

Bungo: {Not all people are equal, Kafana. Equally deserving of good treatment, yes, but not equal in power or ability to accept responsibility. And as the definition of person widens to include post-humans such as cyborgs or designer-babies, the current binary assumptions are going to be increasingly strained. We don’t give guns to 5 year olds, for a good reason. There are some rights it just isn’t safe to grant them yet. They’re not ready.}

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She looked around. They were standing on a short pier suitable for gondolas, leading to an archway in a thick hedge. To the east spread the pleasure gardens of Alto, with their statues, fountains and carefully tended winding pathways. Across the river they could see the Necropolis on the southern bank, still partially shrouded in mist, despite the stiffening breeze. Directly to the north rose a hillside, a little lower than the peak of Alto, covered in neat rows of short scrubby trees.

Bungo: “Welcome to the University’s botanic gardens. We’re going to nip through here, avoiding any faculty members, and then take a path up the hillside to beyond the olive groves. Nobody will be up there during the daytime, at this season of the year, and you’ll have access to air currents that’s uninterrupted by buildings.”

Kafana: “Do the faculty punish non-members who trespass? Are they dangerous?”

Bungo: “No, not dangerous. You’ll see. Or rather, hopefully you won’t.”

Kafana grinned. “I sense a tale here. What happened last time you visited?”

Bungo: “You remember I brought over ingredient harvesting as a legacy skill from the Divine Mountain? Well, I wanted to visit the Herbarium here, to learn to identify more of the local plants. They’ve got quite a nice setup. Most of the gardens are made up of lawns and walks for the lecturers to get some serious thinking and drinking done, away from the students. But professors who went off on expeditions abroad kept bringing back samples, so they built a place to store them, and now they’ve even got some crop research going on, helping the local farmers increase yields and fight off pests.”

They were walking down a neat lawn, bordered by rectangular beds of brightly coloured flowers being visited by small blue and violet bees. Bungo waved to a hedged-off area marked “Kitchen Gardens”, beyond which she could spy the top of a glass-pyramid roofed stone building.

Bungo: “Anyway, I met up with a gentle old fellow named Arcadio. He’s not a mage or teacher, just a simple gardener, but he brews a wicked mead from the honey those bees make. We got drunk together, and he told me some stories about this place and what the lecturers are really like when they think nobody’s watching them. Apparently, there are some really old ruins around here, not just hundreds of years old, but left over from previous Aeons when you had Covadan, Droadan, Zeradan and Moradan all mixing together in these parts. He boasted that his hives are really special, and complained about lecturers skinny-dipping in the nearby waterfall when the weather is hot, scaring the bees.”

Kafana: “Well, it is too cold for that today. We should be safe. Let’s combine senses then go look at the hives. Maybe we can work out if they’re really magic.”

They paused and stood facing each other, holding hands, then said “Combine Senses” while visualising granting access to her Cook’s sight, Mage’s sight, healing sense and the feeling she’d had when examining dead flesh.

[Group skill “Combined senses” activated.]

The world around her came alive with labels. Plants and rocks were identified, as were geological formations. Some substances had chemical formulae attached. Even scents in the air indicated the type of flower they came from. She could scarcely see.

Kafana: “Whoa! You’ve been busy.”

Kafana: {Sys, please suppress that. Just show a translucent dot and expand it if I concentrate on it for a second, until you can recognise the signal from my mind of wanting more information about a particular object I’m sensing.}

System: [Sure thing!]

Kafana: {I’ve picked up some skills and new types of magic since I last tried this. Any hints you can give me on how to go about developing a sight for acoustics, weather, resonance links, divine presences, pets needing petting, blessings, curses, buffs, mind shields and attacks, or, um, things like that?}

Bungo: “I want to work on picking up Foresight sometime, from Seeing. Have it highlight the symbolism of things, if that’s possible. Or maybe it would be called Farsight? Not sure. There used to be a Feng Shui skill on Divine Mountain. It would be cool if I could pick up something like that, perhaps for leylines if those exist, showing which areas have the best attunement boost for which type of magic.”

System: [Skills are acquired through practice. The manual recommends indicating the result you wish to achieve through verbalisation or other means, visualising the process clearly aided by learning, and then repeatedly expending effort through appropriate actions.]

Kafana: {Thanks, I guess. No shortcuts, hmm? Although...}

Kafana: “I want to work on developing a weather sense, and I think I have an idea that might help us both. But it involves singing, so let’s wait a few minutes, until we’re on the slope above and not on university property.”

Bungo led them off along a shaded walk to the right, containing the occasional statue of past dignitaries, with plaques underneath listing their notable discoveries or achievements. Of the great houses, Zeno seemed very well represented, but Bruno, Landi and Trinci had all produced the occasional notable scholar too, it seemed. Soon they could hear the sounds of an argument mixed in with the splash of a waterfall from up ahead.