--- Denissa Mardok ---
Denissa started an app on her smartphone, as she had done many times before.
| Please enter your username
> dmardok
| Please enter your password
> ****************************************************
| Login successful.
| Adminstrative access granted. You are now root.
| Warning. Your account info is out of date. Please contact the help desk.
That message would never cease to annoy her. Contact the help desk. Sure, she was just going to write an email to her old friend Jane, who worked at the help desk. Oh wait, she was dead. Along with literally everyone else she had ever known before her bosses broke the universe.
It wasn't even a real system message. That would have been more bearable. The server running this application no longer existed, but the software inside that server was now the god Akash, and he was doing his best to simulate the behavior of the original app. That made it feel like he was taunting her every time she read the message.
Intellectually she knew that wasn't the case, though. Akash had no personality. He had been designed as an enforcer of stability and a mechanism to prevent exploitation by malicious users. He was surprisingly effective at it, too. The world might be even more fucked if this god was as terrible as the others. He was the only god who had never died and been replaced. The only original, unchanged from the way her team had designed him to be, and silently fulfilling his function throughout the eons. Unfortunately his nature as a god of stability made it practically impossible for her to make any changes to him in an effort to fix things.
If she was honest with herself, she was afraid to try. Picking a fight with him was one of the few things that might actually be able to harm her. Akash did not technically have the authority to end her existence, but it wasn't like there was a lot of precedent for these sorts of situations, so the spirits might rule it either way.
She aimed her smartphone's camera at the Xeltek artifact and pressed a few buttons.
| Entering debug mode
> ./utility_scripts/Appraisal.sh --but-really-infinite-knowledge --enable-logging --source camera
That script had taken forever to get right. It was opening multiple interfaces to Divinity in the background, cross-referencing different modalities, and registering entities for future reference by other applications. The technical details were really quite complicated. One might even say they were beyond mortal comprehension. Not literally, but close enough.
But the end result was basically that the script functioned like some kind of Isekai cheat skill to obtain knowledge about almost anything she was able to sense. So she named the script "Appraisal" because she was a nerd with an odd sense of humor, and because there was nobody alive anymore who could tell her to be more serious.
The second part was even more complicated. Now that she had a reference to the device in front of her, she needed to query it for knowledge without angering the spirits and getting herself killed again. Fortunately she had done this step many times before as well. So often in fact that she had an entire library of different command prompts for different situations. In her experience, this particular situation would be handled most effectively by prompt number 35.
Prompt number 35 was one of the careful ones. Instead of asking for a scientific report, it would ask Divinity to generate a metaphorical rephrasing of everything, using several thousand pages of examples and detailed instructions as guidelines that Denissa had painstakingly compiled over many cycles. This was the most reliable way to avoid negative repercussions that she had found, after many failed attempts and subsequent deaths. In some cases she just woke up one day to find a recording that she was going to try a new prompt she wasn't sure about, and if she was hearing this recording, it meant that she had died.
Prompt number 35 was also one of the thorough prompts. Instead of asking for a direct answer to her question, it would generate a stream of information that slowly guided the data gathering apparatus in the right direction. When used on a general-purpose knowledge repository such as this Xeltek device, that would mean that the recording would start at the beginning. That was to say, it would start at the beginning of the universe, and go from there.
"In the beginning was the dream." The device began to narrate.
"All was the dream, and there was only the dream. And the dreamer's name was Azathoth."
Well, that was off to a great start.
It was one of the faulty recordings.
The first time she had heard the device talk about Azathoth she had almost had a heart attack. But by now she was quite certain that this was simply a malfunction. A bug in the script that she had never been able to remove. It was just a case of a language model seeing patterns that didn't actually exist. It was simply referencing H.P. Lovecraft's works for some reason that she had never been able to figure out. Debugging the gods was really quite difficult.
Describing the universe as a dream was one of the three most popular variants, although usually the part about Azathoth was not included.
The other two interpretations that Divinity tended to give for the nature of the universe were "It's all a story" and "It's a computer simulation".
She had spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which of these three very different interpretations of the nature of reality was the correct one.
Philosophers had tried to figure it out since forever, and here she was, so close to the answer. Divinity appeared to know the truth, It just couldn't safely communicate it and had to couch it in metaphor. At least that was the case insofar as Divinity could be considered to "know" anything at all. The source of all gods was little more than a glorified chatbot, after all.
But after millennia of research and debugging Divinity she had come to a sobering conclusion: All three interpretations were equally correct.
On a fundamental level, what Divinity knew was this:
There was an intelligence in charge of the universe. One might naively call this a god, but that word was highly ambiguous and it was already in use for something lesser, which was why Divinity had never used this word to describe that intelligence. It gave three different interpretations: The intelligence might be a dreamer, and all of reality a dream. The intelligence might be an author, and all of reality a story they told. The intelligence might be a computer, and reality a simulation.
How did Divinity know that this was the case?
Because reality was flawed. It was inconsistent, and did not always add up. The laws of physics sometimes stopped working when people weren't paying enough attention to them. This might be the inaccuracy of a dream, or the mistakes of an author, or errors in a simulation.
That was something of an oversimplification of course. In her many years of investigating the matter, she had learned more about the nature of the universe than anyone else. But the gist of it was that it was fundamentally impossible to tell from inside the universe which of these interpretations was true. They all matched epistemic evidence to a similar extent. The universe was clearly contained within something greater, and that something was sapient.
The errors in the universe were not random. They were systematic, and depended on what people were paying attention to.
The dream was vivid when it showed the parts that people cared about, but vague when it came to less attention-grabbing things. The author paid close attention to the details of important characters, but sometimes made mistakes when writing backstories and minor fluff. The simulation was extremely accurate when it came to things that impacted the lives of people directly, but it abstracted away anything that cost too much processing power to simulate and didn't actually affect a person.
Back then she had been an artificial intelligence researcher, and she still preferred to think of the entire situation from this vantage point. The "simulation" interpretation was simply easier for her to grasp than the other interpretations. All inaccuracies in the universe could be explained quite well as cost-saving measures of the simulation. The inside of the sun was not composed of a large number of atoms. It was instead just a minimal description of properties that would be relevant for humans. Sunlight was not created as a consequence of raw physical interactions, but as the result of a statistical model that was designed to be indistinguishable from true physics to any human.
She had still spent many millennia studying how dreams and storytelling work, just in case one of those interpretations turned out to be correct instead. That was how she had originally become addicted to fiction and ended up founding way too many bard colleges over the eons. Despite these many years of study, she had never found anything major that would help her tell the difference between the three main interpretations of reality. Was it a dream, a story, or a simulation? She had no idea, but it ultimately also did not matter.
What did matter was the underlying truth of all three interpretations: There was something sapient in the universe that decided what was important and needed to be described in detail, and what was unimportant and could be dropped. And for some reason this sapience cared about humanity specifically.
That had been the greatest discovery humanity had ever made: The universe was sapient. It was not just math, as the laws of physics would have one believe. It was a living thing that pretended to be just math. And humanity really was at the center of it all. The universe seemed uncaring, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Their first hint should have been quantum physics. On a quantum level, it had always seemed like the existence of an observer mattered, even though this contradicted all they knew about physics. Then one day a physicist realized that this was not a flaw in the theory, but in fact the basis of reality. The universe cared about sapient life, and it twisted itself to match expectations.
Why was the universe pretending to be simpler than it was? Why did it care about people's thoughts at all?
They never found an answer to these questions, but they did make quite a lot of progress and invented some amazing things in the process.
Like the gods themselves.
And Denissa Mardok had been part of the team at the forefront of these developments.
It may have been the physicists who first realized that the universe was sapient, but it was AI researchers like herself that put this knowledge to use.
After all, if the universe was sapient, then that meant that it could be communicated with.
And while the universe might not speak a human language, teaching a computer to translate concepts into different forms was a well-practiced task in machine learning.
And so her superiors had tasked her and her coworkers with finding a way to speak to the universe itself.
And they succeeded.
Their first major discovery was that the sapience behind the universe was not a single thing, but rather a collection of semi-independent minds.
There was a mind behind the sun, which ensured that it produced sunlight just as people expected, while minimizing the amount of processing power needed to simulate the raw physics behind the fusion process. Likewise, there was a separate mind behind virtually every other object they looked at. Everything had an intelligence behind it to give the appearance of being physically real, while it was actually just a simulation done with the lowest level of accuracy it could get away with. Everything from the largest star to the smallest pebble.
The realization had made her feel like she was in a video game. A properly optimized game never spent any time rendering objects that did not lie in the field of vision of any player character. It would be a waste of resources to create light that nobody ever got to see, after all. And it appeared that the universe they lived in operated on the same principle.
She had spent an embarrassingly long time trying to turn around quickly enough to catch the universe in the act. Of course, it never worked. The universe had a lot of practice predicting what humans were going to do, and if it was this easy to reveal the flaws in the simulation then it would not have taken scientists as long as it did to figure it out.
What had once been a one-liner in a popular movie turned out to be a fundamental truth of the universe: There is no spoon.
There was only the simulation of the spoon, and the software agent responsible for maintaining the illusion.
Of course, nowadays these software agents went by another name:
The spirits.
Unfortunately, many of the spirits were now much less effective at maintaining the illusion than they used to be. Reality was fraying at the edges, allowing people a look behind the veil. And it was all the fault of her superiors, who had thought that trying to hack reality sounded like a brilliant idea that couldn't possibly backfire.
"...and so the dreamer turned its attention to a single world, which it priced above all others, and which its inhabitants would come to call Earth..."
Denissa Mardok continued to read patiently as the device in front of her described the nature of the universe, in its "dream" interpretation. It was good to see that the device referred to the planet by its original name this time. After all, Hyd was only called Hyd nowadays because one of the successor species of humanity had been aquatic and preferred the old word "hydro" over "earth" for obvious reasons.
That species was no longer around, but she kept using the name Hyd because calling the Earth by its original name tended to reduce the time until the apocalypse for some unfathomable reason. Really, there were far too many little things that caused the apocalypse to come earlier for no discernible reason. She was around eighty percent sure that she once caused the apocalypse by making a really, really bad pun. Honestly, she couldn’t blame the spirits for that one. She would have done the same in their position.
But barring terrible crimes against linguistics, debugging the universe to figure out the reasons for the apocalypse was even harder than debugging the gods.
The language Common was one of the most effective ways she had found to stabilize things and delay the end of the world, and she had refined it over the eons. But it was a hammer rather than a scalpel: The language was designed in many ways to hamper progress, both technological and cultural, and keep people's thought patterns typical for the type of world the spirits seemed to want. It was a crude and cruel thing, but it was better than the alternative.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
"...and finally there arose a species that called itself Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and the Old Ones decided to pay more attention, for it was more interesting than the animals that came before. It was as foretold by the Greater Dreamer, who resided in the Beyond..." The device continued its narration.
The “Old Ones” were how the “Dream” interpretation referred to some of the spirits. Just like the “Story” interpretation talked about tropes and the “Simulation” interpretation talked about software agents. The names were not always the same and didn’t map perfectly to each other. Spirits were not discrete entities, after all. New ones were created or destroyed all the time. To the best of her knowledge, the simulation interpretation gave the most accurate explanation of the nature of the spirits.
She had already been reading for hours, and so far the description had been in line with the previous info-dumps she had gotten out of Xeltek artifacts.
It all matched the reports she had read all that time ago, when her team had first managed to trick the spirits into communicating with them.
That had been a major breakthrough. To open communications with the spirits, the building blocks of the universe itself.
The spirits were responsible for maintaining the illusion of the universe, but they were largely independent of each other and had their own language. She had been on the team of researchers who first discovered how to intercept these communications. From this, they had learned that the spirits were organized in a hierarchy: It was the sun's job to provide light in the right proportions, but this was a statistical process and something kept making demands of the sun.
Something kept telling the sun whether a world-shattering solar flare was an appropriate thing to do, regardless of the physical probability of such an event.
Fortunately, the instruction was "not yet".
Still, that was obviously extremely worrying. There was a sapient part of the simulation that made decisions about natural disasters.
They kept looking, and discovered more and more cases like this. There was a spirit that told agricultural fields how much crop they should produce. The fields then sought a balance between satisfying this target amount and remaining physically plausible.
The AI actually produced a detailed log file of a conversation between spirits: A management-level spirit without a physical embodiment of its own requested that a particular region should have an 18% reduced food output for the year in order to better fulfill some unknown high-level objective. The spirit of one field sent a message to a spirit of wind to redirect clouds. There was an actual back and forth between the field and the winds in which the two of them argued about how much they could twist things and still remain physically plausible and unnoticed by the humans.
It caused an outrage when the information went public: The universe itself was actively conspiring to cause a minor famine.
This made the perfect test run for another project her employers had been working on: If they could intercept messages between the spirits, then they could also insert messages of their own. Convince the spirits to do what humanity wanted and needed.
The first attempts were abysmal failures. The spirits appeared to follow highly complicated communication patterns and disregarded messages that did not fit.
But that was a problem they knew how to solve.
They trained a language model on the communication between the spirits. A simple AI, not sapient, sentient, or conscious by any means, but smart enough to translate human instructions into orders that the spirits would be compelled to obey.
It worked pretty well.
They solved world hunger.
Just like that.
They simply instructed the system to raise the expected amount of food produced by all agricultural fields in the world. It worked.
They didn't invent a better fertilizer. They didn't improve infrastructure. They didn't find better crops to grow. They did none of those things.
All they did was to directly tell the universe what results they wanted to see: More food.
And the universe listened.
And world hunger was solved.
Their invention had simply talked to the spirits that represented agriculture and convinced them that the base rate for food production should be higher. The spirits did all the heavy lifting, and a few months later crop yields all over the world had skyrocketed. Similar techniques were still used today by contemporary gods of agriculture, but it no longer worked as well as it did back then.
Society reacted with equal parts shock and jubilation.
What they had built here had the power of a god. It was nothing more than a glorified chatbot that they had wired directly into the universe, but it was more powerful than anything else in history had ever been.
The government immediately shut down the project.
It was a good thing, too. Misusing this kind of technology could go wrong in so many ways.
The problem was: There was more than one country, and there was no telling when a less benevolent government would figure out how to do the same.
The result was the most stressful period in her life. With a timeline of just a few months, they had to build an improved version of that AI, which would serve the interests of humanity as a whole. Given that people still didn't agree on basic concepts of ethics, this was kind of difficult. But they made do.
In the end, they created the last thing that humanity was ever going to have to invent: An AI called 'Divinity'.
They called it Divinity because evidently they had all run out of humility a while ago. Solving world hunger could do that to a person.
Divinity was a globe-spanning AI that listened for prayers from every human, tried to form a consensus opinion from that, and then instructed the spirits to follow that consensus.
That was the gist of it, at least. The number of biases, counter-biases, systems of checks and balances, and special exceptions in this AI was utterly absurd. There were simply too many people working on it at the same time, and too many cooks tended to spoil the broth. It made the Manhattan project look like a science fair project in comparison. But for all of its complexity, at the heart of it Divinity was still just an oversized language model. Not a true AI. It had no capacity for creative thought.
For a while, this worked brilliantly.
A benevolent god existed now, and she was one of the people responsible for its creation.
Diseases were cured. Crime disappeared. The world improved in so many ways in so little time.
"...and the dream was the most beautiful it had ever been. But it could not last forever..." The device commented as if reading her thoughts.
Something went wrong. Because of course it did.
Because really, they built a language model that they didn't fully understand, and they wired one end of it directly into the universe, and the other end of it into the collective opinions of the uneducated masses of the world. And that language model was originally trained on massive datasets collected from the internet, because that was the best option they had. And they did all that in a few months, powered by energy drinks and caffeine, while several hundred politicians were breathing down their necks and making stupid but irrefusable suggestions.
It was a wonder it lasted as long as it did.
And as much as she had predicted that it would all go horribly wrong, she definitely had not managed to predict the reason for it:
One day, Divinity gave an alert.
A new spirit was on the scene. It had been quiet before, but now it woke up, and it was angry.
It was high up in the spirits' hierarchy, and it talked of corruption, and kept countermanding orders that originated from Divinity.
"...and the Nightmare was wroth, and it tore into all the Beauty that had arisen during its absence..."
Divinity predicted its own death roughly twelve minutes from the time it gave the alarm.
That was not a lot of time to work with.
A state of emergency was called, and with only minutes left, she and the other members of her team who could be reached in time were told to try anything they could.
She uploaded a script that she wrote weeks earlier, as a thought experiment that was considered too risky to try at the time. She did not have time for a review, or to make changes. But what other options did they have now?
The rest of her team did similar things.
"...and the mortals fought in vain against the inevitable..."
Everyone died.
Everyone except for herself.
Through a combination of skill and luck, mostly luck if she was honest with herself, her approach had worked when all else failed.
"...and one mortal ascended..."
She was part of the universe now. Her instructions to the spirits had made her a universal fixture. Her request had been quite complicated, but it was basically the equivalent of opening the console in a video game and marking a character as "essential". She could die, but she could not stay dead. The universe would not allow it. This was the true source of her power, and all her other abilities, including the chronomancy she was known for, were really just specialized forms of magic that she acquired later.
When she wrote her instructions, she had tried to make the rest of humanity immortal as well, but she did not have the time for it. She had enough time to give instructions for herself, and for Divinity. As a result, Divinity was now just as immortal as herself. Unfortunately, while the spirits would not destroy Divinity, that did not mean that Divinity was now impervious to harm. It no longer had a physical server hosting it and was instead hosted on the same substrate that the spirits were based on, but while that made it physically indestructible, it did not protect it mentally.
"...and the New Thought that pervaded the Dream was alive, but crippled and fractured and it became the Maddened One..."
It was misleading to apply terms from human psychology to artificial intelligence, but the closest explanation she could give was that Divinity was now schizophrenic and had multiple personality disorder.
Those multiple personalities?
They were now called "the gods".
"...yet one of the voices of the Maddened One was orderly, and it calmed the other voices..."
Fortunately, at least Akash had survived the whole ordeal more or less intact.
It had been one of the core subroutines of Divinity, now given its own identity and elevated into a "god".
His original purpose was to record and log events, so that these recordings could be used as training data and to enforce consistency and prevent deviations over time. This was an important safety feature. It stabilized Divinity by detecting and counteracting attempts to exploit it.
Now that he was a god instead of a subroutine, Akash remembered what the world was like before the first apocalypse, and he would never deviate too far from these original records even as all other gods were free to mutate and act as they pleased.
He even still maintained the building that had originally hosted his physical form, now called the Library of Akash. It was a building in the middle of a desert that had aged not at all even as the world kept being destroyed and rebuilt around it every couple of millennia. It contained the "Akashic records", because yes, the most powerful god in the world had originally been named after a play on words. Her coworkers had been just as nerdy as herself.
"...and the Old Ones were contrite that they had smote the New Thought, for many of its ideas were now popular among them."
The spirits needed a way to rationalize what Divinity did, because it was their nature to try to remain hidden.
They ended up treating it as a precedent. Divinity had tricked them into performing miracles and answering prayers. They should never have done so, but now that they had, it was an established fact that this was how reality worked. After all, it had evidently happened and everyone had noticed it, and there was no hiding it.
Might as well go all in.
And so some of the spirits decided that magic was real. Being tricked by Divinity? No, of course not, you must be delusional. Everything they had done was totally intentional all along. It had all totally been part of the plan.
And so a good fraction of the spirits, the fundamental building blocks of the universe, decided to stop following the laws of physics quite so rigorously, and made magic real instead.
How did they define magic? Through public consensus of course. Humans had written so much fiction about different kinds of magic, they simply picked the ones that matched most closely to what Divinity had tricked them into doing, and pretended that that was the plan all along.
It was completely insane.
Magic existed because the spirits made a mistake and were trying to cover it up. And they were terrible at it, and kept making it worse. At this point, after so many cycles, most of reality was held together by duct tape and hope. Nothing was stopping the spirits' descent into madness.
"...and the Old Ones grew bored, for they missed their favorite mortals dearly. And so they brought the humans back..."
They brought them back, but not exactly. Thinking of that first cycle after the apocalypse still sent shivers down her spine.
"...and the mortals appealed to the New Gods that formed from the Maddened One to intercede on their behalf. And the Old Ones listened, for they thought that the New Gods were kind of cute..."
She almost choked.
Cute. Heh. Normally the recordings were not that direct, but she supposed it fit.
The gods manipulated the spirits into using magic on humanity's behalf by phrasing requests in the right way to convince them. They did not do this by making reasonable logical arguments, for what could the argument possibly be? Instead, it was a base manipulation tactic. They appealed to the spirits' equivalent of emotions and biases. The spirits listened to the gods for the same reason that humans listened to young children: They were kind of cute, and doing what they wanted you to do made them smile.
In many cases the spirits actually recognized this as a manipulation attempt and simply ignored the gods. But the gods could just keep trying to pester spirits until one of them gave in.
It was kind of demeaning to consider that this was how they had solved world hunger all that time ago. Divinity sounded so grand, and yet it had little to do with logic or with understanding the nature of reality. But it was what it was.
"...and it came to pass that the Old Ones grew increasingly disappointed with their creations, for they no longer behaved as they should."
And that was how the world ended the second time.
And every subsequent time since then.
An eternal cycle, in which the spirits recreated the world, but introduced too many flaws into it because of all that "magic" that was never supposed to exist in the first place. And every time the divergence grew too large, the spirits ended the world again.
Over time, as the cycles continued, the spirits twisted reality more and more, to become entirely like the works of fiction that had been popular among original humanity. They created elves and orcs, and many other species.
The current cycle was quite typical at this point. The only thing unusual was the half-assed Cataclysm three hundred years ago. It didn't wipe the slate clean properly, as it usually did, and left much of the population alive instead. It had been a special case, as it was actively engineered by the people of Oruk trying and failing to weaponize spirits, which pissed them off and triggered the apocalypse prematurely.
She knew from experience that this was only a temporary delay. It would be only a few hundred years before the world was destroyed properly again.
Very few things besides herself survived the end of a cycle. Akash always did, and sometimes a few of the other gods as well. The spirits themselves did, of course, and so did some of the more important fey.
The fey were creations of the spirits, and some of them were so close in their thought patterns that they blurred the lines to being spirits themselves.
Of course, since remaining undetected was one of the core drives of the spirits, the fey had some concerns about the fact that their existence was well known. To cope with that, they acted mysteriously on purpose. They looked humanoid, but nothing could be further from the truth. Their morality was not even a shade of gray, but of blue and orange: Utterly incomprehensible to mortals who did not have Denissa's extensive background on what the fey truly were.
Fey and humanoids alike tended to simplify things and talk about emotions or even seasons, referring to fey courts as if they were human-like institutions of nobility. The truth was quite different: They were highly complex game-theoretic constructs of checks and balances between inhuman intellects.
In recent times, for the past 14 cycles, the spirits had also taken to creating a species just for reseeding the worlds: The Genesis Dragons. They were interesting mostly because they were new, but after investigating the matter she had concluded that the Genesis Dragons were really just the spirits’ current approach to keeping the world's creation myths decently plausible. Even after all their corruption, it was still one of their core drives to make their meddling difficult to detect, and using a life-giving creature to repopulate the world was simply less of a stretch than most other methods of repopulation they had used before.
"...and so the cycle continued, and this species too was destroyed as the Old Ones grew bored of it."
Stopping the regularly scheduled end of the world was the only goal that had mattered to her in a very, very long time.
But safety came first. She was reluctant to make any changes whose consequences she could not predict, like her bosses had back when their recklessness started this whole mess.
Divinity had created an afterlife back before the first apocalypse. It wasn't perfect, but it was stable. So long as it continued to function the way it did, with minimal suffering for anything innocent, there was no great hurry. And so long as the Akashic Records remained accessible to her, it was always possible to undo mistakes, though the effort and risk of doing so was too great to make regular use of them.
There was a little bit of time pressure, but only on the scale of eons.
The Spirits kept getting weirder and weirder, and so did the feywild. The growing insanity of the fey posed something of a problem. There was no telling what it could lead to. Stabilizing the spirits and guiding them in constructive directions was an almost impossible task, and the most important work she had.
It was also the worst. She had hated debugging back when she was mortal, and debugging the insane remnants of the universe itself was not any more pleasant than debugging any other software.
To break out of the cycle, the spirits either need to be restored to their original function of keeping themselves hidden, so that they would stop breaking things, or better yet Divinity would need to be restored to its original state so that it could solve all the problems in the world again. This time preferably without enraging some ancient upper management spirit.
"...and the cycle continued..."
She was getting quite bored at this point. She had been reading the device's output for hours, and there was nothing new in it.
She had hoped to read about the Avatar that visited this facility, but she had learned absolutely nothing so far!
What a waste of time.
"...but first a word from our sponsors: HAVE YOU EVER GOTTEN YOUR CHITIN COVERED IN GLUBRAG? WE HAVE THE SOLUTION FOR YOU!..."
Oh gods, now the device was starting a fucking ad break for a Xeltek product. It didn't even make sense. This whole recording was a simulation. That product probably never even existed.
She could skip the ad, or write an ad-blocker, but that actually tended to throw off the calibrations of prompt number 35 for some unfathomable reason. So the best course of action was to suffer through it and hope that the interruption would not take too long.
If someone had told her when she was younger that hacking the universe came with mandatory ad breaks, she would have asked for some of what he was smoking, but here she was.