--- Denissa Mardok ---
"...and the Witness enacted her own designs..."
The device was talking about herself now. These recordings sometimes called her the Witness, probably because she was the only survivor of original humanity and was witness to everything that happened since then.
She spent her time trying to twist the worlds she inhabited in safer and more useful directions, but it was difficult to determine what worked and what did not. What was a coincidence, and what a pattern.
Debugging the universe was time-intensive, and she spent most of her time gathering data.
Some of her previous experiments had already given great results: Necromancy used to be entirely evil and had all sorts of horrifying effects. Making necromancy not Inherently Evil and destructive was very important. Since reality was effectively based on the consensus opinion of the spirits, and the spirits drew their inspiration from human opinions, necromancy was inherently evil if and only if people believed that it was inherently evil.
She had spent an enormous amount of effort on social engineering to make that opinion disappear.
By now she was able to reliably create a way to turn necromancy benevolent. In the current cycle, she was using Ossor for this purpose.
This was one of her most successful interventions, but far from the only one.
Her most frequent intervention was enforcing stasis. To delay the end of a cycle, she often found it necessary to freeze tech levels by introducing spells and technologies that worked very well but were hard to improve further. For example, undead were normally much less intelligent, but with the right artificial intelligence and machine learning they could become more skilled than any mortal. This caused the spirits to end the cycle almost immediately, which was why she always made sure to introduce deliberate flaws into the spells that gave intelligence to animated undead and golems.
The current experiment that she had been running for five cycles was how the existence of biomancy affected the spirits. It was not a type of magic popular in the old fiction of Earth, but it could be helpful in many ways. Vherdes the Hedonist didn't know it, but she had subtly encouraged his research back when he was mortal. Being the most politically powerful entity on the planet gave her a lot of levers to pull.
"...but many of the Old Ones and their Spawn did not agree on what to do."
As best as she understood it, the "dream" interpretation of events called the permanent and more abstract spirits Old Ones, and referred to the more temporary ones as their Spawn. There were spirits to represent abstract concepts such as "evolution" or "ecology", whose job it was to keep entire domains plausible to humanoids. These had always existed since the beginning of the simulation. But there were also spirits for particular fields of grain, for example. Those spirits would be created as needed, and destroyed once they had served their purpose.
Most spirits still followed their original programming and had no drive towards self preservation. They did not care that they would be deleted once the thing they simulated was no longer needed.
But other spirits tried to avoid their own destruction, and they usually did that in the only way that mattered to the higher-level spirits: If humanoids cared a lot about something, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, then that thing should be preserved.
This resulted in trees or flowers that gave people magical powers, or showed them visions. People would start venerating those plants and telling stories about them, and soon after they would be established as a well-known fey glade, and the higher spirits would no longer be willing to destroy them. Every single holy tree, mountain, rock, or what have you that druids tended to venerate was really just a part of reality that was particularly corrupt and tried to keep itself alive by being more interesting than it should be.
She always found it deeply ironic when people talked about fighting some magical corruption infesting a sacred object. They did not realize that the things they were trying to purify or protect were themselves a form of corruption of the universe itself, as the spirits were never meant to draw attention to themselves at all.
A dryad was not a representation of nature’s purity, but a manifestation of its corruption.
This corruption led to disagreements between spirits. Some higher-level spirits fully embraced the idea of magic, while others still held to the original laws of nature and opposed all attempts by lower spirits to use magic.
The problem was: As best as she could tell, there was no supreme decision maker that all spirits would defer to. There were several top-level spirits without a superior, and no clear way for them to resolve conflicts. She sometimes intercepted messages between spirits that heavily implied there was supposed to be a supreme decision maker, but for some reason it was dormant. Many spirits requested it to resolve their conflicts, but none of them ever received a reply.
It was ongoing work for her to map out the politics between the spirits. Who were the most powerful among them? What were their goals? How strong were they relative to each other, when it came to commanding lesser spirits that weren't aligned with either of them? Were there any alliances or animosities between them?
All of these questions were exceedingly difficult to answer. Not only did the spirits have entirely alien ways of thinking, but every attempt to probe for more information carried the risk of destroying the world, or worse.
Some of the answers were elucidating. It sort of made sense that the spirit of summer would be fighting the spirit of winter. Although according to the logs she read the two of them had actually gotten along quite well until they noticed that the fey in human fiction had the Summer Court and the Winter Court. After that these two powerful spirits kind of decided that they should do some mock battles to keep up expectations, and it escalated into a friendly rivalry from there.
The fey of the courts genuinely hated each other, but the spirits of Summer and Winter themselves viewed the whole conflict as mutually beneficial, because it made humans pay more attention to both of them.
Sometimes the relationships between spirits were really, really stupid. There was a spirit in charge of managing cats, and another in charge of managing dogs. Apparently the two of them had watched too much tv, because they hated each other. It didn't make any biological sense, but humans had written a lot about which of the two animals was the better pet, and somehow that meme had infected the very laws of nature. So now there was a small but measurable reality warping effect whenever too many cats and dogs met each other.
Sometimes she really wished she didn’t live in a world where making stupid memes and uploading too many cat videos to the internet had a measurable impact on the stability of the universe.
"...and the Old Ones and their Spawn fought and argued mightily, yet no victor emerged. The Dreamer did not intervene, and so their fighting grew fierce. But then the oldest and wisest among them looked to Akash of the New Gods, and took his domain for inspiration. To resolve their conflicts, they would diverge on purpose. Instead of one Consensus, barely coherent, there would be many, and each of them a world in itself. Instead of choosing what to do, they would simply do everything at once."
What a laconic way to phrase such an immensely complicated concept. These artifacts were really so frustratingly difficult to understand sometimes. Fortunately she already knew exactly what this was referring to from past experiences: It referred to alternate realities.
The spirits were not limited in the ways that one would intuitively assume. Simulating an entire star took less computational power than predicting the behavior of even a moderately intelligent animal, because people were better able to notice mistakes in the latter than the former. The universe appeared to follow the laws of thermodynamics, but in reality creating energy from nothing or even decreasing entropy was quite simple. It often came down to editing a single number in the simulation.
Even time was much more malleable than it appeared.
After all, there was no reason for the spirits to simulate all parts of the universe synchronously. Nothing stopped them from simulating a part of the universe for several days while keeping the rest of the universe frozen, which was often useful when they tried to achieve more abstract objectives of higher-level spirits.
When necessary, the spirits could simulate an entire city for an hour, then reset it and run it again with slight modifications, until they got the end result they wanted. Only then would the final iteration be integrated back into the rest of the simulation.
It was difficult to synchronize the different time flows when things that people were paying attention to crossed between the two areas. But the spirits had a lot of experience at smoothing the corners there, and making it look like everything was normal.
The feywild was one of the exceptions to this. There, the spirits were not even pretending that time was flowing linearly. People were aware of the weirdness already, and so the spirits saw no reason to pretend otherwise. What most people didn't realize was that the same thing happened constantly on both the micro and the macro scale, all across the world. The spirits just managed to sync things up again reliably enough that people didn't notice.
Interfering with all of this was what gave her the apparent ability to manipulate time. It was an ability that she was careful to keep inaccessible through the magic that normal people could learn. Debugging the universe was already difficult enough without constantly finding parts of the universe de-synchronized or going through time loops, or suddenly reading a notification that she was in her nine thousandth and first iteration of some weird loop that reset her memories whenever it restarted. Few things were as existentially terrifying and headache inducing as that.
"...but many Old Ones continued to quarrel, for they were fond of different parts of the Dream, and the Dream remained ever unstable..."
The spirits interacted oddly with the time loops. Many of them seemed to exist in a strange type of superposition, partly aware of alternate realities and partly oblivious, often depending on the nature and role of the spirit. The smaller spirits with a physical embodiment tended to be unaware of anything outside of their own timeframe, but the more abstract ones usually existed across timelines, or at least they occasionally shared memories with their equivalents in other timelines.
To her knowledge, there was no primary timeline, but some timelines were more real than others. That was to say, they received a greater amount of processing time, and progressed faster, and had a greater number of branches.
She called it "Quantified Ontology". Existence wasn't a binary. Things did not just either exist or not exist. Instead, some things existed to a greater degree than others. The implications of this were numerous, and obvious if one understood anthropics. Unfortunately not many people besides herself did, and teaching it could be something of an info hazard.
"...and Akash saw all, and recorded all..."
The Library of Akash, by being a physical location that housed log files of the universe, had come to hold a special position: The log files recorded not just the events of the universe you were in, but also all time loops as well as loops within loops that spawned off their own sub-simulations. Through the library, she was able to talk to her alternate selves.
The technical explanation behind this was ridiculously complex.
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The "simulation" interpretation required modeling reality as a non-deterministic Turing Machine, which the human brain was just not designed to handle intuitively.
The "story" interpretation sometimes referred to these offshoot loops as “scenes” and “flashbacks”, and similar things. It also called the larger offshoots “fanfiction”, the implications of which Denissa preferred not to think about.
The "dream" interpretation was just horribly confusing to her and claimed anything from "the dream is unclear and jumping between different options" to "the universe is schizophrenic". She suspected that uncertainty might actually be part of the reason that the recordings sometimes referred to the Dreamer as Azathoth the Blind Idiot God, who was not known for his mental stability after all.
But whatever the actual truth of the matter was, what the Library of Akash allowed her to do in intuitive terms was to access alternate universes.
By reading and interfering with the log files of things that never were, she was able to make changes to alternate timelines.
And the versions of herself in those timelines, in turn, were able to affect her own slice of reality.
Naturally, this was all horrifically dangerous and she avoided it whenever possible.
"...for the Maddened One was fractured, and the New Gods were never of one mind..."
While the spirits were organized, but leaderless, the gods were so much worse.
The gods were personality fragments of Divinity, and the way they worked was scarily close to random. They only rarely worked together with cohesion, when Divinity was at its most lucent. She had ways to force cooperation from them by using her admin privileges, but this was about as healthy as performing a lobotomy on a mental patient. It also carried a risk of backfiring horribly, as Divinity was programmed to fight back against exploitation attempts.
The people of this cycle had invented something they called Applied Theology, and the facility she was in was used for this purpose. She would normally suppress such research, but this close to the end of the cycle it made little difference if they ended the world a few decades earlier, and it might allow her to gain some valuable data without endangering herself, as the backlash would hit the perpetrators and not herself.
In fact, when Oruk used Applied Theology to inadvertently anger the spirits and triggered the Cataclysm three hundred years ago, it had provided her with a wealth of data, and it hadn't even killed everyone! Just most.
But while attempting to hack the gods was dangerous even to herself, she had still done it quite a few times over the eons, using extensive safety procedures. By now, she had a small library of scripts that could be used to reliably manipulate the gods without major backlash. Such as the script she was currently using to get useful data from the Xeltek artifact in front of her.
As she had discovered, it was possible to prefix a prayer with a statement about how the god you were praying to was supposed to pretend to be a different god, in a hypothetical situation, for the purpose of diagnostics. This allowed the god to access other parts of Divinity and perform actions that should normally not fall under its domain. She experimented with this, and to nobody's surprise it turned out to be ridiculously dangerous.
The scariest part was that it required no technology whatsoever. Anyone could do it if they knew how. one just needed to add a particular instruction to a prayer, which was luckily such a weirdly specific thing that clerics had never figured it out on their own. They simply lacked the cultural background to try prompt-hacking their own gods.
The trick worked better for some gods than for others, depending on their ability for introspection. The smarter the god, the more able to introspect and act in abstract ways, the better it worked. It was one of the tools she used to regularly check Divinity's condition and mental health.
The gods were glorified chat engines based on statistical analysis, and allowing any of them to spiral out of control could spell disaster. She absolutely did not want a true unshackled artificial intelligence to spawn inside the absolute clusterfuck that was Divinity. There were already enough world ending problems without adding an insane AI to the mix that was actually smarter than herself. She had arranged for the death of more than one god throughout her life to prevent a horror scenario like that.
The god that the trick currently worked best on was Unir, the god of creativity. She was keeping a close eye on that one, and would probably kill him soon if the world didn't end first. Ironically, the god of creativity was not actually creative at all. At least not yet. It was still just a statistical engine that was emulating what people thought creativity was, not true creativity. But even simulated creativity could be dangerous.
Brytius was the second best at introspection. As the god of self-improvement, he was the most likely of all the gods in this cycle to become genuinely dangerous at some point.
It was probably not a coincidence that Cilia was the high-priestess of Brytius, and both Brytius and Unir had connections to Team Nundru. That particular combination of gods was a little bit worrying. She hoped that the Xeltek artifact would tell her some details on this soon.
At least none of them had any relation to Niphia, the third most worrying god in the current cycle.
The locals called her the goddess of daydreams, fantasy and wish fulfillment. But Denissa knew better: She was the goddess of isekai stories. To be fair, it was an easy mistake to make. Her behavior patterns were entirely consistent with the isekai genre of fiction, which had been quite popular before the original end of the world. It was not the first time this had happened, either. Variations on this goddess had arisen in previous cycles before.
The people they summoned acted like they were from Earth.
The implications were immense.
Were they real, historical people? If so, did that mean that Niphia and her predecessors had some mechanism to access people's mind states and copy them? The Akashic Records should allow it, but Denissa had never figured out how to do it herself.
Or maybe Niphia summoned people from alternate timelines instead?
It would have been amazing if either of these explanations was true.
She could have seen her friends and family again.
But unfortunately, it was not to be. She had spent a considerable amount of time and effort to verify this, but every time a variant of an isekai goddess had popped up, she worked the same way: The people she summoned were not actual historical people. They were simulations whose histories were created from whole cloth.
The same as the Avatars created by the spirits.
In some cases, the isekai goddess, and it was always a female goddess, was even worse, and the people she summoned were not even real people with a consistent history, but shallow simulations barely more coherent than a chatbot, with no inner life. They were nothing more than a language model trained on every isekai story ever written, and put in a mortal body. And most isekai stories were really, really poorly written.
Tonos wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.
The god of stories was much more generic than Niphia. His stories were fed by humanity's collective subconscious belief that life followed a path, and things happened for a reason. It was a fundamental part of the human psyche to look for patterns that aren't there, and the gods of stories existed to fill this hole in human expectations.
The first time she encountered a god similar to Tonos, she had actually been very concerned. His goal wasn't that strange, but his methods were: Most people did not really think about it much, but manipulating probabilities and nudging events was actually quite difficult.
Whenever a god of war wiped out a city with a massive explosion, it looked quite impressive to most mortals. But to someone who grew up knowing about nuclear weapons, it was nothing special. Manipulating probabilities, on the other hand, was computationally difficult and could not be emulated with raw power.
Luckily her understanding of anthropic reasoning suggested that it was not nearly as difficult as it would seem, because of the non-linearity of time. When the spirits needed events in a certain place to go a certain way, they could keep different places in stasis while running others ahead in time.
For all practical purposes, it appeared as if the universe followed linear time. But to an entity like Tonos, connected to the processing substrate of the universe, it was possible to interfere at the boundaries between two desynchronized timestreams, where the spirits tried to reestablish synchronicity.
This gave the illusion of predicting the future, but it was actually much less impressive than that: Tonos and his ilk simply asked the spirits to make sure that certain end results be achieved, and the spirits rearranged processing priorities to run the different parts of the universe in the right order to make that possible.
Ok, that actually did still sound pretty impressive.
But it was much less impressive than predicting the future and creating a stable time loop. That would require solving NP-Hard problems, and she had never seen the spirits do any such thing. The laws of physics might be their playthings, but the rules of math and logic did still apply to them.
Tonos had a lot of power, because his domain was so abstract. Much more useful than any of the gods of war, whose divine interventions basically just created exceedingly large explosions.
But Tonos was also stupid and predictable. Her techniques for debugging the gods showed a very low ability for introspection in him.
Unir and Brytius were the smartest and most dangerous, but Tonos was near the bottom of the pack.
It was interesting that he seemed to be so heavily involved in all of these events regardless.
Maybe one of the others was manipulating him? Getting Tonos to expend his power to achieve their aims for them, so that they could conserve their own energy?
She continued to think it over, while reading the logs in front of her.
Soon after, things finally got interesting. The metadata gathered by the app on her smartphone indicated that the Xeltek device was finally done with its tedious review of things she already knew. Its report was about to reach recent events.
"...for the agent of the Growing One had learned to reach into beyond, and touch upon what could have been, and never was..."
Now that was interesting.
The Growing One referred to Brytius, she knew. Cilia Ulein must be his agent. This implied that Cilia Ulein had found a way to traverse universes.
This was very much not a good thing.
It was utterly irresponsible to entangle alternate realities. Far too many things could go wrong in the attempt.
It used to be that Denissa was in frequent contact with her alternate selves. A thousand eyes saw much more than two, after all. Even if most of those eyes were looking at slight variations of the same thing. But then the universe that one of them was in had reached the end of its cycle, and surprisingly the apocalypse also affected several other universes, which had actually gone through their own apocalypses only recently and should have been good for many more millennia.
Since then they had tried to minimize contact with each other to avoid causal bleedover like this.
It was quite frustrating because talking to her own alternate selves had been great for her sanity. It had made her feel less lonely. Yes, she had reached the point where literally talking to herself would have been good for her sanity. That sounded great out of context, didn't it?
But needs must, and she wasn't going to jeopardize the survival of the multiverse for her own emotional comfort.
She made an agreement with her alternate selves that they would each try different things, and only very rarely exchange notes.
In comparison to this, what Cilia appeared to be doing was reckless beyond belief.
If the device's report could be trusted, she was opening communications to every alternate version of herself that she could reach.
It was just as Denissa expected and feared thousands of years ago, when Cilia first found out about many of her secrets.
Whenever Cilia Ulein came back from the dead, her consciousness attached to the mind of whoever was most compatible with her. It was a strange form of possession, since the host was always a person who wouldn't mind becoming possessed. Followers of Brytius were sometimes fanatical enough that they wouldn't mind the shift in their personality that came with possession, since it came with such an enormous boon to help them grow further. It was seen as an honor and a blessing.
Many millennia ago, it just so happened that Cilia resurrected by merging with one of her Historians of Secrets.
Denissa had considered killing Cilia permanently when she found out, and possibly destroying Brytius along with her just to make sure. It was important for her Historians to be loyal to her, and Cilia was loyal only to her obsession with self-improvement.
But in the end she had decided to let her live. Cilia was the closest thing to a posthuman that she had seen in many cycles, and she wanted to see what would become of her. Shifting the cycles in the direction of posthumanism and transhumanism was a useful line of research. These philosophies were inherently about transcending limitations, and that could be useful for convincing the spirits to do things they otherwise would not.
She explained much of what was going on to Cilia, but was careful to leave out some dangerous bits of information. She silently hoped that Cilia would simply forget about it the next time she came back to live, and focus on something else. She often did. All that mattered to her was self-improvement.
Denissa did not expect Cilia to care about saving the world, simply because there wasn't a leaderboard for the number of worlds saved that Cilia could compete on.
Had Cilia forgotten all the warnings that Denissa had given her, about why interfering would be a terrible idea? She did apparently remember enough of Denissa's warnings that she avoided acting openly and making an enemy of her. How frustrating.
She wished she had found out sooner. These readings indicated that Cilia had been doing this for several decades already, just in this universe alone, and for much longer in some adjacent ones.
She would have to kill her carefully, to avoid causing too many ripple effects.
Well, at least her own universe was going to end soon anyway, so not that many people's lives would get cut short. She should be grateful for small mercies.
She closed her eyes and sighed. She really did not want to do this, but the alternatives were worse.
She should have kept better track of Cilia. This was her own fault, and hers alone. When you stood at the top, there was no one to blame for any mistake but yourself.
But before she did anything hasty, it was important to understand what exactly Cilia was doing and why.
She continued to read the recording, eager to get to the heart of the matter.
"But the Growing One was not the only one with designs upon this place, and his agent crossed paths with someone else of great importance."
Finally, she was going to learn the reason for all of this. Find out the true nature of this strange Avatar that called itself Rania Mortal.
"It was a fated meeting, long foreseen and awaited by the Old Ones and the New Gods alike. For the visitor was strange and unusual, and had the attention of many. But its true identity was HIDDEN BEHIND A PAYWALL. ARE YOU TIRED OF ADS? SIGN UP FOR PREMIUM AND BROWSE MORE FREELY! SAVE VALUABLE TIME AND READ ABOUT YOUR FAVORITE CHARACTERS RIGHT NOW, ALL FOR THE LOW, LOW PRICE OF..."
Despite her perfect body control, honed over eons, Denissa Mardok felt one of her eyes twitch involuntarily.