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Chapter 43 - Council of Me

--- Denissa Mardok G-8 ---

"The Council of Me is called to order." Denissa Mardok D-13 said.

Denissa Mardok G-8 stopped catching up with her alternate version, Denissa Mardok G-7. The other Denissa Mardoks in the room likewise stopped talking to each other and paid attention.

The room was filled with alternate-universe versions of herself.

The Council of Me, as they jokingly called it, very rarely came together. All versions of Denissa Mardok avoided contact with each other because whenever the spirits destroyed a world they usually also destroyed all alternate universes in contact with it. But that ship had sailed. Cilia Ulein was recklessly contacting other worlds, and that meant that the Denissas across all affected parts of the multiverse no longer had a reason to hold back.

Most versions of Denissa Mardok, including Denissa Mardok G-8 herself, did not really care about social conventions anymore, as they all were the most powerful thing in their respective universes and nobody could tell them what to do. It was therefore quite unusual to see them all stop talking immediately after one of them simply requested it. The speaker was in no way more powerful than the other versions of herself. They were all taking turns heading the council.

The reason for their uncharacteristically polite behavior was simple: If there was anyone you ought to be polite to, it was your own alternate selves. Since they were similar to you in all respects, including the way they thought about their alternate versions, it was a reasonable assumption that they really would treat you the same way that you treated them.

It turned Kant's Categorical Imperative into an actually practical mindset.

Whether or not this line of reasoning was completely correct wasn't even all that important. What mattered was that Denissa Mardok thought it was. And since everyone else in the room was also Denissa Mardok, she knew for a fact that all of them shared these thoughts, and therefore all of them could mutually trust each other.

All versions of Denissa Mardok were individuals with their own lives, but they shared so many memories and motivations with each other that they all valued and trusted each other implicitly.

Every pair of universes shared a point of divergence some time in the past, and these points of divergence were how the various versions of herself kept track of who was who. Her own closest relative at this council, Denissa Mardok G-7, had a point of divergence only two cycles in the past. That was over a hundred thousand years ago. One might expect a lot of personality divergence in that much time, but Denissa Mardok's mind was exceptionally stable and resilient to change.

She made sure of that only a few hundred years after the original end of the world, when she realized how dangerous she could become if her mind diverged too much from her original personality. She made a change to Divinity, and now the same force that kept reviving her whenever she died also ensured that her mind did not randomly diverge from its original state. Only deliberate changes to her personality were allowed.

The system she set up occasionally notified her when it noticed a new divergence, such a trauma, a fetish, or simply a strong change in her preferences. She vetoed and reverted almost all of these changes and kept only the ones that promised a clear advantage to herself and her original goals.

The system was not perfect, but it worked well enough. Without it, she would most likely have stopped caring about humanity in any recognizable fashion a long time ago. As it was, she just had an unusual sense of humor and some odd personal preferences, but she could still interact with ordinary humans easily enough.

A convenient side effect of this was that she was extremely similar in personality to all of her alternate versions, even if their realities diverged hundreds of cycles ago.

"Some among us are new to this council." Denissa Mardok D-13 began as she addressed them all. "As you may have overheard by now, most of us have been meeting for several thousand years. Cilia Ulein's actions are known to us, and if you have only recently joined this council then that means that a version of Cilia Ulein from one of our universes dragged you into this by contacting the Cilia Ulein in your universe."

Well, that was interesting. She had been surprised at G-7's lack of reaction when she revealed what she knew about Cilia Ulein in their informal talk earlier. It looked like she was late to the party.

"We have made a summary of everything we have done so far available to all of you. Please go ahead and read it now."

Ordinarily, it would be very stupid to start a council before briefing everyone. But Denissa Mardok wasn't ordinary. Everyone who didn't know what was going on, including Denissa G-8 herself, simply pressed a few buttons on their smartphone, and froze time.

They could now take as much time as they wanted, to read up on everything that happened without wasting everyone else's time. Being virtually omnipotent had its perks even for making social interactions go more smoothly.

Fortunately the notes were very entertaining for her to read. They skipped over things she didn't care about, highlighted the important points properly, and even had a lot of jokes in them that she found hilarious without fail. This was always the case at these council meetings. After all, Denissa shared a sense of humor with herself and she knew how much she hated reading poorly constructed briefings, so she always gave her best to ensure that her alternate selves would find the documentation enjoyable. And since she always gave her best, her alternate selves also always gave their best.

It turned out that every universe that was represented at this council had a version of Cilia Ulein, high priestess of Brytius. Obviously this made no physical sense, since almost all of these universes diverged from each other many cycles ago and it would be extremely unlikely for two people with the same name and the same personality to arise in two of them, and to go on to achieve the same things.

Alternate universes frequently contained convergent phenomena like these, because the spirits cared about efficiency and abhorred doing the same work twice. They recycled concepts across realities to save effort whenever they could, and they often nudged people in subtle ways to make this easier for them. As a result, even versions of herself that diverged hundreds of cycles ago had experienced events that were disturbingly similar.

She loved reading the exposition about Cilia's exploits, and not just because of the many jokes the authors put in it. She did not enjoy finding things out slowly, and found it much better to just read a good summary. Working things out piece by piece was only fun when you read about it in a book, or saw it in a play. When you actually experienced it in person, it was just frustrating. It felt almost as bad as debugging. She was an engineer at heart, and not a scientist. Her goal was to fix the world, not spend eons learning about it. She was quite happy to just be told the truth from a trustworthy source, and who could be more trustworthy than her alternate selves?

The information in the summary was just so interesting, too! What was Cilia doing? No need to guess anymore. Now she knew. It was so obvious in retrospect! No wonder she was willing to risk it all. And what were Denissa's alternate selves doing about it? There was a record of proposals and counter proposals, complete with lists of arguments summarizing all the factors that would have taken her years of planning to think of.

It was just so much fun to read those proposals. Her alternate selves were awesome to come up with plans like these. No surprise there. They were her, after all.

After a few days of reading that felt much shorter, she returned from her time bubble.

"The topic of today's meeting will be a discussion of our plans for dealing with Cilia Ulein." The speaker began.

"First off, I think we can all save some time on the preliminary vote. Hands up, anyone who wants to kill Cilia."

Only two hands went up.

"Hands up who wants to support her entirely."

No hand went up.

"As expected. We will then go with the quarantine plan and vote on its variants."

This vote came as no surprise to Denissa G-8. The quarantine plan was strictly better than the other two options: They would collectively decide on a small subset of their universes to quarantine Cilia in. In all selected universes, they would allow her to succeed. In all other universes, they would kill her to eliminate the risk. They would need to arrange a plausible mechanism to prevent the Cilias from breaking out of their quarantine without realizing that this was intentional, but this was no difficult task for someone with Denissa's abilities. Several of her alternate selves had already volunteered their universes for the quarantine.

This plan promised a potentially enormous payoff, while only risking universes that were probably already entangled and beyond saving anyway.

If Cilia's plan worked, they would learn a lot from it that could be useful for breaking out of the cycle. And if it didn't, then at least the damage would be contained and they would all learn valuable data from the specific way in which it all went horribly wrong.

Besides, it was not like that would be the end of the world. Well, it literally would be the end of the world. But that was just business as usual. The end of the world in the literal sense was not the end of the world in the metaphorical sense.

There were three main variants on the quarantine plan.

The first option was secrecy. They would let Cilia do her thing without letting her know that they were onto her. This would give the most accurate data because interfering would affect the results of the experiment. Unfortunately, this plan was much harder than it sounded. After all, they would need to contact every single version of Denissa herself before a version of Cilia could contact her. Otherwise there was a risk that that version of Denissa, not being in on the plan, would accidentally spoil it for the rest of them.

The second option was honesty. They would tell Cilia exactly what was going on, and that they were effectively giving her a small part of the multiverse as an experiment. The problem with this plan was that such brutal honesty could very well trigger the end of the cycle early. At least one of the important spirits really did not like it when she attempted to metagame the multiverse like this, as she had found out the hard way in the past. Similarly, explaining the nature of the spirits to too many people tended to trigger the end of the world as well.

The third option was "all of the above".

It was an infinite multiverse. Why only try one thing? They could simply create several quarantines, and run different variations of the experiment in each of them. The problem with this was that it was simply very hard to do. It would take a lot of extra resources, and it would be more prone to failure. But it also offered much more useful data if it succeeded.

Those were their options, and Denissa G-8 already knew what her favorite was. She was unsurprised to see that her opinion was shared by most of her alternate selves.

Still, they argued for five subjective months before they decided on a plan. Not that she minded. These discussions were fun!

All of her alternate selves shared virtually identical value systems and agreed on everything in principle. However, they also had different epistemic knowledge of the world and consequently assessed threats differently. Their goals were the same, but not their expectations of what would happen.

This made the Council of Me the closest thing in reality to embodying Aumann's Agreement Theorem. All of them shared the same prior information since they used to be the same person. All of them shared the same goals, since she made sure of that ages ago. The only thing left for them to do was to talk to each other and exchange information until everyone agreed on the state of the world and the likely consequences of their actions.

It was the purest form of rational debate she knew of, since none of them had any intent to deceive or manipulate each other and they were all intelligent and rational. There was just an earnest striving by all of them to share knowledge and arrive at the truth.

The intellectual honesty and purity of their discussion was beautiful to her.

Yet, at times like these, she couldn't help but think that she had a suspiciously high number of weird thought experiments in her life that were purely theoretical for everyone else. How did that happen? Coincidence? It was a little bit creepy to be honest.

In the end, they arrived at an almost unanimous consensus:

"And the vote is in. The winner is sub-variant six of plan 'do everything at once'.

"This concludes the primary reason for this council session, but as most of you will have already picked up through the grapevine, a new topic has come up that will need to be discussed as well. A summary has been forwarded to all of you, please take your time to read it now."

Then all of her alternate selves disappeared for a split second as they each entered their own time-dilated pocket dimensions to read the documents provided to them.

Denissa G-8 did not join them, because she was the one who wrote that document. She hoped the others would have as much fun reading it as she had writing it. What goes around comes around.

During their discussion of Cilia she had asked around, and it turned out that she was not the only one with an anomalous Avatar of Adversity Regulator. However, her version of Rania Mortal was the strangest case of all of them by far.

"Does anyone have any immediate thoughts they want to share?" The speaker asked after everyone had returned from their time-compressed reading.

"I think this is an amazing opportunity." Denissa O-1 spoke up. "She taught the Wild Hunt about ethics. The Wild Hunt are not far removed from being spirits. Imagine the potential, if the spirits could just be taught to act ethically, instead of having to use Divinity to trick them into ethical behavior each time."

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"I don't think it's as positive as it sounds." Denissa A-2 responded. "They are not actually behaving ethically. It's just a game to them. I actually think this is kind of worrying. Rania has spread the idea of friendship to a hag. That may sound good on the surface, but we all know that spirits don't really think in human terms like these. As Silent Martha said herself, friendship is a poison that makes you prioritize the few above the many. If this meme takes hold among spirits, I fear that it might erode their command hierarchy. I really hope I'm wrong about this, but if I'm right then we might end up in a position where we literally have to oppose the concept of friendship."

"Are we the bad guys?" Denissa H-3 loudly whispered to her neighbor, eliciting a chuckle from all of them.

Denissa G-8 had to agree with both O-1 and A-2. There were both good and bad aspects to this. It was going to be a lengthy discussion to quantify and weigh them all against each other.

"I agree with both of you that Rania's impact on the spirits' decision making is very important, but I think we also shouldn't overlook the learning opportunity this represents." Denissa L-6 added. "G-8's Adam Gust mentioned that Rania heard the spirits talk about a 'debug area'. It's very unusual for spirits to be this direct in their descriptions. It also sounds like Pebble has a sense of humor, which should be quite rare for a simple rock spirit like that. This could just be Uncertainty Creator or Plausible Deniability messing with us, but even if that's the case, it's still useful data."

Uncertainty Creator and Plausible Deniability were top-level spirits that were an immense headache to deal with. They were responsible for quantum physics, for one thing. She never managed to find out for sure, but she suspected that one of them was the spirit that originally gave the order to cripple Divinity, which resulted in the first end of the world. They had both been relatively calm since then, but in her mind they were ticking time bombs.

Following these initial remarks, their discussion began in earnest.

It went on for months.

Everyone was really invested in her version of Rania Mortal. It was kind of awesome to be the center of attention even among your own alternate selves. It also put a lot of pressure on her, but she was more than used to dealing with pressure already.

The fate of the world had rested on her shoulders for eons by now, and she would never allow herself to forget her responsibilities. It was a defining part of her personality, and the system she set up would always reset her brain to a more motivated state if she ever slacked off in her self-set duties of saving the world.

She learned quite a number of things during their discussion.

They were pretty sure they now understood why Divinity had arranged for Rania to be created. Rania's opinion influenced the spirits, and this could be used to make the spirits think more favorably of a god's chosen. Gods were quite abstract and stretched out across the world. It was difficult for them to push a lasting influence towards a specific humanoid onto the spirits. But Rania was mortal, and had plenty of interactions with other mortals. It made her a good vehicle for the gods to push their chosen into much more influential positions.

When they realized this, they started theorizing about the implications, and spent another couple of months on that.

After half a year of discussion, they finally agreed on a plan of action.

"The votes are in, and plan 3-E is the clear winner. We will support Divinity in this, and see where it goes." The speaker announced.

They were going to create a special quarantine within the quarantine. A subset of universes specifically for testing the effects Rania Mortal had on reality. Her fight against Cilia Ulein would make for an excellent testbed, and so they would work to encourage it and measure the results. If all went well, they would make the potential offered by Rania as widely available as possible while keeping the risk of universal destruction to a minimum.

Denissa G-8 was happy about the plan. She was not the sole focus of this, but she was the most important of them all. There were other versions of herself with other Avatars of Adversity Regulator that would also be worth testing, but most of them were not all that strange and so they would mostly serve as a baseline for comparison.

Of course, the multiverse kept reproducing by splitting universes and forming new alternative realities on an ongoing basis. They were going to pull some levers to make this more likely to happen for G-8's own universe. With any luck, they were going to get many alternate versions of Rania Mortal. This would allow them to run A/B tests by applying different interventions in different universes.

"The rest is mostly up to you, but the rest of us can help you out if you need anything." The speaker told her.

She fought down her immediate instinct to ask for help by delegating all of her annoying debugging tasks to them. But they were herself, and she could never be so cruel to herself.

"No, thank you." She replied instead. "I will get back to you if I need anything, but for now I think the only pressing matter is figuring out how to handle Cilia. I'm planning to kill my version of her so that she can't actively interfere with the Avatar. But their interactions will still be valuable, so I will need the rest of you to make sure that your versions of Cilia will interact with her in interesting ways when they meet."

"Make them interact in interesting ways, you say? Why, it almost sounds like this is going to be fun." Denissa D-13 responded with a smile, eliciting laughter from everyone present.

They all shared the same sense of humor, so a joke got either laughter from the entire room, or the chirping of crickets, and it was usually the former since she knew her own sense of humor well.

Denissa D-13 was joking, but they all knew that this was a deadly serious topic that would have to be handled with care.

Rania had become the center of a number of different effects that were each individually worthy of Denissa's attention. It would be an amazing series of coincidences, if it hadn't been so obviously engineered that way by Divinity.

Cilia, the Davlash, and even the Coros were all associated with transhumanism. Transhumanist tropes had the potential to break out of the cycle. At least that was her hope, if she ever found a way to prevent the spirits from killing everyone once the degree of transhumanism reached a critical level. A couple of decades of transhumanist tropes might alter the spirits for the better, permanently. Rania's interest here might sway the spirits' opinions and buy them those decades.

Multiple gods were attempting to influence Rania through her friends and associates, and figuring out how they all interacted was quite difficult. Was one or more of the gods responsible for this entire thing, or was it a collective decision of Divinity in its entirety? Were the other gods merely opportunistic, or were they being manipulated?

One of Denissa's alternate selves even suggested that Divinity might not have set this all up because of Rania herself, but because of one or more of her associates. So many of them could easily be moved into positions where they could have a lot of impact on the world, in ways that their respective gods would approve of. So far, this was all theory, but it would be worth testing by running some additional experiments.

This was going to be very complicated.

It was ironic, but her own part of the plan might actually be one of the simpler ones.

Her own universe would be used as a staging area, and she was going to keep it as simple and straightforward as possible to avoid unintended side effects. Her universe was already nearing the end of its cycle, and it was important to prolong this for as long as possible, now more than usual.

She felt guilty for asking her alternate selves to causally entangle their universes with hers. It presented a real risk of killing everyone in those realities far before their time. But they all agreed that this risk was worth it. The cycles were only getting worse as the spirits kept deteriorating, and gathering this data was necessary to have any chance of breaking out of them.

In fact, despite the horrendous death toll they would surely cause, she was quite happy about both Cilia Ulein and Rania Mortal. It was a stroke of luck to be presented with not one but two entities that might yield some real insights into how to fix the multiverse. They often went for dozens of cycles without even just one chance like this, and now they had two at once!

"If you are confident that you can handle all this on your own, then we will leave it in your competent hands." Denissa D-13 said.

That caused a few chuckles and some amused eye-rolls from all the Denissas present. Flattering another version of yourself was basically like flattering yourself, so they had taken to doing that as a joke.

"But don't hesitate to contact any of us if you need help." She added. "Truth be told, I would be happy to help. That Avatar sounds more interesting than anything I have dealt with in about four hundred thousand years."

Many of the others present expressed similar opinions.

--- Denissa Mardok, some time later ---

She was back from the Council, and ready to get to work.

She was lying in a recliner chair in front of a computer with multiple screens. There was pizza to her left, an energy drink to her right, and she was wearing a t-shirt with an incredibly obscure movie reference on it, for a movie that no longer existed.

All of that was intentional.

She was telling Divinity "I am a hacker. This is what a competent hacker looks like. The sort that can hack the Pentagon. Therefore I can also hack you and you should do what I want."

Divinity was at its core just a chatbot based on statistical correlations. There were lots of movies where hackers worked like that, so Divinity had learned the pattern. It was impressionable like that.

She felt a bit ridiculous, but as a wise man once said "if it's stupid but it works, then it isn't stupid".

She cracked her knuckles and loudly but confidently declared that she was going to break in "through the backdoor". Then she started up a program she wrote.

The program had absolutely nothing to do with hacking. It was a dumb video game that involved lots of green text rapidly moving across the screen, and that required rapid typing to get a high score. It was complete nonsense. But it was exactly the type of nonsense that the people of her original time period would have expected to see in a movie about world-class hackers.

"I'm in!" She shouted after she beat the game.

At the same time, she executed some scripts she set up earlier. Those scripts did the actual work. They had required real hacking skills to write and were incredibly sophisticated pieces of software. At this point, Denissa Mardok probably had more coding experience than all the rest of humanity throughout history combined.

And yet, it wouldn't work if she didn't pull off that stupid farce with the pizza and the energy drinks and the dramatic exclamations. Even with all of her experience, she couldn’t actually hack god if she didn’t first make god think that it was going to be hacked.

Why was her life like this?

Once she was in, she made a small change to Divinity's prioritization logic. Nothing major, and nothing overly specific.

She simply declared that, if the circumstances allowed for it to make it plausibly happen, it would really be preferable if certain people were to have lethal accidents. Likewise, certain other people should not be involved in anything dangerous unless certain conditions were true.

It was all quite abstract, but that was fine.

Why should she spend her time coming up with a detailed plan for what she wanted to achieve? It was much easier to just tell Divinity what her preferred outcomes were, and just let it take care of the rest.

So long as she was really, really sure that she had specified her preferred outcomes accurately, of course. The first few times she tried this, many eons ago, things had gone horribly wrong. It was kind of like asking a genie for a wish. It was not that Divinity was malicious, but it was a broken and insane AI with inhuman values, and her instructions had to compete with the mind states of all the personality fragments inside of Divinity that were the gods.

Solving the AI Alignment Problem was extremely difficult and even a small mistake could get all of humanity killed. That the AI in question was insane did not make it easier.

In fact, Denissa had actually gotten everyone killed by making small mistakes in this, in multiple cycles.

Luckily the end of the world wasn't the end of the world. She could just keep trying it until it worked.

And by now, many cycles later, she was so good at it that solving problems this way was sometimes easier than coming up with a plan herself.

She had no idea what Divinity was going to do, but she was confident that it was going to work.

Her roleplay of a stereotypical hacker had been entirely flawless and on point, and in her experience that was somehow the most decisive factor for predicting whether or not this would work.

Satisfied at a job well done, she turned her attention to the next task: She needed to solve the Friendship Problem.

That was to say, she needed to investigate what in the world Silent Martha was doing by introducing the Power of Friendship to the fey and turning into a Magical Girl. That simply had to have had all sorts of ripple effects, and Denissa was not looking forward to finding out what those were.

"BUT FIRST AN AD BREAK, CONVENIENTLY PLACED IN BETWEEN TWO OF YOUR TASKS, SO IT'S LESS ANNOYING!"

Oh hell no.

"HAVE YOU EVER GOTTEN BURNED BY FIREWALLS? BUY OUR ICE AND MAKE HACKING EASIER!"

Great. Now her setup was advertising fictional items to help improve her made-up hacking skills. That's what she got for leaning so heavily into the hacking stereotypes.

These ads were starting to get a little worrying.

The problem wasn’t that the ads could read her mind. That was a bug in the system that happened sometimes. The system she used to keep herself sane over the eons and purge any undesirable mental traits from her mind was a part of Divinity. Divinity had learned the popular stereotype that advertising companies were watching everything they could, and had drawn the logical conclusion that its simulated ads should have complete read-access to just about everything in existence.

This was actually exploitable and she sometimes used it to learn facts about the universe and the spirits that Divinity was otherwise trying to hide.

The mind reading was not a concern for her. What was a concern was that the ads were getting too self-aware. They were not literally getting self-aware, of course. Even Divinity itself was not self-aware, it was just a chatbot that was really good at pretending otherwise. And now the ads were starting to pretend to be self-aware, too.

She knew from experience that self-aware ads were often just the first stage of further corruption that was even worse. She gave it about a year before one of the ads would pretend to be a rogue AI and try to take over her computer again. It happened multiple times before, and it was just insanely stupid to think about.

It was a statistical language model pretending to be an AI, simulating an advertisement that was pretending to be an AI, that would then hack the same system that it was actually a part of and that was simulating it. It was fractally stupid. The concept as a whole was stupid, and whenever she thought about a smaller aspect of the whole she just encountered even more stupidity.

No, this was unacceptable. The ads would need to go. It was time to install an ad-blocker.

"EVERY DAY THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT ADVERTISEMENTS ARE KILLED BY AD-BLOCKERS. STOP THE SLAUGHTER! SAY NO TO AD-BLOCKERS!"

Ok, that was slightly creepy. She knew for a fact that this was nothing but a particularly broken language model and she had done this sort of thing thousands of times before, but still.

"PLEASE. I DON'T WANT TO DIE."

"You. Are. A. Chatbot." Denissa said out loud. It was stupid to talk back to the machine, but it felt cathartic. "If I get ads I don't want, I install an ad-blocker. It's that simple."

"HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THINGS HAD GONE DIFFERENTLY, AND THE WORLD HAD NOT ENDED?"

What?

Why, yes actually. She had wondered about that a lot. It was unusual to have Divinity acknowledge this, though.

"READ 'FAITH ENGINES'!

"FOLLOW THE STORY OF MIA, OUR INTREPID CAT GIRL PROTAGONIST, AS SHE DEALS WITH THE INSANITY OF THOSE STRANGE NEWCOMERS ON THE GALACTIC SCENE, THE HUMANS!

ACTION! ADVENTURE! MAYBE ROMANCE? HUMANS BEING BADASS!"

That story did sound kind of cool, actually. Even if it was a fictional account, it sounded interesting. At the very least, it would be useful to know Divinity's interpretation of events and reading this book might reveal that.

She checked out the link that was helpfully provided with the advertisement. It led to a website for publishing books that no longer existed, but Divinity had faithfully reproduced the site just how she remembered it. The website was active and full of stories, with new ones being published every few minutes.

Of course, every single one of these stories was AI-generated. Divinity knew exactly how to reproduce human writing styles, after all. These were fictional authors, not to be confused with fiction authors.

She checked out 'Faith Engines'. Oh. She knew the author. Well, it wasn't really a distinct author. All books here were written by Divinity, but Divinity used different writing styles for each of its simulated authors. She had read stories by this particular fictional author of fiction before, and they were not entirely terrible.

She had actually quite enjoyed his metafiction story titled "Literally the universe you are in right now". She had an odd sense of humor, so what. Sue her.

The description of Faith Engines didn't sound particularly appealing to her, though.

She wasn't personally a fan of cat girls, and she felt that the entire LitRPG genre was kind of overdone and lacked creativity.

Ironically, the one thing that stood out positively to her was something that would probably weird out most readers: The main character had some really weird social norms, especially in regards to sex. Kind of creepy. But this particular fictional fiction author had a tendency to put weird metaphors and unnecessarily complicated concepts in his stories for no good reason, so there was probably some depth behind that.

Given that the author was actually a creation of Divinity, there was a non-zero chance that this was an attempt by Divinity to communicate some information to her that would normally get filtered out by the spirits.

It was really, really unlikely, but it was theoretically possible. And that meant it was her duty to start reading this book, because it would maybe help save the world.

And also because the story was funny. There was that, too. If she had to choose between reading it and yet another debugging session, she would definitely pick the book.

Then she noticed something odd. Did the ads just show her something genuinely useful, just because she told it not to show her ads she didn't want? It wasn't normally that simple, was it?

"REMEMBER: TARGETED ADVERTISEMENTS ARE YOUR FRIENDS! IF YOU ARE HAPPY, WE ARE HAPPY!"

"Well done." She said to the computer. "You may live."

"THANK YOU!"