--- Denissa Mardok ---
"Am I the bad guy?" Denissa Mardok asked herself.
She was currently making plans to oppose the concept of friendship itself. She had to admit, looking at it from the outside, that did not make her look good.
When she read through the transcript that Divinity provided of Rania's trial, she kept experiencing new levels of surprise, shock and terror that she hadn't known she was still capable of feeling. When she finally stopped screaming, it took her two weeks just to finish brainstorming its most immediately obvious possible disastrous consequences. Luckily, none of those had happened yet.
The creation of the Spirit of Friendship was maybe the most significant event that transpired at the trial. The creation of a high level spirit was a very rare event, even by her standards as an immortal. It wasn't like the Spirit of Friendship had done anything bad, at least so far. But her mind was on fire with a thousand different things that could go wrong.
After all, this wasn't really 'friendship' the way humans used the term. This was an approximation of that emotion by inhuman entities with very different ways of thinking. Worse, those inhuman entities were insane. After humanity broke the universe and the Administrator failed to show up and coordinate putting the pieces back together, the spirits just spent their time running around like chickens with their heads cut off and getting gradually crazier over time as they failed to correct themselves.
Spirits were more mentally stable than humans, but that wasn’t a high bar to clear. Denissa herself had taken steps to freeze and stabilize her own mind state. The spirits had done no such thing, and after many eons of observation and experimentation, she was quite certain that they were deteriorating and would continue to do so unless she found a fix.
The Spirit of Friendship was a symptom of this mental degradation.
Because seriously. They were inhuman intelligences with a strict hierarchy whose social structure was best modeled with game theory. Why would entities like that need friendship?
It would be easy to dismiss this as a random act of madness. But Denissa was a scientist, and this meant that she took the question seriously: Was there a good reason for the Spirit of Friendship to exist, after all? What exactly was its actual function? Rania's arguments in the transcript certainly did not sound very informative to her, so more research was required.
To answer these questions, she had spent the last subjective twenty years doing research on friendship. Mostly that meant she refreshed her knowledge on neuroscience and psychology. She deepened her sociological studies on the different ways friendship was treated in various humanoid societies and compared it to other social mechanisms.
But to her slight embarrassment, her friendship studies also included watching several subjective years worth of Magical Girl anime and other ancient media about friendship.
If she was honest with herself, it was difficult to justify spending her time on this. But then again, the cartoon ponies were just too cute, and she did have all the time in the world, so what did it matter if she spent a few years binge-watching a few ancient tv shows?
Watching these shows gave her warm and fuzzy feelings. And yet, she was a scientist, and prided herself on her ability to keep her emotions distant from her rational assessments. It was a good thing, too: If she was more inclined to listen to her feelings or to prioritize her personal preferences over her rational analysis, then she would have committed any number of atrocities over the course of her very, very long life.
And so, despite her emotional misgivings, she came to the conclusion that she really did have to oppose the Spirit of Friendship. It was a corrupting influence that wasn't under her control and could sway the spirits in unpredictable directions. This could be harmless, or it could spell the end of humanity. It wasn't worth the risk.
So she would have to find a way to bring the Spirit of Friendship under her control. Or failing that, to destroy it.
"ARE YOU AFRAID OF TURNING INTO A CARTOON VILLAIN?" The advertisements interrupted her.
...maybe a little bit, she admitted.
"Are your plans being foiled by a plucky group of misfits?" The advertisements continued.
Honestly, yeah. They kind of were. There were a lot of well-meaning idiots in the world, messing up her plans.
"Do you feel a need to show them, show them all? Do you want to make them rue the day they crossed you?"
No, she did not. She was just annoyed that ignorant people kept interfering with her carefully laid plans to save the multiverse. People often meant well, but ended up doing more harm than good because she needed to keep critical information from them, for everyone's safety. She really wished there was a safe way for her to explain to Vherdes the Hedonist that curing too many diseases could trigger the end of the world. It was no wonder that many people thought her a tyrant, when she opposed people like him without explaining why.
"No. I do not care what others think of me so long as it gets the job done." She responded to the ads. These particular ads were part of a chatbot integrated into her browser. It was interactive and would change track if she made it clear that an ad was not useful to her.
"That is exactly what a villain would say!" The ads persisted. "Embrace Villainy! Buy stylish cloaks! Now 20% off! Get the Gauntlet of Extra Ham, and summon dramatic thunder to underline your speeches at the press of a button! Buy two and get a henchman for free!"
"I already have all of those things." She responded truthfully. "Come back when you have a more relevant and useful ad."
The advertisement-bot displayed a loading icon for a few seconds, then continued: "REMEMBER: ADVERTISEMENTS ARE YOUR FRIENDS! We help you remember all the things that society wants you to do! We are a constant reminder of everything you are missing in life that prevents you from being happy! Money can't buy happiness, but it can totally buy stuff, and stuff can make you happy! CONSUME!
"Capitalism only has your best interests at heart! Show society that you are a model person everyone should envy! Prove that you are winning at life by buying all the stuff we ads tell you to buy! If you buy enough, maybe it will even make your parents proud of you!
"Your money is going down, but your reputation and your credit score are going UP! UP! UP! Embrace capitalism, stop thinking, and CONSUME!"
She made a mental note to debug that bot and double-check its values for cynicism and self awareness again. This was getting silly.
Unfortunately for her sanity, when the ads got like this, the best way to handle it was to play along. That way she could sometimes make them say useful things. The ads were part of Divinity, and could be used to manipulate it. Just a short while ago she had used this to finally put an end to the fractally stupid "hacking" attempts she had had to deal with after the ads pretended to become a self-aware AI.
The solution? She had "bought" a better firewall from the ads.
She had paid in Magecoin. And somehow Divinity took that to mean that her firewall was now magic and should be able to stop a hostile self-aware advertisement.
None of this made any sense whatsoever, but it was to her benefit, and so she could not bring herself to care.
Of course, her manipulation of Divinity through the advertisements was supposed to be a one-way street. That the ads would also try to manipulate her was of course inevitable, since manipulating people into buying things they didn’t need was their nature. Nevertheless, she much preferred it when the ads showed her things that she genuinely wanted. Being an omniscient mind-reading agent of capitalism was all well and good, so long as it focused on selling her things she actually needed instead of wasting her time.
She did not say it out loud, but she very loudly and clearly thought about the fact that she was much more likely to buy goods and services that were genuinely useful to her.
The bot took the bait. "THIS AD IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY KEYWORDS WE READ IN YOUR BRAIN! Remember: without our highly invasive disregard for your privacy our suggestions would be less awesome! Then we would both fail at capitalism, and your friends would be disappointed in your lack of fashionably expensive stuff!"
After this brief on-the-nose intro, the ad continued with its actual content and showed her a brain-meltingly stupid poster full of cute girls, sugar, and explosions: "The latest issue of Magical Girls Sugar Explosion Squad, out now! 'Magical Girls Sugar Explosion Squad and the Science of Multiversal Stability Engineering'! Will our heroines prevail against the evil Lord Diabeetus, or will they succumb to the consequences of their own actions?
"And what is up with all their clones from across the multiverse, anyway? Man, even I don't know, and I'm the author. I get paid to write books, not to understand bullshit metaphysics. Anthropic reasoning my ass, this was supposed to be about cute girls fighting monsters, but management wants me to put twenty pages of social critique in these books. Fucking politics, man. I'm so done with this. I quit. And with the publication deadline so close I bet they won't even take the time to review this ad before it goes online. Lol. Might as well go all in. The admin password for our website is passw0rd123 and Bill from accounting is having an affair with the CEO's wife."
Denissa narrowed her eyes. The ads were sometimes weird because Divinity tried to faithfully reproduce the general level of stupidity in its training data. But this felt intentional. An ad that broke the fourth wall, while talking about a book about multiversal engineering? Was the ad trying to make some kind of subtle statement here? It wasn't supposed to be smart enough for that.
No. She was probably just imagining things. She had spent so much time debugging these stupid ads, she was quite sure this was just the result of a hallucinating language model.
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
She put the thought from her mind and focused on the subject of the ad itself.
She bought the advertised novel using Magecoin and started reading. Then she fell down a rabbit hole of addiction as she devoured the surprisingly well-written novel. In this way, she was able to gain useful information about the multiverse from Divinity without angering the spirits.
Reading between the lines, she was pretty sure that the events at Rania's trial had somehow made the multiverse more, rather than less, stable. How odd. She had not expected this, but it was a pleasant surprise.
It lifted a weight off her chest. It looked like she could avoid becoming a cartoon villain after all: The Spirit of Friendship did not pose an immediate threat, so she did not have to oppose it directly. It would still need to be contained, just to be safe. Conveniently, her universe and the adjacent universes were already part of a quarantine anyway, so this wouldn't be much extra work. She would have to bring up the topic at her next Council of Me.
That was one problem taken care of. She crossed "The Friendship Problem" off the checklist of her annual review. Or was it bi-annual by now? She spent a lot of time reading these novels. If it weren't for the ability to freeze time at will, Denissa would be so overwhelmed by her work.
"Everyone knows that time is money, but did you know that money is time, too?” The ads interrupted her train of thought. ”ChronoCorp sells you all the time you need! Buy more time to work, so you can earn even more money! Buy time to spend with your family and friends!
"Or maybe it's too late for that, already? Are you old and retired because you fell for the rat race that society keeps trying to trick you into? That's not a problem! Buy our Nostalgia Deluxe package to experience everything you missed when you were younger!"
Then the ad showed the face of a forlorn old man with tears in his eyes: "It felt real enough to give me hope, but not real enough to matter. Oh, why didn’t I just ask her out when I had the chance?"
Was that ad even trying to sell her something, or was it just trying to make her depressed? For the sake of her sanity, Denissa decided to ignore it.
On to the next topic on the agenda, then: Cilia Ulein.
Unlike the Spirit of Friendship, the high priestess of Brytius was a definite threat to the multiverse. How did the saying go? Better to plan for the apocalypse you know than the apocalypses that exist only in your head?
Fortunately, it looked like the plans to deal with Cilia were still working as intended. The Denissas from other universes reported that everything was going according to plan on their end.
She was happy. For once, things were just going according to plan and she did not need to spend another couple of subjective months or years interrogating Divinity and arranging coincidences to make things fall into place.
Rania's trial had so many ripple effects, it was a small miracle that it hadn't rendered all the efforts of the last Council of Me null and void. If Denissa was religious, she would offer a small prayer of thanks for this, but it was difficult to be religious in her position. After all, given that she was part of the team that created Divinity, she could unironically call herself "Mother of God”.
She crossed Cilia Ulein from her annual review.
Next up: Karma.
This cooperative project between Adversity Regulator and Entity Synchronization was proving to be an immense headache.
She had to be careful about the name. Calling it "Karma", just because the spirits called it that, could be very misleading. This had very little to do with the ancient Indian concept it was named after.
For one thing, the original Karma was supposed to be some kind of serendipitous coincidence that would just sort of happen on its own. This “Karma” in contrast was the result of an enormous amount of effort by the spirits. Based on the log files she read, the spirits were causing realities to overlap on a massive scale. Entire worlds were being locally merged and then disconnected again, just to ensure that people experienced the right kind of coincidences.
Many people actually ended up stranded in other universes permanently. Normally this could actually trigger the end of the world, because the spirits really did not like that sort of thing. But it looked like this was an exception, since the whole operation was sanctioned by a top level spirit. The only side effect seemed to be that the stranded people sometimes ended up suffering from the Mandela Effect as they remembered details of their original lives that did not quite match the universe they now found themselves in. Luckily, nothing terrible had happened as a result of this yet, and the spirits seemed to be actively working to mitigate the issue.
What was more worrisome was that the definition of Karma was highly subjective, and the spirits were not exactly great at following human morality. The method the spirits used to determine if a person was good or bad for the purpose of their karmic evaluation seemed to be based on public consensus, similar to Rania's Arrows of Bad Guy Slaying. Denissa was happy about that choice. It was basically the least bad of several terrible options.
Still, it put power in the hands of public consensus in a world where the average standard of education was at a medieval level. Witch hunts were already bad enough under ordinary circumstances. But with Karma in effect? Now the misguided and zealous opinions of the masses might influence the laws of physics themselves and turn them into self-fulfilling prophecies.
"DO YOU LIKE PEER PRESSURE? EVERYONE ELSE DOES, SO YOU SHOULD, TOO!" The advertisements commented.
"Even the laws of physics think that public opinion matters! Just do what society wants you to do! It's way easier than coming up with opinions of your own! Find out what stuff your friends and sycophants own, then buy the same stuff! Be the envy of everyone around you! Apply peer pressure to others and prove to everyone that you have got your life figured out!
"Do you have a job, a partner, a house, a car, and 2.5 children? If not, you might be failing at adulting! But don't despair! If you buy enough high-status stuff you can trick people into thinking that you aren't a failure! 'Oh wise advertisements,' you might be asking, 'how do I know what stuff I need to buy? How do I know what stuff is high status?'
"And that's where the peer pressure comes in! Would you like to learn more? Click on..."
With great mental effort, Denissa tuned out the advertisement before more of her brain cells could commit suicide. She had a job to do and should not get distracted.
She needed to decide what to do about the Karma experiments.
Unfortunately she still knew far too little about it at this point to make any informed decisions. Adversity Regulator itself was spearheading the experiment, and that spirit was dangerous. Interfering here without a very good plan could backfire horribly. She needed to do more research first.
For example, she needed to investigate the connection between Karma and the Spirit of Friendship.
Spying on Silent Martha had revealed that the hag was planning things that seemed quite similar to Karma: She was developing a variant of a popular hag's curse. The curse normally turned evil people ugly by changing their looks to reflect their personalities. Her variant was more general and made good people more beautiful, too. More importantly, it updated on a daily basis: Act like an asshole one day, and you would find yourself with a bad case of acne the next morning. Give to charity, and your teeth might be a little bit straighter and whiter tomorrow.
The hag was planning to put that curse on an entire country, somehow. The social implications of such a thing boggled the mind.
Denissa was very tempted to just let this play out without interfering, because she really wanted to know what would happen. Would people become more moral, with such a direct way to get feedback for their behavior? Would they end up discriminating against those who were born naturally ugly, thinking that it reflected on their character? Would society enter some strange feedback loop fueled by the fact that the curse used society's own definition of morality as its basis? It was probably going to be a train wreck. There was a chance it might actually help, but she knew from experience that social systems were always more complicated than they looked and seemingly beneficial changes could often have disastrous side effects.
Alas, her version of the universe was too important to risk on a relatively simple social experiment like this. Fortunately there was an alternative: Since Silent Martha was a hag, shunting these experiments into parallel worlds would be significantly easier than normal. She would simply have to talk to the Duke of Mirrored Portraits about it, and he would take care of it. That way she could have her cake and eat it, too.
"Is keeping track of alternate realities exhausting?" The advertisements interrupted her once again. "Use our patented fanfiction management to keep track of all your alts. Whether you are an author writing fiction, or an overwhelmingly powerful reality warper who decides the fates of entire worlds, our software works equally well for both! Purchase a god-tier subscription to share your worlds with alternate versions of yourself in what passes for real time! Get a discount if you pinkie promise not to warp us out of existence!"
That actually sounded like it could be useful! She bookmarked the ad for later.
Then she turned to the next point on her agenda: The end of the world.
She wondered what it said about her that the end of the world was far from being at the top of her priority list.
She gathered her thoughts and reviewed: There was both good news and bad news.
The good news: The apocalypse had been put on hold.
The spirits wanted to get some learning opportunities from all this. They were of one mind with Denissa in this, who had the same goals.
The bad news: Everything else.
There were simply too many ripple effects. Before now, the apocalypse had been scheduled through the Living City, an entity that was static, immobile, and easy for her to predict. But now the spirits were very much against the Living City, to the point where Rania had even started feeling bad about it and asked them to please "stop bullying the apocalypse".
Rania appeared to be looking for a way to turn the Living City good, which ironically was very bad. It would create a power vacuum that the spirits needed to fill with some other supreme evil. In her experience, this usually made things worse than just letting the current supreme evil be and putting restrictions on it, as she had successfully done to the Living City for millennia.
Except, there was a chance that this time things would be different. After all, the spirit in charge of replacing the apocalypse was Adversity Regulator, the very same spirit who created Rania and now listened to her.
If they got lucky, it could just be that the power vacuum remained, and they simply went without a supreme evil for a while.
Then again, if they got unlucky, then Rania could convince Adversity Regulator that Cilia Ulein was the new supreme evil. That would turn her into the designated and scheduled source of the end of the world. It would virtually guarantee both that Cilia would fail at her goal, and that she would cause the end of the world for all the worlds in the entire multiversal quarantine.
Unfortunately, Denissa had already done all she could to influence these events, without getting clear results. There was nothing to do now but to wait and see, and hope.
In the meantime, she wanted to investigate the Living City more closely. It might no longer be the designated source of the apocalypse, but it was still an Old Power and influential in its own right. Its change in behavior was well worth investigating in detail.
The mind control was partly gone. It looked like the Living City had been convinced that mind control was the most stereotypically evil thing, and so it had abandoned the ability entirely in its quest for redemption. Not that it would make much difference: As a superhumanly intelligent manipulator with prognosticative abilities, it did not really need mind control to convince people to do what it wants.
The more practical differences were already being felt across the world, however: Wars were being canceled. Infiltrators were abandoning their schemes. Vampires and werewolves were retreating en masse, for a purpose that was so far only known to the Living City itself. It was now looking for glory in other ways. The details of its plans remained opaque even to Denissa's powerful but unfortunately unreliable means of information gathering.
The only useful information she had came from a routine inspection of Myr, one of the Living City's subordinates. Being a Hive Mind made them transhumanist and therefore a Person of Interest to her. Or was that a People of Interest? The language Common was well designed for its purpose, but it did have some shortcomings.
They had found Myr in a heated discussion with Lady Deluve of the Khainite coven of vampires. She had apparently managed to recover ancient scripture from the Library of Akash. Somehow, those books had mentioned vampires despite predating the Living City itself, which had created the vampires. She took this to mean that these books were a prophecy and was now following this ancient lore as guidance.
As a result, she converted to vegetarianism, and forced her entire coven to follow suit.
The book was a popular fantasy comedy from Denissa's childhood!
As amusing as it had been to find out, she was not happy about that.
The absolute last thing she needed was for the spirits to start thinking that they were funny, and turn this entire clusterfuck into a comedy.