As people grow older, they dream less and less. Science is divided regarding the specifics of why this happens. To some extent it can be attributed to the failure of biological systems; the elderly sleep less in general as a result of their pineal glands producing melatonin less reliably, and on a more basic level, it is simply harder to get a body with more problems physically comfortable for 8 hours straight. Yet that's only part of the story. Brain activity during REM sleep begins to decline from the very onset of adulthood, with duration of REM sleep following soon after. Adults, as a matter of generality, simply do not need to dream as much to feel refreshed as children do, and this is generally linked to the fact their neurons make fewer dynamic connections generally.
Though a simplification of a more complex truth, the purpose of dreams is generally thought to be the sorting of information too complex to process consciously - a form of learning, of formulating new subconscious strategies for navigating reality by remixing memory in unorthodox ways. That, then, begs an obvious question. Do older people stop dreaming because their minds have lost the plasticity of youth? Or do they stop dreaming because there is simply nothing left to learn?
After a while, I came to wonder if my grandfather had been mistaken. That the best way to describe the human condition was not a bowl with a hole in the bottom, but rather a puzzle. One that the mind had been evolved solely to solve.
When you're young, it uses its experiences to build a 'self', for no other reason than to accomplish that goal. Then, once that 'self' is finished, it produces an answer to the puzzle. The puzzle has many answers, and some are quite a lot more useful than others, but all of them represent a facet of the truth; equally valid interpretations of reality, arrived at through its vast spectrum of possibility.
Once that answer has been found, the mind will never go back to building the self. And from that moment forward, it becomes the only lens through which the puzzle can be interpreted. Any new answer discovered will never be any truer than the first, and so will lose purely on the basis of chronological precedence. The heart has no gravity; when the fires of the engines have gone out, an object in motion remains in motion.
Maybe the cracked bowl was the shape his answer ultimately took. Perhaps some people had bowls that weren't cracked at all, able to bear loss like it was no big deal.
But for me, I think it was more like a gunked-up pipe. Long. Dark. Spitting back out anything new that flowed inside.
I hadn't been dreaming, that morning. I didn't have nightmares any more, at least not most of the time.
I awoke to lamplight peeking through the curtains, and a slight ache in my neck due to having slept at a weird angle. Groaning softly, I reached a hand up to rub my eyes, my book slipping through my fingers as I did so.
Must have fallen asleep reading again. No wonder I was on the wrong end of the bed and didn't have a pillow.
Blearily, I opened my eyes. I was, once again, in my old room in Oreskios, though there wasn't much left to identify it as such now. My clothes, stuffed animals, and books had all been moved, and the old logic engine was long gone. The general decor was different, too-- The curtains were now a sandy color, and the walls had been repainted green. My mother used it more as a general guest room these days. It didn't even smell the same at this point.
I craned my neck to look at the clock on the bedside table. It was about 7:30 AM; significantly earlier, as I'd feared, than when I'd hoped to have woken up. I thought about trying to get back to sleep, but I knew that was a waste of time. Lately it only seemed to take the smallest crack of lamplight for my body to start pumping cortisol like it was preparing for a marathon. I could use the Power, but that was bad for you if you did it took much, and nowadays I wouldn't have been surprised if it left me dealing with the Censors.
Sighing, I clambered out of bed. Scratching my back, I wandered over to the mirror - different from the old one, inlaid into the closet door during the redecoration - and checked to see what ridiculous shape my hair was probably in. Sure enough, one side had clumped up and bent over on the other, ending up so twisted and asymmetrical that the roots even felt sore. I grabbed my hairbrush, sitting on my suitcase from when I'd last used it, and set to fixing it, picking out the difficult tangles with my fingers.
I looked at my face. Absolutely nothing had changed, except for perhaps a subtle quality in my eyes. I looked...
I looked tired. Just seeing myself was enough to make me consider going back to bed again, even knowing it was pointless.
The body and the self are irrevocably linked. People make judgements of others based on what is observable, then internalize those judgements in constructing their own self-perception. People are also pushed into roles by society based on common aesthetic judgements, though that's so self-evident even saying it aloud feels a little pretentious.
But with that in mind, perhaps humanity having learned better and better how to keep the body in a static state ended up contributing to the same stasis of mind I was talking about a minute ago, and maybe that contributed to, well, everything else. Like a backed-up drain of social roles. Or maybe that was a reductive way to look at the issue.
Regardless, it was easy, in a way that hadn't occurred to me it would be originally, for me to feel like I hadn't changed. That nothing had changed.
Well, perhaps they'd changed a little bit. Things hadn't exactly got better. I still felt a sense of dissonance seeing it. That I was seeing someone else's face.
But I didn't need to take the medicine any more.
After I was done raking my hair into something resembling normalcy, I fetched my glasses headed over to the window, pulling back the curtains. It was a beautiful midsummer morning. The sky was clear and blue, birdsong emanated from the trees, and the lamprise was framed by the mountain pass, as it had been since I was a child.
But lately, Oreskios shone back. For light was also coming from the west, the lamplight reflected off the towering structure that now dominated the city center, visible in the corner of my eye even when I didn't turn to look at it. It was a colossal, cone-shaped arcology, covered almost entirely in glass to accommodate the substantial amount of plant life - not to mention human life - within. A city-within-a-city, one that now housed the greater part of the population.
Well, if they could still be counted as the same city, at this point.
My mother's house was quite close to the edge of the freehold. If I squinted, I could just about see the two-story tall stone wall towering at the boundary between it and the state-controlled land beyond.
I frowned uncomfortably.
7:44 AM | Upper Oreskios | June 4th | 1608 COVENANT
199 years after the last conclave of the Order of the Universal Panacea
I dressed in some simple clothes - a grey tunic and a black hakama - then headed downstairs, yawning as I descended the steps. My mother, like I'd predicted, was the only other person up. She was already in the kitchen, chopping some vegetables as she prepared an unnecessarily large breakfast. She, too, looked more or less the same as she always had, save for some slight creases in the corners of her eyes and the fact that she styled herself a bit differently, tending towards more utilitarian and androgynous clothing, with her hair cut rather short. She smiled as I arrived.
"Good morning, sweetie," she said.
"Good morning," I echoed, a little listlessly.
"You're up early today," she observed, in a cheerful tone that indicated she considered this to be a positive development.
"Mmm," I hummed. "I guess."
I glanced over the ingredients she'd assembled. It looked as though she was making both a traditional Saoic and Inotian breakfast at the same time; there was bread, rice, tomatoes, olives, feta cheese, tofu, soybeans, sausages and at least two types of fish, plus an assortment of greens off to the side. Looking at it all made my stomach ache, and not in a good way.
"This is a little much, don't you think..?" I suggested. "I mean, even for seven people."
She made a dismissive gesture. "Oh, it's fine." She finished chopping the vegetable - sweet kelp, now that I had a better look at it - and moved on to a piece of salmon, brushing it with some transparent glaze. "It's the last full day we'll all be together for probably the whole year. I want to make sure everyone gets their favorite." She gestured at some of the individual components. "Natto and sausage for your brother, pickle and fish soup for Dokia, a proper full Inotian for you and the twins--"
"I'm not sure how I feel about you grouping me with the seven year olds," I cut in flatly.
She chuckled. "Well, you've always been a fussy eater."
"Why don't you at least get a golem to help you with stuff like this, at least?" I asked. "There's no reason for you to do it all yourself. I could help you set it up, and you wouldn't have to let it do everything. Just the tedious parts."
I wanted to add that maybe Sukun should be helping her out once in a while instead of always leaving it to her and his wife, but if I said that, she'd just start going on about how he still had a full-time job and enough to worry about.
She flattened her brow at me, smiling with incredulity. "Utsu, if I got a golem to start doing the cooking for me, I'd end up like you! I'd never get out of bed."
I furrowed my brow. She chuckled softly at me.
"The one that does the cleaning is enough. I need something to remind myself I'm still alive. Oh-- Speaking of which," she went on, holding up a finger, "since you're up, would you do me a big favor?"
I bit my lip noncommittally. "Uh, I guess that depends on how big you mean."
"Since you're dressed, would you mind nipping down to the distribution center and picking up some duck eggs?" She furrowed her brow, putting a hand on her hip. "I could have sworn I grabbed some yesterday, but either I got my wires crossed or someone was particularly diligent about cleaning up a midnight snack."
"Oh," I said, stretching my arms into the air. "Sure, I guess."
The distribution center was just five minutes down the street. It was no big deal.
She smiled warmly at me. "You're an angel. Come to think of it, would you get some flour, too? Just in case I run short baking tonight."
"Yeah, no problem," I said, already turning in the direction of the door. "I'll be back in a minute, then."
I headed out into the hall and put on my sandals, then walked through the front door.
𒊹
I hate this fucking place, I thought to myself, about the city I'd once considered a promised land. I want to go home.
The road down to Hierarch's Way - where Ran and I had first met - hadn't changed overwhelmingly in the past two centuries. Most of the houses had been replaced or at least redesigned, many of them stories higher and sporting sharper, more modern exteriors, and some pairs had even been replaced by apartment buildings. Yet the road was the same shape, and the placement of gates and decorative trees largely unchanged, resulting in the general feeling of the place remaining intact.
The same could not be said, however, of Hierarch's Way itself.
If you'd shown the me of two centuries ago a photograph, I wouldn't have even recognized it. Gone was the tram station, without so much as a trace remaining. Gone was the grassy hill where the two of us had looked up at the stars together. And gone was the restaurant where my family had taken me to after my induction, along with all the other quaint and somewhat-bourgeois establishments that had once populated the area.
It had all been replaced, wholesale, by something that looked more akin to a downtown high street. Towering and bright neo-traditional buildings of 10 or more stories tall now dominated the area, providing goods and services of most every nature one could imagine, and several most people probably wouldn't. (One of the first signs upon turning the corner was a small banner on the side of a building stating that 'neural massages' were available on the 7th floor.) They splayed out in every direction that free property could be found, having swallowed the cheaper parts of the residential area whole.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
Oh, and though the station was gone, the tram line remained, after a fashion. It now stood high in the air, raised above even these buildings on a row of towering bronze stilts, the closest station attached to a rooftop some distance further down the street. A carriage soared at a high speed as I passed underneath.
The whole place was an echo of an echo of an echo, to which I'd become a complete stranger. Though this was far from what bothered me the most about it.
Despite what one might assume, this was not a commercial district, or at least most of it wasn't. There was a lack of explicit advertisements or prices, and the whole area was less flashy than one would expect. After the wall, this was the second reminder I'd seen today as to how things had become completely fucked.
There would, unfortunately, be quite a few more.
The distribution center was one of the closest buildings - second on the right after the turn - and the grocer was on the bottom floor. The crowd on the streets wasn't particularly dense this early in the morning, but about half of it, not including myself, was unveiled. So many people in the freeholds who'd had distinction treatments just didn't bother nowadays; since contact with those who hadn't was so rare, the sense of mutual obligation, of everyone doing it even if they didn't per-se need to, had slowly begun to socially erode, with prosognostic events being thought of as almost a solved problem.
Things had also shifted on a legislative level, at least in Oreskios and a few other places. If you hadn't had distinction therapy, then the punishment for going unveiled had shifted from being preventative to being retributive. No one would enforce you covering your face, but if you caused an event, it was considered a sort of assault.
The inside of the grocer was a placid, eerie-clean white space, the goods lined up in horizontal containers behind glass shields, save for some niche goods which were packed densely into shelves towards the back. It was manned entirely by golems, which looked much closer to human now than they had in the past. Designs like Aruru, where they were humanoid and friendly-looking but with some deviation to avoid the uncanny valley, were standard. The ones here had been painted green, and had long legs and an additional set of arms. Their faces were simplistic, with little more than holes for mouths and glass slits for eyes, and they were dressed only in simple black aprons.
I navigated the aisles until I found the replicated eggs, which it turned out had been sorted unhelpfully into the dairy section, then picked up a bag of flour, which was more sensibly in the bread and baking area. I passed a group of kids - early teens, probably - who were dressed like they were on their way to a Saturday class, happily chatting among themselves at the back of the area with all the sweets.
It felt strange. Being around young people these days, I felt somehow out of sync with reality. I...
Well, let's not get into that right now.
I picked up some chocolate for myself on the way out, since distribution centers stocked a lot of complete products and meals nowadays, not just raw ingredients like it used to be. On the way out, flying golems were in the process of giving a public announcement along the street. It spoke in a feminine, excessively calming voice, like a preschool teacher.
"...fire from the Triumvirate fleet from this engagement will be expected to impact at approximately 11:41 PM. As a result, the barrier will be raised from 11:30 AM to 12:00 PM. Please be advised that travel in and out from the city limits will be suspended during this period. If you have scheduled travel that coincides with this time, please contact the service provider for direction. All residents, please take note..."
I sighed to myself as I turned the corner back towards my mother's house. About half of the way back, a chittering sound began to emanate from my pocket. Cursing to myself, I reached in and pulled out my logic bridge. Superficially, it was the same circular device with a dias of False Iron one could recognize from back then, but in modern times the interior beyond the glass was packed indistinguishably densely with microscopic gears and pseudo-biological components. Clicking my tongue, I pressed my hand against it as I walked.
"Hello?" I said.
"Good morning!" a woman - represented through the feed as dressed in a green dress and with straight, sleek black hair, sitting at a wooden desk - answered back in Mekhian. "Is this Grandmaster Fusai?"
"Mm, that's right," I said, rubbing my eyes with my free hand.
"My name is Iris of Arkhat," the woman explained. "I'm calling on behalf of the University of Per-Haret. We just wanted to let you know--"
"Is this about the lecture on the 9th?" I asked, redundantly.
"Y-Yes," the woman answered. "We just wanted to let you know that there's been a slight scheduling change due to a need to cancel one of our examinations. We'd like to move the lecture from our afternoon slot to our morning slot at 9:30 AM. Would that be acceptable?"
"Uh, no, I'm afraid it wouldn't," I told her bluntly, glancing to the side. "I have another engagement in the morning."
By 'engagement' what I actually meant was fuck getting up early for something like this. I don't care about this shit any more. Leave me alone.
"Ah, I see," the woman said, sounding a little anxious. "I don't mean to impose, but would it be possible to reschedule that engagement? We've already been promoting the event to our Thanatomancy department."
"I'm sorry, but no," I affirmed. "If it can't be moved to later in the day, then it will have to be rescheduled outright."
"I see," she said. "Would you mind if I patched you through to our department head? It would be easier to..."
"I'm sorry," I repeated. "I'm in the middle of something right now. You'll have to call back later."
I hung up the call, feeling annoyed and a little dead inside. I flicked down the switch to turn the logic bridge off, stuffed it back in my pocket, and stared up at the sky. Voidships were launching skyward from a nearby production facility, their multi-colored tails swirling behind them.
I'm not even sure where to begin.
It wasn't like it was all bad. But the world, suffice it to say, had taken something of a turn for the worse.
In many senses, a lot of the writing had been on the wall even back then, in the years following the revolution. Even though a lot of people had died and there had been some token efforts to soothe the growing inequality brought about by the end of scarcity and the greater and greater concentration of wealth - especially property - among the older generations and particularly those who had emerged as the new upper class following the Tricenturial War, nothing about the situation had really changed on a fundamental level.
The reforms, directed primarily by the Humanist faction of the Old Yru Convention after the Paritists had effectively been locked out by the revolutionary figureheads, had largely been focused on making sure events like the great famine of Ikkaryon could never happen again, ousting hardline Meritists and building up state support for individuals, providing everyone with a 'reasonable quality' of housing and food at a far higher standard than previously. This was to be funded through increased taxes on major property holders repaying luxury debt through rent-taking, diminishing the influence of the people at the top of the pyramid as well.
But though these looked like good ideas on paper, they failed to address the core of the problem - the asymmetrical distribution of assets in an environment where the economic relationships were rapidly becoming de-facto frozen in place as replication and automation technology destroyed the ability of the individual to independently generate meaningful wealth.
I'm no economic theorist, but I've read a lot of books designed to make me feel smart about something I ultimately don't understand, so I'll try donning the hat for a moment and put it like this:
In a 'normal' economy, the purpose of owning property is as a means to an end: A way to get money. You acquire land so that you can build housing and charge rent, or factories to make goods, or storefronts to sell them-- Or I guess if you're living in the countryside, to grow crops and rear animals. Whatever the case, the land itself has no inherent value beyond this utility - the real goal is to amass enough wealth to buy all the indulgent luxuries you want, or if you're a sicko who craves power, to pay off politicians who also want indulgent luxuries.
However, if it becomes so easy to produce those indulgent luxuries, or indeed all goods, that they lose their value... And even things that were previously abstract services become goods themselves, on the basis that you can buy a golem who will do them for you... At a certain point, the polarity of the situation shifts. The value of property, as the only finite resource and one that's non-consumable, approaches infinity. It becomes a key that unlocks the entire world.
Ironically, the system of luxury debt implemented at the advent of the Grand Alliance 400 years ago, an abstraction of people's purchasing-power designed to prevent the excessive accumulation of potential wealth in the form of currency, became one of the core means by which institutions were rendered unable to address the problem. Without the ability to break down assets into something universally fungible, it became impossible to tax this new form of absolute wealth itself, only its products, like the aforementioned rent tax. Combined with the fact that the Old Yru Convention had been unwilling to target property used for business enterprises, this led to, well...
Imagine you have two people in a race. One of them has legs. The other does not. To compensate for this, you handicap the leg-haver by making them go a little slower. Is this sufficient to make the race work, as like, a thing?
Obviously not. One is still moving further and further away from the other. The fact it's happening a little slower-- Well, that's ultimately ephemeral, isn't it?
So the lukewarm reforms, which in some places with entrenched Meritist governments like Itan were barely even implemented, did not solve the problem. Instead, as landholders consolidated their wealth and lifespans rose, the loose and informal segregation of society into these two groups became, over the course of the 15th century, more and more formalized.
On one side, there were the 'gerontocrats' (a term which had at this point been banned in many territories) who owned land, and the extreme minority of professionals in their service, paramountly arcanists, who still had a role in the economy. And on the other, you had a growing swathe of people, most of whom were young, who had no role in this and almost certainly never would.
As the last vestiges of scarcity were stripped away, even abstracted forms of currency became outmoded. Everything could be easily provided with a little infrastructure - it was simply a question as to whether you had something to offer in return. Thus, the upper crust of society began to organize itself into what could be best described as super-gated communities, pooling their land and skills in such a way where they could maintain a utopian quality of life on a completely self-sustaining basis.
This was, for lack of a better phrase, the beginning of the end of the dream espoused by the founders of the Alliance. If indeed it had ever been sincere at all.
𒊹
The maple tree in our garden had grown, now standing more than three stories tall, but had also got old, the trunk twisting and a few little cavities opening up. Eventually it would die without a Biomancer to fix it, but I guess no one had really bothered to think about it.
After breakfast, the twins had wanted to go out into the garden and play, so the rest of us had gone with them. All seven of us were there.
My mother, standing near the doorway with a gentle smile, her arms crossed.
My brother, who was now a grown man several inches taller than me, with a youthfully handsome face and a formal, short haircut.
His wife of about 120 years, Eudokia, a petite woman with pale blonde hair and a cheerful, intellectual manner who he'd met at his job as a prosecuting attorney.
Her father Haoran, a heavy-set and often sarcastically grumpy older man with dark brown hair and tan skin, who'd been a carpenter back when that job was still something that meaningfully existed.
The twins themselves, Hibasu and Korin, both tawny-haired young girls who were well-mannered and loudly eccentric respectively.
And, finally, myself, out on the grass with them.
I felt out of place. But that was nothing new.
The garden had changed, too. At a certain point, my mother had got bored of diligently maintaining the elaborate display of flowers that had once comprised the majority of it, and now it was mostly just grass save for a little section off in the corner. When I'd asked her why she'd done this, once - back about 60 years ago, when Sukun and Dokia had been raising their first child - she'd said it made for a better environment for growing kids.
That wasn't the real answer; I knew it was all tied up in her relationship with my father, and their divorce. But I didn't push the issue. Sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.
"Again!" Korin pleaded to me, as she descended back to earth. "One more time!"
"Come on, sweetheart," my brother told her, smiling with a hint of disapproval. "Give your aunt a break. It might look simple, but doing this tires her out, just like when I carry you. And it wastes energy--"
"Just one more, auntie Su!" She insisted, her brown eyes looking up at me in a pleading expression as she practically hopped up and down on the spot, her single braid bouncing along with her. "Then I won't ask again, not for the whole weekend! I promise!"
I glanced to the side. Haoran was watching the scene with amusement from a deck chair, smoking a cigarette.
I looked towards my brother, at a loss. I was absolutely terrible with children, so how to act in these sorts of situations was well beyond whatever meager parental instinct I'd managed to pick up through osmosis "Should I do it...?"
His smile became incredulous. He shrugged.
Shrugging myself, I looked down at the child. "Uh, okay," I said. "One more time, since you really insist!"
"Woohoo!" she cried out, sticking her arms out in the air and closing her eyes. "Xiori, great spirit of the heavens... I implore thee, grant me your power..."
I bit my lip. This kid is watching too many dramas.
Regardless, I lifted up my scepter and cast the Object-Manipulating Arcana, then slowly levitated the girl into the air, taking care with the degree and placement of my exerted force to make sure I didn't hurt her. Then, I partially flipped her such that her belly was facing the ground, at which point she started flapping her arms like a bird.
At this signal I began, - slowly, no more than maybe a meter every couple of seconds - flying her through the air. I sent her in a loop around the garden, then towards and around the maple tree, higher and higher in repeated circles. I stopped her for a moment close to the apex, then sent her back the way she came, this time around and between the branches by a more circuitous route. I tried to put myself in her head, to think about what might have been best for the sort of fantasies I'd had at that age.
My eye caught, for a moment, on the spot where the branch had broken off on that day all those years ago. A new one sprouted from around the same spot, now, as if it had never even happened. I touched the rim of my neck.
Finally, I brought her back down in front of us, speeding her up just a bit for a little thrill at the end. She touched down gracefully, a joyful smile on her lips.
"One more!" she again insisted. "One more time!"
"Korin, that was already your 'one more time'," My brother told her, more firmly this time. "That's enough for today. You don't want to make auntie Su mad."
"Auntie Su won't get mad," the little girl told him defiantly. "She's nice! I wish she was around all the time."
I laughed awkwardly, brushing a strand of hair out of my eyes. It was getting a little windy.
"Come ooonnn, auntie Su," she pleaded again.
"Maybe tomorrow," I said, glancing awkwardly at my brother. "I think I'm a little low on eris... I don't wanna, uh, drop you!"
"Awww," she said, and furrowed her brow at me. "What's eris?"
Oh, they haven't taught her that at this age? "W-Well, it's the word for the special energy you use to cast things with the Power," I explained to her, my tone awkwardly cheery. "They store it inside scepters. That's what they're for."
I tapped mine to illustrate the point. The ankh was the same as my old one, but it was platinum, with a crescent moon crowning the base.
"Can I see it?" the girl asked curiously, craning her neck.
"Uh, no," I told her. "It's... a sort of light, you see. If I opened it up to show you, it would just be really bright and hurt our eyes, then get away before we could get a proper look at it."
Actually, it would just give us all radiation poisoning, I thought. But that's a little much to explain right now.
"Now, what do we say, Korin?" My brother asked her expectantly.
"Thank you, auntie Su," she said, still clearly lamenting that flying time was either. "Magic is so cool."
"Well, it's not magic," I tried to explain to her. "It's more like controlling a big machine that you can't see. T-There's a lot of math, too, so it's not as fun as you'd think."
I'd said this before. I knew it wouldn't stick.
"Do you think I could be an arcanist, when I grow up?" she asked.
I laughed nervously, staring into the middle distance.
Maybe I'd take a break from coming out here, for a couple decades.