10:55 AM | Upper Oreskios | June 4th | 1608 COVENANT

When Korin had finally grown bored of listening to me give vague explanations for why all the things she liked were actually bad and boring, I decided to escape back indoors. Now I was in the kitchen again, watching the rest of the family through the window. I'd poured myself a cup of coffee without really thinking about it, but now that I had it, I was realizing I didn't actually want to drink anything. So I just kept stirring it mindlessly, hoping the desire would take me and I wouldn't have to run the risk of something seeing me pour it down the sink.

The twins were still playing in the garden, though now together with their mother, who at present was setting up a series of large wooden pins for some sort of bowling game. Hibasu didn't look enthusiastic; she was always being dragged into physical activities with her sister when she would have preferred to just read or play on her logic engine. Right now she looked like she was trying to explain something to her mother, who was nodding along patiently.

After a moment, the latter noticed me, and gave a friendly wave in response. I flinched slightly, then smiled and waved back, before looking down at the cup. Even after almost a century of seeing each other off-and-on, it still felt like I barely knew how to interact with her.

A minute or two later, my brother himself opened the door and joined me in the room. I could tell instantly that the purpose of this was specifically to start a conversation with me about something, because he didn't move towards the sink, the cold locker, or one of the rear doors, but rather stood for a moment at the entryway, hesitating as he gave me a warm smile. I tensed, hopefully imperceptibly, my stirring motion jilting and coming to a stop.

"Hey, Utsu," he said, as he eventually stepped over to where I was standing.

"What's up, Sun?" I asked him. I shifted the mug to hold it in my hands, like I'd been sipping from it this whole time like a normal person "You want anything to drink?"

"Ah, nah, I'm good," he said, holding up a hand loosely. "Just thought you might want some company."

"Oh," I said. I came indoors specifically because I didn't want company, obviously. "Thanks, I guess."

I got along well with my brother, and always had, though I'm not sure if I could call the reasons for that wholesome. He was, of course, the only family member who'd never really known 'me' before my Induction, having been only a little older than five at the time. I remember that I'd made myself promise, even before I'd come to terms with my mistake, not to let my own twistedness interfere with his own childhood in any way. I always tried my best to be a kind and supportive big sister, even when he was being kind of a brat. I'd intruded into his family to satisfy my own desires, but he was an innocent. I wanted him to stay that way.

As a result, we'd developed a largely uncomplicatedly positive relationship... relatively speaking. Prior to that resolution, I'd felt a cruel sort of envy for him on account of the fact that he had all the things I wanted - the same comfortable life as Shiko, a place close to her - just by the nature of his birth. And afterwards some of that envy had remained, now for the fact that he did get to live such a normal childhood in contrast, have such an ordinary life.

Lately, we'd grown a little more distant, though for largely unrelated reasons.

"Sorry about how Korin was getting back there," he went on. "She's at a really needy age lately-- She's always asking us to play with her and take her out, too. Dokia thinks we should try and reward her enthusiasm, but I'm not always so sure." He looked at me with a hint of anxiety. "I hope she didn't tire you out."

"No, it's fine... Like I said, it's really easy to manage a simple incantation like that." My eyes flicked down to the fluid of the cup. "I'm more worried that I'm getting her interested in arcane stuff in a way that goes beyond, well, superficial kid shit."

"Well... would that be so terrible?" He gave an awkward chuckle. "I mean, don't you think you might be a good role model for her? When she's old enough to understand some of the stuff you've done, she might think you're even cooler."

"I told you," I said, frowning. "There's a lot of risks to being an arcanist that people aren't allowed to talk about. You should take the stuff mom says seriously."

"I mean, I know there's a chance of a repercussion to your mental health with the Index attachment process," he guessed. This was technically true - you could, in fact, get brain damage if someone fucked up that part of your Induction - but was obviously not what I meant. "That's an open secret at this point, and it's a valid fear... but you know, so is any stressful job at the end of the day. And with the way things are now, it might be one of the only ways she could become completely independent, when she's grown up." He glanced to the side, a pensive look in his eyes. "I'd want her to have that chance if she could."

"There's more to it than just that," I told him, my tone reserved. "More even than mom knows from dealing with grandpa."

"You always say things like that, but if you don't explain anything, I can't even really form an opinion..." He smiled awkwardly. "You know I wouldn't report you, right?"

I bit my lip furtively, stirring the cup some more as I looked back towards the garden. "...maybe when she's a little older," I settled on saying. "If she doesn't grow out of being so interested."

I really hoped she would. The degree to which the secret of Induction was kept had always been serious, but it was also another way things had changed in the past two centuries.

My brother sighed softly. "If you say so... though you're making it hard to know what I should be encouraging and what I shouldn't."

"She's a smart girl," I said. "They're both really smart girls. I'm sure there are lots of jobs they could find without needing to learn the Power."

Privately, I felt a lot less confident in that statement than I tried to sound. Over the past few decades, my mother had been made redundant from her garden designing job, and my brother barely worked any more himself. He'd been a junior partner in my father's law firm for several decades and done very well, but after it had been sold off and he'd got a job with a state, the amount of actual stuff to do seemed to be decreasing year-by-year. It turned out that when the economy sort of ceased to exist, so did a lot of crimes.

At this point, Dokia worked more than him, but only because she worked at a much larger firm doing discovery-stage paperwork for considerably worse 'pay', so much as that concept even meant anything meaningful at this stage. Even though she was an incredibly intelligent woman - far more so than me, in most ways - if she hadn't married my brother, she could have easily ended up on state land, probably sucked up into the now sprawling legal bureaucracy of the Old Yru Convention. What her job really was was laying down roots in the freehold to make sure that could never happen, even if they eventually split up.

"Well, either way," my brother digressed, with just a hint of frustration crossing his features at my lie, "I appreciate you always playing with her. She really does love to see you. She still reads that graphic novel collection you bought her last year all the time."

The hardness in my face quickly faded, reverting back to the fatigued amicability that seemed to be the best I could muster this week. "I'm glad," I said, smiling a little. "I really loved those books when I was a kid. What about the books I got for Hiba?"

His smile became a little awkward. "She's... still getting around to them, I think. She's a little picky when it comes to the fantasy she wants to read."

I snorted softly. "Bit of a miss, then, huh." I raised the cup to my lips, feeling I should make a token effort to drink it. The fluid was only warm, and the bittersweet flavor felt too sticky on my tongue. "I'm sorry I can't seem to get along so well with her."

"Ah, it's not your fault," he said with a dismissive wave. "Hiba's just shy. She was always hiding from her grandpa until he started coming to stay every month or so." He curled his lip a little into his mouth. "Speaking of which, I wanted to talk to you about something."

Oh, I thought. Here we go, then.

"So, I was talking to mom, and... well, we're a little worried about how you're doing out in Deshur," he explained.

I lowered my brow. "How do you mean?"

"Well, I know you originally moved out there to live with Rekhetre, but the two of you haven't been together for more than 20 years now... And you don't have a job out there or anything. It seems like you're probably a little lonely." He looked nervous, the area around his nose flushing a bit. "We thought-- Rather, we wanted to let you know that if you wanted to move back here, you're more than welcome. It would be nice to have you around again, and I'm sure you'd be a positive influence on the girls."

What would be the best way to act? I wondered, mostly subconsciously. Dismissive, defensive, reassuring? What could I actually pull off?

I chuckled awkwardly. "...just because I haven't had a partner in a while doesn't mean I've been lonely. And I have been working. I've been touring and doing lectures at all the new universities they're opening over there."

Though not very reliably, I thought to myself, remembering the conversation in the morning.

His expression grew more troubled. "It's not just that. I don't want to seem invasive, but... You haven't been calling much lately, you know? And you've gone from visiting every few months to just once a year or two." He broke eye contact, looking out towards the window. "And it doesn't seem as though it's just us, either. I ran into Iwa the other month, and she said that she's barely heard from you in the last five years."

"I've just been preoccupied," I said, but couldn't help hesitating afterwards. "I-- I should say hi to her, though. I didn't realize it had been that long."

"Also, I hope this isn't too much to say, but I went and looked up your address, and your place... I mean, it looks nice - it's more spacious than you could ever have over here, obviously - but is kind of out in the middle of nowhere. I checked a pilotage service on the logic sea, and it said it would take almost an hour by magnetic carriage to get to the nearest town with a train station. I, uh..."

Words seemed to fail him for a moment as he watched my face. I was staring down at the liquid in my cup, rubbing the rim with my thumb.

"I'm not getting this out right," he said, flattening his lips. "Look, I know that things haven't always been going your way lately... and I don't know what exactly has been on your mind, or what your plans for the future are. But we really would all be happy to have you here again. I said too much a second ago - I wouldn't expect you to always make yourself available for the kids. I know you're not really interested in raising a family, and that you were as upset by what happened with Toba as the rest of us..."

Toba was my brother's first son, now somewhere in his early fifties. He didn't speak with the rest of the family any more.

"...so if you wanted to keep mostly to yourself, then I don't think anybody would make a big deal out of it." He blinked a few times, glancing downwards. "Mom won't bring it up, but it worries her a lot to imagine you out there all the time, without anyone really looking out for you."

"You're talking to me like a problematic child," I said distantly, not looking up from cup. "Like I'm an invalid, or something."

"That's not..." He cut himself off, running his hand over his mouth. "I'm not trying to come across that way."

"But you kind of are," I reaffirmed, a stubborn coldness taking hold of my voice. "I'm an adult. An adult with an eighth-tier citizenship I earned myself, and a star of commendation from the Convention itself." Not that it means much as of the last 30 years. "And you're talking like I need someone to take care of me. That I need to go back to my parents house because I've failed in becoming a functioning member of society."

I cringed even as the words came out. I'd intended it as a firm-but-reasonable demand for him to stay in his lane, but instead it had come out as a petulant declaration of my own grandeur, like I really was a child. Why was I even saying this at all? This wasn't how I wanted the conversation to go.

"C-Come on, Utsu," he said, his tone holding steady but his face now growing much more flushed. "You know I didn't mean it that way... I respect you more than anyone. You've done work for all humanity I could never even dream of being involved with." He regarded me affectionately, in spite of my attitude. "You'll always be my genius big sister who I bring up whenever people are talking about the famous people they know, and who's always been there for me whenever I've been having a tough time. I probably wouldn't be a prosecutor at all if it wasn't for you."

"I don't think I'm really famous," I said quietly.

"And anyway, I literally live here myself!" he went on, laughing a little as he gesticulated his hands. "Almost everyone in the freehold lives with their extended families nowadays. With a place this big, it would be insensible not to, especially with dad gone. Obviously I'm not trying to paint you as some unsalvageable case of arrested development who needs to go back to living like a kid." He frowned with concern. "I'd just like to see more of you. And maybe it could be good for you to try something different, if you're stuck in a slump."

"I'm not stuck in a slump, I'm just..." I hesitated, biting my lip. "Fuck, Sun, this is weird."

"I'm sorry," he said genuinely. "I didn't mean to put you on the spot, or anything."

"I should be telling you all this, if anything," taking another faux-sip. Outside, Korin shouted something about the wind making the game unfair, while her grandfather laughed and made some snarky comment in response. "I was kind of thinking of saying something to mom already, but things have got really fucked-up here, you know? And I don't just mean the bombings every other day." I looked up nervously towards the sky, realizing we were actually coming up on the time the broadcast had announced.

My brother shook his head. "Oh, don't get me started on politics. It's unthinkable what's happened to the city since the war started, let alone the whole Grand Alliance--"

"That's the thing, though," I interjected, cutting him off. "Every time I bring this stuff up, whether it's with you or mom or whoever else, you all always say something like 'it's unthinkable'. And yeah, it's all completely nuts. But you've been saying stuff like that for decades now. It's like you're talking about gossip you're sick of." I narrowed my eyes. "When I was going through the public parts of the city on the way here from the port, it was legitimately scary. The parts that didn't look like a giant military camp seemed like they were practically in ruins. And at the gate to the freehold, I saw golems with nullification cannons." I shook my head. "I don't know how you can live like this. I really don't."

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"I mean, yeah, it's really messed up," he admitted. "I don't know if it will ever get better out there, at least not if the lunatics on the city council and in Old Yru have anything to say about it. But I mean, what can you do?"

"Leave the Mimikos," I told him simply. "Get out of here while you can. I could probably get you places in Deshur, or you could move to one of the colonies. Anything."

He scratched the side of her neck. "That's not really realistic, Utsu..."

"Why not?"

"Well, because our whole life is here," he said, in a tone that made it clear he felt the very question was absurd. All our jobs, our property... not to mention all of our friends, especially in mom's case. Plus the girls' whole everything." He frowned. "We'd be worse off anywhere else. We might never get new jobs with the way things are now, and even if we did, we'd definitely end up trading down in terms of property if we moved outside of our freehold coalition. I know it worked out alright for you, but..."

"So what happens if the arcanists screw up and forget to put the shield up one day?" I asked him. "Or unrest breaks out, like what happened in Turaggoth? Or a politician ends up in power who actually goes through with the threat of nationalizing the freeholds?"

He sighed. "I get where you're coming from, and I am worried about where things will be in a few decades if nothing changes... But come on, you're catastrophizing. There hasn't been a single instance of a major population center getting hit since the start of the war. And even if they're awful, more than half the people on the city council live in the freeholds. No one's going to do anything to actually upset the status quo. Even in places like the Exarchates where the Iconists are basically running amok, they haven't gone through with it."

The Exarchates were states made up of the former frontier of Rhunbard, partitioned off from the rest about 500 years ago following the Tricenturial War.

"Stray fire from a battle hit Tel Kalyria just the other month," I told him. "It was all over the news, even in Deshur."

"Yeah, but... that was just a small town," he said. "Maybe 50,000 people, with just a couple arcanists overseeing the barrier."

"I'm just saying. It feels like everyone here is a frog in a boiling pot, right now." I looked towards the sink, considering dumping the now increasingly cold coffee down the plug, but ultimately decided against it, taking another sip. "Even if nothing bad happens, it's just not right the way things are here now. Living in these weird bubbles with giant walls everywhere. I can't imagine what it's doing to the way those two understand the world."

My brother rubbed his brow. "Well, that's another thing entirely, I guess. Dokia and I have talked about it a few times about how to explain all this when they're older... and of course we're not sending them to some state school that'd pump them full of propaganda." He looked at me, his expression almost a little desperate. "Look, again, I understand where you're coming from, Utsu... but in the end, there's no guarantee Deshur will stay safe, either. People are always talking about the idea of Mekhi joining the war too. The Grand Alliance is always putting pressure on them, or the Triumvirate could just decide it's tired of them funneling resources to their enemies and do it themselves."

I tightened my lips, immediately taking another sip without thinking about it. Maybe this interaction was making me tired enough that my body was starting to want it.

"If that happened, you'd be the one in the most danger, living out in the middle of nowhere," he went on. "Problems this big affect the whole world. You can't really get away from them, no matter what you do."

I didn't feel like saying anything in response. There was nothing I really could, at least not without escalating this to some dumb argument or weird political debate.

"I don't know, it sounds flippant... but I feel like all you can really do is be with the people you love, and try and take the hits as they come. At least that way, you don't have to suffer through things alone, you know?" He smiled at me with obviously as much warmth as he could muster. "I'd just like it if you were safe and happy, that's all."

It was a kind sentiment, and to a degree, I really did appreciate what he was trying to do.

I cleared my throat softly, then curled my lips up, attempting to return the expression. I really wanted to just end the conversation, and would have said almost anything at this stage. "I mean, I appreciate it, but... really, I've been doing okay. You don't need to be worrying about me like this, or anything."

My brother looked at me for a few moments, a conflictedness in his eyes. I could tell this wouldn't be enough to satisfy him. So I continued:

"I'll... think about it, alright?" I told him, my forced smile growing more hesitant. "And you can think about what I said too. And we can talk about it again another time. Okay?"

Now I could see his expression shifting to a mix of hesitation and disappointment. It wasn't what he'd really wanted to hear, but it had least made it clear enough that the conversation was over. After that, I reassured him a few more times, the mood slowly calmed, and we made jokes and small talk for a couple more minutes before he eventually headed upstairs to use the toilet. I went back to watching the garden, pouring the cup down the sink and boiling the kettle to make another.

My brother was a better person than me, but we were both cowards, to different degrees. Sukunoro, like so many of the Humanists and Paritists left in the freeholds, was a coward for living here in luxury and enjoying a normal life while the world went to absolute shit around him. He spoke platitudes about how awful it all was, and about love and the need to find happiness amidst the misery, while not really acknowledging how he was benefiting from the status quo. And he refused to look around him and think about the future seriously, even for the sake of his family.

But I was no better. Even if I'd chosen a lower quality of life, it wasn't to take any sort of stand, but rather for my own sake. I'd only brought up politics at all as a way to avoid sincerely talking about my emotions, not out of any genuine concern. I was just as passive about it all as he was. And not once in the whole conversation had I said what I really meant, even though his compassion had been sincere.

All I did nowadays was perform and hide. It was the better part of what I'd done since I'd arrived for this visit two weeks earlier.

The hour was approaching, so I waited for the voidship fire to hit the city rather than let myself be surprised. The shimmering surface of the barrier covered the sky, and the sky roared mutedly as white bolts struck it like falling stars, burning so brightly they hurt my eyes. The twins watched from the garden, Korin cheering enthusiastically. For them, I realized, this was an everyday event.

𒊹

The rest of the day was fun. Having had such a big breakfast, we only had a light lunch with some bread and cold meat, then went out to dinner to a fancy restaurant further up the hill and shared a pork roast. I managed to have a conversation with Korin about a show she liked - starring a girl who could turn into a giant golem with magic eye powers, or maybe the other way around, I wasn't entirely sure - instead of her desire to become an arcanist, which I considered a victory. Dokia told a story about how her office had adopted a cat, and the various forms of chaos it had been causing. It was cute. I went back to my old bed, in my old room, and slept.

The next day, it was time for me to go home. My mother walked me to the tram station, heading down the busy highstreet until we came to the elevator, a glass shaft which raised us smoothly up to the platform. My mother gave me a long and tight hug, looking at me with a bittersweet smile.

"Come back soon, alright? Next summer, at least."

"Yeah," I said. "I will."

"And take care of yourself. I'm always here if you need to talk."

"I know." I smiled back. "Thanks, mom."

She opened her mouth to say something else, then paused for a moment, glancing to the side and tightening her lips. "I hope..." she said, hesitating for a moment. "I know that things might seem difficult for you right now. But I hope you'll remember that you still have a lot of life left ahead of you." A tram sped by us, and her tied-back hair wafted sharply in the wind. "When your father left, I... I remember feeling for a while as though everything was over-- That something I'd poured the greater part of myself in was just done, and I ought to just lie down in bed and stay there. But you know, it wasn't over. It never is."

My face flushed. I looked towards my feet, nodding.

"You're my daughter," she said, cradling my face with one of her hands. "And I'm so proud of you I can't even put it into words. I believe you still have an amazing future ahead of you, even if it's a little hard for you to see it."

"I..." I stammered, biting my lip. A warm feeling rose in my chest for a moment, but then felt stifled by a greater sense of guilt and isolation. I couldn't face her.

"You don't have to say anything," she said kindly. "I just wanted to tell you that, before you left."

I nodded stiffly.

"I love you, sweetheart."

"...I love you too."

She kissed me on the cheek, and we parted ways. I waited for the tram amidst the crowd of people. Fashion had changed somewhat in the past 200 years. Trousers, though still rare, had become considerably more common, and sharper and more simplistic cuts with striking colors prevailed, especially in professional contexts. I'd largely rejected these developments to continue dressing in the way I always had, in plain, feminine-utilitarian inoffensive clothing. That morning was no different: I was dressed in a grey tunic and loose, knee-length pale blue skirt. I wore a lot of grey. It was a great color. A greyte color.

I'd stopped wearing my hair in braids a long time ago, shortly after the Exemplary Acolyte's Class had been disbanded. There obviously hadn't been much point in continuing with preserving Utsushikome's choices in how to style herself so as to not interfere with people's perception of her any more. Yet at the same time, it had still felt profoundly wrong to decide to forge some distinct aesthetic identity of my own, and more than that, nothing I really tried felt sincere compared to the memories of my youth. So in most ways I'd just kept coasting. My hair was still about the same length, and I'd never bothered to get my eyes fixed-- Nowadays everything was done over logic bridges anyway, so I barely needed my glasses anyway.

I'd accepted that I wouldn't change. That I couldn't.

From the platform, one could see most of Oreskios. Despite the my complaints about the changes to the shopping area earlier, the area I'd grown up in on the mountainside - now one of four freeholds in the city, the other three being located around the river, on the coast, and along the old western walls respectively - had gone otherwise relatively unscathed by the passage of time, which of course made sense, since it was filled with old people who didn't like change. Of which I suppose at this point I was essentially one--, I couldn't help but feel grateful this was the case, however twisted the broader situation had grown. Even if I'd come to dislike being here, I still always often visited my old school and let myself get lost in my memories.

I'd always been, as Ran had put it, a person who was 'so sentimental it bordered on a health problem'. But sitting in that cafe moaning about the first time they'd remodeled this station all those years ago, I simply had no concept of just how bad the sickness ran, not just in me, but in all of society. When you're young, it's so easy to see the ways the world is fucked and advocate to fix it. But as you age, nostalgia piles upon nostalgia until it feels like it's gumming the very workings of your soul. You become stiff and brittle. The new and novel replacing the familiar goes from feeling alienating to outright insulting, an attack on your very selfhood-- Taking things that felt filled with meaning and replacing them with empty garbage. You feel an overriding impulse to cling to what you still have like a rope in a raging storm, even as this makes things worse for everyone.

That being said, not all resentment of change can be boiled down to oversentimentality.

Some change is just, well, bad.

Beyond the wall a few dozen miles in the distance, the city had been utterly transformed. It wasn't just the arcology on the other side of the river, towering monolithically over the entire city, which was at least engineered to be beautiful and host its own biosphere; it had been constructed about 60 years ago in the brief Humanist political fightback, when the population had grown out of hand but before things had gone completely to shit. No-- The entire area behind the river, beyond the traditional city center, had now evolved into what was essentially a wall of towering stone and metal skyscrapers, cylinders packed so tightly together and with so little distinction that they more resembled a bizarre natural feature than something constructed by human beings. Some of them were lightless and clearly uninhabited, while one - located near the coast - was partially in ruins from what I understood to be an insurrectionist bombing.

More were under construction further west and south, as well as countless smaller towers and, further in the distance, factories. Beyond the area of the coast within the freehold, the docks of Oreskios - already practically a megastructure in my youth - had now been built well out into the water, housing over a million people themselves and, more prudently, becoming home to massive construction facilities for voidships, which at this distance looked like a line of gigantic bronze ovals stretching out into multiple columns against the blue sea. They were surrounded by other, smaller facilities responsible for smelting the metals and building the more specialized equipment, which belched steam and smoke in tremendous quantities, periodically diverted from the city by artificed wind.

Industry, in the wake of the war, had been driven to levels of efficiency beyond what people had imagined possible, facilitated by small armies of arcanists and an unimaginable number of construction golems. Multiple battleships were finished every day in Oreskios alone; the easy parts replicated, the complex parts assembled manually. And it was small potatoes compared to the scale of the construction being done in the Empyrean itself.

And yet even so, we were still getting our asses kicked.

The tram came after about five minutes, the bronze carriage - still in the archaic, partially-wooden style always embraced by Oreskios, but now with the underlying technology far more sophisticated - coming to a graceful stop. It wasn't particularly busy today. I went inside and found a seat next to a grey-haired woman staring with a furrowed brow at her logic engine.

I got mine out too, putting on some music. I stared out the windows.

Again, we were close to the edge of the freehold, so it didn't take long for us to approach the wall at the perimeter. We passed out of my mother's neighborhood of old mansions, then another filled densely with modern apartments, and then we were there, the tram quickly speeding up as it passed beyond the threshold. There would be no more stops between here and the port, since the infrastructure within and without the freeholds were now almost completely severed. The line simply went right over it.

I didn't look down below this time, instead just staring at the ceiling of the carriage. Listening to soft piano notes that came from nowhere.

As the freeholds had formed in earnest a little under a century ago, the rest of society had reached a crisis point: There were now billions of people - the majority of the population and growing - for whom there was and would never be work, and who owned nothing. Further, as lifespans had continued to grow over the course of the 15th century (though not to the degree Kam might have hoped for; they were currently stagnating in the mid-600s in the freeholds, and were much lower elsewhere), land inheritance and the vacating of professional roles became far more rare occurrences. For many, no prospects remained of a better life even in the far future.

As the global population soared and the lessons of the revolution grew further from people's minds, the settlements concerning the allocation of resources to this increasingly-large group began to erode. Homes got smaller, the range of items offered in state distribution centers contracted. Previously taboo subjects like restricting reproduction to landholders were once again floated openly. Empyrean or renewed interplanar colonization was put forward as a solution, but struggled to get off the ground due to the apathy of decision makers.

In this environment, violent unrest had once again grown common, with radical groups like the greyflags seeing a surge in their numbers. The adoption of surveillance and policing golems prevented another outright civil war, but this just resulted in the unrest diffusing beneath the surface of society, leading to the formation of increasingly extreme guerrilla groups pushing for the adoption of Paritism and similar ideologies.

The older generations, of course, responded to this completely rationally, understanding that they would need to cede a degree of their resources and influence for the long term health of society, deescalating the situation and allowing a more sustainable solution to be reached.

Just kidding. Obviously, they put a bunch of Idealists and Iconists in power instead.

In fact, combined with increasing political friction with fringe nations like Mekhi and the Saoic Arcanocracy, nativism and social protectionism surged to prominence even among much of the population in state territory. The elite of the freeholds had wished for new adversaries for the general public to distract from themselves, such that they might continue with their comfortable lives undisturbed. And the usual suspects had been happy to provide them.

Of course, once you invite a wolf to dinner, there's no guarantee it will be content with just the meat you serve it.

I remembered how when I was young, everyone had always talked about how, even if there was some friction getting there, the end of scarcity could only ever ultimately mean an age of perpetual peace and prosperity for mankind. After all, the thinking went, if there was enough for everyone, then there was no need for anyone to hoard wealth. Class structure would simply fall away as human kindness prevailed.

It took me a long time to understand why, exactly, this perspective was naive. But after living this long, this is my best answer: It's because beyond a certain point, wealth isn't really about abundance, wealth is about power. The power to shape the world as you please; to manifest that which is valuable to you as unimpeachable components as reality. Aesthetic, culture, permitted behavior, vibes - these are what people wish to dominate, what they create scarcity to enforce.

And 'create' is the right word, and really, had always been. Even when I was a child, society had the capacity to give everyone more or less the quality of life I'd so envied Utsushikome for having. And yet it hadn't. None of this was a new development. Technology had just made it more and more obvious.

People want to be eternally young. But eternal youth isn't just youth of the body. Eternal youth is when the world is not permitted to remind you that you have grown old. It is a world where you are eternally right, eternally cool, eternally indulged; where reality mirrors the contents of your calcified heart. This is the tip of the pyramid of needs. The ugly wart on the core of human nature.

And if it's not shaved down, it's enough to turn even a utopia into something different altogether.