I was flying, though I could not clearly see anything. I had no fear in the flight, like in those dreams where I was in a car which drove off a cliff. I was in control.

Everything blurred.

Hurtling forward.

Hinete screamed, and I rushed towards her, turning, turning — the wrong direction. Running away.

A spear came for me, flashing enchantment, and from the weapons pouch of another with a profound soul. Close quarters. I couldn’t get out of the way.

Hinete screamed, she was punctured through the heart, the head of the spear going right through the body. She hung on the spear in midair, blood slowly dripping off the broad metallic head.

And then suddenly I was separated from the whole. It was Sesako who screamed in this wavery dream, and I knew that this was Sesako’s dream, not mine, and I merely observed his nightmare.

His hands were covered with blood. The hands looked wrong, as though he had four fingers.

No, six fingers.

“Why did you betray us!” Hinete screamed in his face, blood from her lungs dribbling down her lips.

And suddenly the whole landscape changed.

Now it was my dream — I was the one terrified, while I perceived some essence of Sesako that watched me here, in my own dream. I was surrounded by towering buildings of glass, a road made of asphalt that in this dream wavered like in extreme summer heat, men and women wearing shorts and spaghetti tops hurrying backwards and forth, a vast yellow crane that looked like a tall beetle swung a bar iron in the air high above from a long chain. Cars rushing backwards and forwards, and a great noise and trumpets all around. Everything was covered by deep shadows from the buildings.

I knew what would happen.

I helplessly stepped out onto the tarry black surface, looking to the right to ensure the way was clear. I knew the yellow van was coming again from the other side. But I still stepped out.

Honking horn.

Without turning around, I found myself staring at the unrushing vehicle, my eyes widened as inch by inch it came closer. Closer. Closer.

Nothing I could do.

Nothing…

Pain.

And then I was shaken. Sesako’s form in the dream had walked up to me through the van, and he shook me.

He looked as much like me as a mirror.

The nightmarish dreamscape passed away from us both, and we found ourselves together in a green forest, the leaves golden and autumnal. A soft breeze caressed my face, and butterflies flitted between us.

He wore long hair that was neatly braided, but his face was completely shaven. He wore a deep blue robe that was closed with a yellow sash and lined with purple. If his appearance reminded me of anyone, it was Legolas in the Lord of the Rings movies, except the hair was dark brown like mine.

He stared at me and studied me in turn.

Feeling self-conscious I glanced down — had I imagined myself naked in this dream?

Thankfully, no.

I wore my Levi jeans and a t-shirt

“What is the significance of your tunic?” Sesako at last spoke, as though he was triggered by me looking down. “Through that knowledge we share I can understand the meaning of the words, but the sense of the whole is nonsense. It refers to there being ten types of people, but then only lists two — is this perhaps one of those riddles upon which a master might make his student contemplate, to help them feel their power better by occupying the symbolic part of their mind?”

“What?” He was beginning with something like small talk. I was pretty happy about that. I looked down at the shirt again. It was the obligatory programmer’s shirt that said: ‘There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don’t.’

“Uh,” I felt slightly embarrassed by this, for some reason I could not articulate easily to myself. “It is just a pun. No deep meaning.”

“A word game?” His face showed distaste. Was Sesako the sort of person who hated puns? That fit my mental model of him. “You need not explain further.”

We stared at each other again. “Uh, well.” I knew that speaking first was supposed to be a bad move in negotiations, and I supposed this was a negotiation, but fuck that sort of rule. “We are supposed to figure out how to work together, right? Ummmm… so…”

“Strange. You are distinct and strange. Yet I believe you to be in some way twin souled to me — that is the only way that you could reside in my body and my mind without my power forcing you away. Even the emperor himself would not have been able to take this position in the way you did.”

He fell silent again.

Pausing, studying, considering. His eyes… they had an almost predator look which I did not like.

“So, Sesako, what do you —”

“I cannot despise you for your cowardice as much as before. Not after I saw you die. And I realize now that you are intensely young. You have no power — no magic. Or had none. And you aged as though you were one without even his spark lit. By my math, I have aged as much as an ordinary human would if he was twenty-nine. Is that correct for your age?”

“Yes.”

“Young. Younger even then Hinete. A brave man dies only once, a coward a thousand times. And now I ask — nay, I demand that you die a second time.”

I had that terror in my chest again. “I’ll not let you demand my life. Not again. That I shall not trade. Better to be a living dog than a dead lion. — Though it originally was said the other way around.”

“My purpose will drive me,” Sesako replied. “I will do what is necessary.”

It terrified me. This likelihood that he would kill us both in his war. And I had to help him, because that was the only way to slightly reduce his odds of murdering me in a suicidal fight.

I hated him for that. I began to feel in my guts that I would do anything to stop him from killing me.

Rather than saying any of that, I asked “Is the saying about a brave man dying only once also common in your own land, or did you draw it from my memories?”

Sesako’s eyes widened. “What a question! How unsettling to hear such a question.” He frowned, looking at the trees which the wind elegantly blew through. “It did come from you.” He looked down at his hands. “I become partially you.”

There was something… unsettled about the great cultivator that I had not seen. As though being faced with a situation where his mind was not wholly his own, where he unconsciously drew upon and used the memories of another person was something he simply was not prepared to deal with.

“Weird. I tried to smile. “I’d read some fiction with stuff like this, that doesn’t make me prepared. I bet it feels even weirder to you. Or maybe not. You are used to odd things happening because you actually have magic.”

“Why would having power make me expect the unusual,” Sesako replied. “Nothing odd in this way has ever happened to me.”

“As one of the modern wise men said, there has not been one strange thing since the beginning of the world — just things we didn’t understand.” I laughed. “And now the big dragon in the sky has told us to cooperate. So, cooperation. How are we going to cooperate? — I suppose this extra special power you killed yourself to get —” I laughed again. It was ridiculous. “We both killed ourselves.”

“There is nothing amusing in that.”

“Well, it makes me feel better. Except I was stupid because I was in a hurry and wanted to eat some good food — and it would have been overpriced trash anyways, because Trip Advisor really isn’t dependable. But you… you were even stupider, but you had a better reason.”

Sesako smiled slightly as though there wasn’t really anything to say in response to that.

“Anyway. This power will only work if we both cooperate in its use.”

“I am certain I can figure out its use in time without you.”

“You don’t have time. You need me.”

He stroked his clean-shaven chin.

“Besides, you aren’t the emperor — perhaps you can’t figure it out at all, or whatever that big dragon did to merge us means the dantian can only be used if we work together. It's the pattern of the story.”

“The world does not work after the patterns of stories.”

“This all seems very cliche to me.” I shrugged. “Make two enemies cooperate to defeat the bigger enemy? Maybe it is like a story, maybe it is not — but you need my help. The question is how best to divide up the surplus value we will produce.” I rubbed his hands together. “Some sort of even split of our time, and your fortune. And an agreement for no dying. I’m not helping you if you have any plans that will definitely kill us.”

Sesako grimaced. A grim grimace.

“You are clearly a version of myself,' Sesako said. “A parallel soul. Yet I can detect no commonality between our attitudes.”

“I do not think that is the case — you wish to protect those who you care for. You wish to do the right thing. You try to work hard and sacrifice and make good things happen. I do the same.”

“You do not!” A crack echoed through the dream park, as Sesako slashed the air with a magical force whose strength seemed to surprise him. “You treat everyone as equal, those who have no claim on you, and those who are small and pathetic, as well as —”

“No one. No one is small and pathetic.”

He sneered. “You, you unawakened toiler. You were small and pathetic. To be killed by such a tiny vehicle, with tiny little force behind it. To be helplessly trapped on the ground, unable to fly. To be minuscule in a world so large — you are small and pathetic.”

Stolen novel; please report.

His eyes blazed with some sort of deep emotion.

“Do you wish for us to work together or not?”

“I—” He hesitated, as though confused.

“You really are scared. You are terrified of a loss of control, or of really depending on anyone else.”

“I can depend upon those in my formation, upon my mentors, upon Hinete. I depend on many people, but they are Yatamo, and I understand them, but I do not understand you.”

“Then ask me questions. What do you not understand?”

“Perhaps… where to start. Yes: It occurs to me that if you wish to acquire food to feed a particular poor person in Diet Vinh, that food will need to come from somewhere else, and ultimately a different hungry poor person will go without.”

I winced and sighed.

Sesako grinned with delight. “You see, your notion of helping the poor can’t work.”

“If a poor person has more money, then more food will be produced, or the rich will waste a little less food, because it is now more expensive.”

Sesako laughed, a little cruelly. “Is that what you expect?”

“Yes.” I felt flushed. “If more money is being dedicated towards the purchase of food, more marginal land and labor will be used, and in the equilibrium, there will be more total food.”

“Marginal land is marginal because it is almost useless.”

“I am certain that there is some amount by which food production can be increased. It would be quite odd if there was literally no way.”

“Were you an expert upon farming?”

“No, but —”

“And what happens next after you’ve fed the poor. You do realize this will just mean the same number of people end up starving? You help someone in this generation, they’ll have more children, and in the next generation there won’t be enough food for them. Eventually, there are always people starving. It can’t be helped, and I’m not going to waste my energy wishing otherwise.”

“We can then figure out how to enormously increase food production. And we can convince people to have fewer children.”

Sesako scoffed.

“Listen! In the world I came from, that has happened. There was enough food production for everyone, and in my whole country almost no one was too poor to buy food —our farmers had gotten really, really good at growing lots of food. Overeating was a vastly bigger problem than insufficient food.”

“I doubt that is true — you say you still had starving people. Then there wasn’t enough food for everyone.”

“Not everyone lived somewhere where they were able to get a good job. This was why I started trying to help other people. I was an instructor of automated devices, and I made good money. It seemed wrong to have much when other people had little. I initially donated one percent of what I earned to a group that directly gave poor people in a distant country an amount of cash that was about two percent of what the average person in my country earned, but twice what the average person in that country earned, but I felt like I should do more. I wanted to really make the biggest change for other people – to cause the biggest improvement in their life stories possible. I started donating ten percent of my income to a group whose goal was to protect children from dying of malaria by giving them bed nets to stop mosquitoes from biting them while they were asleep. And as I got promoted and earned more, I donated a bigger portion of my income. Sure, money is nice, but I really liked the feel of sacrificing for others — I was doing something that mattered.”

“You did not feel as though you were robbing those who had the truest claim on your charity? Your family, your dependents, and those who lived in your city and your country?”

“They all had more than the people who I was helping. And just because I knew someone, or saw them with my own eyes, that didn’t make them more deserving of help, health and a happy life than someone on the other side of the world who was desperately scratching out a living under a hot sun.

“Hmmmmm. No magic. That makes no sense. Impossible.” Sesako shook his head. “I half imagine that everything you say is a dream created by a feverish spirit. Never real. It makes little sense — but I assure you that here in the real world, the population will grow to match whatever amount of food you make, no matter how big it is.”

“Do the women among your nobles — those of you who have magic, do they have more children or fewer children than poor people?”

Sesako pressed his lips together and shrugged. “They have fewer. Those with the spark have a better moral fiber, but —”

“It is because the women amongst your cultivators are educated, and they are useful as warriors, as enchanters, and for doing all of the different things that cultivators do. They are just as valuable as a man. In situations like this, where they have jobs and knowledge, women choose not to have very many children.”

Sesako tilted his head. “You at least believe this.”

“It is not inevitable that the poor we will always have with us. It is not a rule of nature. It can be fixed. People can be taught all that is necessary to eliminate poverty, at least real, grinding, intense suffering, forever. This is only one of the many, many problems in the world that can be fixed.”

“You do not just want to feed the poor and give them healing or anything of the sort. You want to fix everything.”

“Yes! A paradise, a beautiful and good world. A place that is better for humans, for life, and for happiness. For everybody, no matter who they are. What I want is… a world where every single human has the abilities, power, and immortality of a celestial. And where, what is more, they are all happy — that is the goal. Feeding peasants now is just part of it.”

“Oh?”

“I know you heard what I was saying to the big lizard about expected values: We need to look through the options and figure out what one has the highest expected value. Perhaps we should fund the development of spells for cultivators to improve yields, and maybe we can develop a potion for preventing pregnancy that peasants can use.”

“It already exists. They don’t use it.”

“Is it cheap enough for them to afford it?”

Sesako opened his mouth. Closed it. Shrugged. “It is very likely not affordable, but I don’t think they would use it if they could.”

“Everyone has a right to have children. The only problem is when we start running out of resources. We then need to find a way to make these potions cheap enough for poor women to use, if they want to. It doesn’t matter to me which approach we take. The goal is to help people. A great swordsman once said that it doesn’t matter if you thrust, or cut, or what maneuver you use, all that matters is if you cut the enemy. Suffering is the enemy.”

I was beginning to get to him. Maybe he was less resistant to what I said now. “And obviously we need to consider bad secondary effects, and the secondary effects of those secondary effects, and so on to figure out what an intervention actually does. But someone who says ‘I don’t know if it will do any good, so I won’t do anything to help other people’ — they are making an excuse for themselves. There are things we can do that will work, and with study we can figure out what they are, and we have no excuse for not being at least a little altruistic, and for not doing at least a little.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want to help other people at all?”

“Really?” I shook my head. “You really see no value in helping people just because they are people like you?”

“I say nothing about what I see,” Sesako said. “I ask about you and why you care.”

“Well, they are people just like me.”

“I do not see how it follows that you ought to give up vast amounts of your resources, and dedicate yourself to helping them because they are like you — in fact, I can say that they are not people like you, because very few want to help people they have never met.”

“Maybe — look, peasants, street urchins, those who are powerless, sick, dying, helpless — those who’ve not awakened their spark of magic. Those born in less happier lands. Those who are desperate. They are all people. They all have the same hopes, dreams, loves, desires, wants and needs. They all can be happy, they all can thrive, and they all can suffer. Do they not bleed if you prick them? — they are just as worthy of a good life as you and I.”

“No. No they are not.” Sesako replied. “by virtue of my capabilities, my position, and the fact that I create a good life for myself, I am more worthy. And those who I love are more worthy, because I love them, and because I care for them.”

“You really are not an egalitarian, are you?”

“Why should I be? What is the argument? You merely describe feelings.”

“Goals come from feelings. A goal is a feeling that you want the world to be a particular way where you have decided to act. I mean why do you care about the dragon?”

“Because she has aided me. Because she has blessed my land, and because I have made promises to her, and her to me. I am connected by a web of obligations, mutual aid, blood, duty, honor — everything, to my people. To defend them in war. You are connected in no way to these others. I know why I wish to help my people and my land. What you wish to do is wholly irrational.”

“Rationality is how we achieve what we want. Wants and desires are neither rational nor irrational.”

“That is nonsense, and I think you know it.”

“Look: This is how I have lived.”

“I believe that” Sesako was not sneering. He had a far more considering tone than he had when we first began arguing.

I was frustrated. I needed him to understand in the way that I did that everyone was important. That fits with my personal model of ethics: That everyone has their own intuitions, and there is only a limited possibility to change the intuitions about what is good or bad that a particular individual has.

I would never be able to convince Sesako.

“Perhaps there is nothing I can say. Some people just don’t want to help, and I’m not trying to browbeat anyone or make them guilty, or — each individual makes his own choices. That is the only way it can be. For me, I decided to give a tenth of everything I earned in a way that would do as much as possible to make the lives of others better, regardless of who they were, regardless of where they were from, and even regardless of when they were going to be born. And it was fun for me to do this — it made the sort of pointless rat race of life under late capitalism into something noble and worthy. I was doing good.”

“When?” Sesako smiled in a not quite friendly manner. “You also want to help people who have already died, or who aren’t born yet? Because of course you do. How do you do that?”

“Not just them, I also want to help farm animals, wild animals, and even insects thrive — though I’m not actually sure if insects are cognitively sophisticated enough for it to actually matter what happens to them.”

Sesako laughed. “A thoroughly nonsensical person. A complete equality amongst all — except the insects, who only sort of matter.”

“Look… if it doesn’t make sense to value someone born in… say some tiny country on the opposite side of the empire less than someone born in this country. So why does it make sense to value someone born in the last twenty years more than someone who will be born a hundred years from now?”

“A compelling and elegant argument for why I should care nothing about those born in distant countries.” Sesako grinned at me, making a joke of the reply.

“The question of future people is important, but it’s not the central argument.” I smiled at him. “While I’m a greedy person, who always wanted the best for myself, there was still a part of me that really cared about other people and — I found purpose. Happiness, joy, and a sense of meaning in life to know that I was actually doing something to make the world the sort of place I wanted it to be.”

Sesako replied solemnly. “For you, this cause is your Great One.”

“Most people just complain about how they can’t change anything, how there will always be problems, and how small people don’t matter. But they are lying to themselves. They are giving themselves an excuse to not do the things they can do. Most of the people from where I was from were able to give enough each year out of their salaries, without restricting their lives in any important way, to save the life of another human being each year. I was just one of the rare people who acted on this enormous opportunity.”

“It is your Great One,” he repeated. “You worship your cause. And I can understand that you may become fanatical, and someone insane in its pursuit.”

“I am not insane.”

“You want an imaginary world where everyone thrives, where there is no suffering, and where everyone can have everything they want at once without having to give anything up. Do you also wish the heavens to provide for each person so that no one needs to labor?”

I blinked several times. Then I smiled. Well, one of the things I’d like to happen was a fully automated futurist transhuman utopia populated by a vast number of people — and I thought it was possible. “Well yes, that would also be nice — nobody should need to work unless they want to.”

“You are insane.”

I placed my hand on Sesako’s shoulder. “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

He laughed. “Insane. But let us return to the main point,” Sesako said. “A deal. First, if we die, half my accumulated fortune shall be dedicated to training the spark of peasants in Diet Vinh.”

“I don’t want us to die. I really, really don’t.”

Sesako shrugged. “The possibility remains no matter how much you dislike it. Even if I were to be over cautious, it cannot be eliminated.”

“Well then, the spark of peasants in Diet Vinh at least sounds unlikely to cause negative secondary effects, even if it isn’t necessarily the highest expected value cause, and we don’t have the time to research carefully. Sure. In case of death — which we will try to avoid, half the money goes to Diet Vinh. But how can we make that actually happen if we die.”

“Oh, that is simple, and I mean to achieve one of my secondary goals through this: I will give the fortune to Hinete and tell her to go there and manage your program. That shall keep her from dying in this ugly war and keep her occupied long enough for the grief at her lost country to subside.”

“And when we don’t die?”

“Half the fortune then as well — and you can use the time you have in control of this body as you wish to do your good doing.”

“And then there will be time to figure out what is actually the best way to make a better world, and do the most good that I can manage, instead of simply guessing that awakening the spark of peasants is a good idea.” I accept that plan. “But I don’t want us to die — you will promise not to risk our lives without necessity.”

“I never risk my life without necessity.”

“You meant to fight on, trying to kill the emperor’s men if they have won. You meant to die defending the dragon — once the end has come, once you have actually lost. Promise you will flee.”

Sesako set his jaw.

“I’ll fight you. I’ll make you lose earlier. If you don’t promise, I’ll — I’ll…” I can’t die again. I can’t die again. I can’t die again.

The sky above us in our dream turned gray and dark suddenly. Lightning sparked. And a tornado descended into the tree line, tearing apart the ground and tossing leaves and detritus high into the air.

“Better a dead dog than a live lion. That is what your people say? I can promise to be a dog then. Though I do not agree with the saying. For it is wrong. But once hope of victory is lost, I will flee.”

I studied him trying to decide if I could trust him. Then I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t really have any choice.

We shook hands, and that was that.

The dream sky whirled around above us, spinning faster and faster, endlessly spinning.

And all faded away into nothingness.