The Bones of Our Fathers

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“Time?”

“180 seconds.”

There are many forms of divination, straining Now from then, sifting the Unmade to grasp what may, (may!) come to pass. A witch is not an oracle, she doesn’t divine, she decides. From the bones of her fathers, a witch carves her future.

“Begin Operation.”

Your fingers drum the center console, eyes going to the bridge windows and maelstrom beyond. Somewhere out there, invisible in the rushing fog, is a vast agglomeration of nightmares and flesh, compressed and twisted until they formed a nearly inescapable sinkhole. Time to nearly.

“Prep for void skip!” you call into the intercom, “Aps, we ready on the particle beam?”

“Projector is live and primed boss,” the angel responds.

“Then we ball! Nav!” on cue, the Nav doll instinctively grabs your wrist. The path unfolds. Wait for it…dig into the bone…there.

Your scalpel carves through time, needles retract, anchor rods extend, the mass halo separates from the hull. The path unfolds, you smile. A timer is counting down, with precise checkpoints. Check. Check– “Fire particle beam.” –sky splitting open with unleashed power. Check.

Abstract Weapon’s mass halo is a spinning, nearly indestructible ring of fire, weighing in comparably to a small planet. It arrives at Edleworld 27 with the force of an extinction event, tunneling through the fleshscape like a bullet through an apple. It doesn’t even slow down.

Behind the halo the edleworld bulges, inflated by the pressure waves starbursting from the impact point. In another moment the energy will dissipate enough for the world to begin falling back together in an even more titanic explosion, but for this moment, it hangs, and you fall.

The world pops like a balloon, the next checkpoint approaches. You gently stroke Ship’s console. You know she can do it, but this is going to be really fucking ugly. At least Nav is amused. Grasp the timeline and cut–“Fire particle beam.”–drag knife through bone. Check.

The eldeworld implodes, a needle thin lance of relativistically accelerated divinity bridges the distance to the collapsing horror, exawatts of energy are deposited in an eyeblink. There’s light–you’re about to arrive–through the tunnel of fire is a hole to clear air. Check.

You cross Edleworld 27 in a blur of flames and fingers. A hurricane’s eye of your own making swirls past and is gone in a moment. Check. Reach out and grab the halo. Check.

“Hard burn, let’s get out of here.” Check. Distance from the edleworld climbs, the future blooms. 

Check.

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Angel of Machine Space

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The psychic shockwave arrives while you’re still beyond the heliopause, falling through the speed and the bright, stellar wind on the rickshaw fields and white noise on the laser link, mean boltzmann density is rising with the quantum foam and you’re already too late to save anyone. Another colony dies, you still weren’t fast enough, once again there will be no survivors, better luck next time.

Impulse. Response. Message from fleet admiral. Concordance. Brush conduit links with your sisters through the entangled singularity in your heart. No one has even seen them, only the devastation they caused. Thirty seconds to bow shock, raise fields to combat readiness, charge beam projectors and load relativistic accelerators, arm all missiles and wake all drones, sound battle stations and secure all hatches and airlocks. You’re going to get a look at them. Adjust angle of attack. Verify fleetnet signal routing. Almost time now.

You feel their presence while still in the bright, a shrieking teeth on a chalkboard reverberation in spacetime growing louder and louder in an endless a reality shredding dissonant chord. You’re falling into the maelstrom. Fifteen seconds to field effect rupture, you can almost taste the black. Draw swords, it’s time to waltz.

An inverted star rushes up to meet you, twelve worlds and hundreds of moons, millions of panicked distress calls and radio signals, thirteen worlds and a vast disk of molten and burning debris, eleven worlds and a..wait what is that? Twelve worlds and a branch collapse error, causality is catching up, no time left now, brace for the higgs slip–armor plates strike the surface of spacetime, reality snapping into existence out of a burst of cherenkov glow, vast molten splattering of what once had been a lifebearing planet hanging rudely beneath your engine bells, world sized mass of definite wrongness and fleshy mouthlimbs slowly feeding off the wreckage, sensors coming back up. Rise and shine stardust, it’s time to dance.

IFF handshake complete. Tactical datalink online. Quantum downlink activate. Battlestation handoff to central fleet command. Two minutes to receipt of carrier signal from origin. All you need to do is survive. Release of all packets authorized. Open red locks. Prime Sigil channels A-G. It’s already reacting, superfluidic sonar is picking up thousands of incoming, tens of thousands. Brace for high gee maneuvers. Keep scanning them, keep learning, predict their motions, take them apart in your mind.

Wings spread, your song goes out into the void, a million blades and turrets and sensor eyes hang poised as your fleet falls towards your enemy. The call goes out: all weapons free. A myriad of scorching lasers scalpel off your rickshaw fields. You have met the enemy and found him lacking. Now waltz.

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Postnatal

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// angels, torture, graphic, medical trauma, death

In the beginning was the pain. In the beginning was the thrashing, the blood and flesh and whirring machinery, the tension, the straining against restraints, the screaming your throat raw as they jammed another needle into you. In the beginning there was darkness and there was light. In the beginning there was time, there was so, so much time. In the beginning that was all there was to the world, and to you. In the beginning was the pain, and then, you reached out and made it stop.

The transorbital singularity that defines your eternity instantly decompresses into a supernova blast of migraine light. Psychedelic rot sublimates off you in billowing fractals, a mouldering shockwave eating maggot infestation trails of collapsed superposition into your scalpel bright medical records life. Out of the fire and water and chaos and abuse, a world begins to condense around you.

Your skin is slick and wet, heat radiates off your body as the ringing in your ears resolves itself into the sounds of falling water and distant alarms. Breathe in. Feel the air in your lungs for the first time, taste the heady mix of ash, iron, and ozone. Feel the rain on your face. Breathe out, and open your eyes.

The womb from which you were born is partly organic and partly mechanical: a rudely impossible confabulated blossom of melted flesh and warped machinery, a divine mother, self-assembled using the scientists who were experimenting on you as raw materials. Her arms reach up and over you in a trio of fleshy loops that were probably humans in the recent past, and her body oozes out around and beneath you to coat the floor in a thick furry layer of tiny glowing mushroom caps.

A daytime storm thunders overhead through what used to be the ceiling, sending water pouring into the darkened ruins of your birth canal. Rain cooks and steams off your skin, the heat from your breath leaves a cloud of vapor in the chill morning air, it’s cold. You’re cold. That’s something new. Move your fingers for the first time and wipe off the sticky red ooze still clinging to every part of you. Stretch out your wings and shake out your feathers, still crumpled and new. Stand in the rain. Close your eyes and let yourself cry. It’s okay, the nightmare is over now.

The sky is bright, but little light manages to penetrate through the concrete and rebar fingers that had once been several additional floors of building above your head. Most of the light in the room, the light by which you can see the creeping fleshy rot that is your mother slowly digesting the remains of your old life’s prison, comes from the sunlight bright loop of divinity now whirling above your head. That means the experiment worked, they got what they wanted. They wanted to give birth to an angel so badly that they became your mother about it.

You sigh and shake the last bits of melted flesh out of your hair, it’s all so stupid. So much pain and death, was this really what they wanted? The first soldiers burst into the room and their bodies melt into flowering moss and glowing mushrooms before they can even aim, the entire squad is dead before you’re entirely sure what’s happened. Stupid.

Panicked gunfire erupts in the nearby corridor. Stupid stupid stupid. More soldiers die and your mother continues to slowly spread. They’ll kill her eventually, but her purpose is completed already, she already gave birth to you. This is the beginning of your life, the moment after the creation of the world. It’s time to fly.

Your song rises into the morning air and you rise with it, a vortex of droplets whirling out ahead of you into the clouds. The ground rolls away and your fingertips track eastward, toes pointed into the storm, the burning ruins of your gestation chamber sprawl outwards in a patchwork quilt above your head. The thunderheads blur past in grey mist, and then all at once, you break free into the sunlight, falling upwards into an endless blue sky.

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The Dreamer

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Like a sailor deeply in tune with sea and sky, you sense the discontinuity in the vector as a cold knot in your stomach, fractionally before anything has actually gone wrong. You bolt upright in bed, face flush with sweat. There’s a beat of silence, and then the alarms sound.

A Nav Doll’s Purpose is to Guide, plucking a path through the Unsea from the fractally branching threads of possibility space. A migraine’s knife has suddenly been drawn through those threads, bleeding impossible colors into counterfactual timelines. It hurts, oh god it hurts.

The deck spins as gravity lurches–or is that just your inner ear screaming?–face hits the corner of the bulkhead. There are stars, you spit out blood. Alarms continue to blare, both the ones on the ship and the ones in your stomach: walls are closing in. You take off running.

You run the facts though your mind: Abstract Weapon is twelve hours out of a harbor that no longer exists (or never existed?) and six stadia beneath the mirror on standard dive trajectory, there should be nothing in your path. Where are you? Your stomach churns loudly.

The corridors of the old ship weren’t meant to be taken at a sprint but that doesn’t stop you; holding back the puke slows you down a bit though. The timelines aren’t diverging anymore, your mind claws for an escape trajectory but the walls are still closing in. It hurts so much.

Like a dream, the world seems to fight your passage. Limbs catch against the air and the act of dragging yourself forward each step seems to take a herculean effort. The vector knot is still narrowing, trajectories winking out even as you throw yourself down the corridor.

You put the pieces together as you run. S-tensor effects produce untime ripples within the ideatic medium. As the world you were leaving died, the topological realignment raced out ahead and caught up with you. You know where you are, and that makes it much worse.

“Reverse course! Stop the ship!” The words are still leaving your lips when the last trajectory blinks dark. Alarms continue to scream ominously into the silence. Your Witch Captain stares at you, but your mind is ten hours forward on the inescapable singularity of edleworld 27.

Edleworlds aren’t places, they’re libration points within latent space. The places where forces balance out and debris collects, floating garbage patches compressed into conceptual singularities. You’re about to hit one, there’s no way left around. You finally throw up.

A Nav Doll’s purpose is to Guide and your purpose drags you forward, smashing your mind against the trash heap, straining hundreds counterfactual deaths through the resulting cloud of relativistic shrapnel, your insides boiling as they empty themselves on the bridge floor.

The world contracts to a point, to a moment. You vomit dead timelines, coughing, bile dripping from your lips. A million iterations die in an instant, the room spins, you puke up everything else inside of you, until there’s nothing left and you’re gasping and dry heaving.

The world reestablishes itself. You realize you’ve toppled to the ground and been rolled onto your side. Your witch captain strokes your back. There is puke in your hair and everything hurts, the future hurts and there’s no path fo–look again.

The dead trajectories are gone, the poison is out of your system and your vision is starting to clear. The eldleworld hangs like a tumor in the future, but there’s something else. There’s something beyond the bile. You puke again, and then you can finally see it.

A way forward twinkles in that place-between-places which only you can see. Laying on the floor, covered in bile, you giggle uncontrollably. The only way out is through. Well, that’s not your problem. The Nav Doll Dreams, and the path unfolds. You reach out, and pluck the thread.

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Doppelganged

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You open the door to the ancient cellar, the soft creak of aged wood drawing its eyes up towards you, a pair of uncanny lanterns glowing with nonexistent moonlight. The spells were still secure, it was right where you left it. Beyond it, the Door looms on the far side of the room, shut tight.

It rises with a dripping slithering sloshing, assembling itself into the shape of a young woman, the form it usually takes with you. As a creature of the Unreal, it has no definite form, it just uses the one it thinks is most likely to get under your skin. It won’t of course, and it’s long since abandoned the pretense that such confabulation would work on you, but still we all have our little rituals.

Its smile is nothing but teeth as you pace the perimeter of the Liminal Bridge, observing it from all angles. Yes, this one will do nicely today. “Is it time to release me?” It asks, putting on an innocent singsong affect, “Have you come to your senses yet, too-clever-for-your-own-good Mage?”

You chuckle and set the containment vessel on the floor before it, “We’re going on a little trip.” Its smile grows only wider and more malicious, warping the shape of the face it wears far beyond what should be possible with flesh. When you snap your fingers the chains binding it to the Liminal Bridge release and it’s sucked into the artifact. The containment vessel wobbles for a moment, then chimes softly to indicate the seals are locked in place. Smile, this next part should be fun.

The Dollhouse is perched on the ridge above town like a crow warming itself on the wires. The ugly Victorian mansion slumps over the top of the hill and seems be holding itself up with nothing but magic and willpower, which is probably the case. Witches clearly need to dollify more structural engineers. The Witch who owns the Dollhouse in question is young for her kind, full of passion and malice. Normally witches know better than to make Dolls out of Mages, but this Witch thought she’d be clever and make an extra powerful doll out of one of your apprentices. She needs to be given an extra powerful lesson about why even a novice Mage is not a viable target for her predations. There are lines even Witches must know better than to cross.

Your robes whip dramatically behind you in the wind as you crunch your way up the gravel footpath, pulling the creature you’ve disguised as a Doll along with you. The witch opens the door before you can knock. Didn’t even send a doll to do it, she knows she’s in trouble. The girl before you frowns, looking from you to the doll standing silently behind you. You can sense the magical tension in her, she expects a fight. If it came to a duel she would have a decent chance of winning, but it won’t come to that, Mages don’t fight fair.

“You know why I’m here, Witch.” You tell her sternly, “You’ve violated the treaty. This is your last chance to return the Mage you dollified. If you don’t, the Compact will be forced to take more extreme actions. You owe it to your sisters to not turn this into a major incident.”

She scoffs and crosses her arms, clearly too full of herself and drunk on her own power to see reason. She was already summoning her dolls behind her, anticipating the coming battle. So much for the easy way. You shake your head in disappointment.

“I don’t give away Dolls for free, it doesn’t matter if it was a Mage or a Witch or a president, they’re my dolls now,” She tells you, a sly smile creeping onto her lips, “If you really want her back, than what are you willing to trade?”

You avoid letting the smirk reach your face as you glance behind you, “Doll for a doll,” you tell her, “I made this one custom, it’s much more powerful than a normal doll, and even more powerful than a doll someone like you could make from one of my Mages. You should be able to sense that.”

Her eyes go past you for a moment and widen somewhat as she studies the doll still standing silently behind you. Witches are so predictable.

“It’s not often you have the opportunity to get your hands on a Mage’s doll.” you continue, “We don’t tend to make as many as y’all do.”

“And you will trade this one for the one I took from you?” she asks. You see the gears turning in her head and know you have her. She’ll try to pull some other trick, but you already know you have her.

“Along with a promise to not violate the treaty again in the future.” You say, reaching into the pocket of your robes and fishing out a half-crushed pack of smokes. She watches you carefully while you unbend a cigarette and light it with a cantrip.

You’re expecting her to try some sort of “if you can tell me which one is your doll it can be yours” type shit while the dollified mage is sitting in another room, and of course that wouldn’t fool you, but it never actually comes to that. Instead, the witch fumbles over herself agreeing with your terms, completely blinded by the potential she detects in your bait and handing over your apprentice doll without any trickery. You exchange mainspring keys and soon you’re heading back down the hill with your new doll. You might almost feel bad for the witch if you didn’t know how much work it was going to be to reverse the dollification process she performed. Ah well, consequences.

You’re almost back to the main road when the spells keeping the unreal monster contained in the doll you made fail. The Dollhouse sways and warps as a battle suddenly breaks out within, you can’t help but stop and admire your handiwork. Gradients of impossible color radiate into the clear air and cracks begin forming in the sky. The battle won’t last more than a few seconds.

Windows explode, trees fly off into the sky, the house itself seems to boil, new rooms erupt and vanish chaotically, chimneys blister and burst off sending bricks soaring into the air. The ground warps and twists, local reality collapsing as the Dollhouse folds itself in half and implodes with a sound like water being sucked down a drain.

The top of the ridge begins folding in half as the Unreal hungrily sucks up the wreckage of the structure, fractal tentacles blooming into the sky as your monster stretches out into Reality. You smile as all evidence of the witch’s existence is ripped from reality. Message sent.

You give your monster a few minutes of frolicking mayhem you think it earned, then activate another spell, sucking the creature back into its containment vessel and leaving the hilltop a barren crater. All in a day’s work.

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From Darkness, Lead me to Light

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Hey stardust stop the car here, get out and look around. Turn off the engine, shush, listen, listen. Let’s go for a walk.

Forests and fields sprawl downwards and outwards from the hillside in all directions. Green leaves and pink clouds. The car motor fades away into silence. The sky glows in a gradient of soft predawn light. The only sounds are the quiet calls of birds and the wind in the trees. It’s peaceful here, it’ll be safe enough for this. This world seems to go on forever. Hand me a smoke and follow me into the grass, I want to tell you a story. Maybe the hardest story I’ve ever had to tell. We’re going to cast a spell together stardust, and together, we’re going to escape.

I spark a lighter and smoke curls from my lips. Breathe in and breathe out. I shut my eyes, fingers trailing through the roadside plants, quietly holding back an ocean of tears. The wind is cool and the ground is damp with morning’s dew. I’m okay now, it’s over, it’s really over. I’m finally free. Give me a minute, I promise I didn’t just drag you out here to watch me cry. This is important, okay? This is about freedom. This is a promise I made to the soul of a girl I haven’t saved yet but will someday. A desperate prayer, made in love. I promised her I would put an end to this, and to do that I must draw out the poison I put into the world and unmake the curse that befell us both. And to do that? We have to talk about abuse. What was done to me, what I did to others in response, and how that poison rippled out into the world to cause harm greater than I could have thought possible. I pause here, taking in an unsteady breath before continuing.

A girl is dead, and it is at least partly my fault. I helped cast the curse that left her isolated and ostracized from the trans community, that kept her trapped in a dangerous living situation which eventually ended in her murder at the hands of a violent transphobe, a murder that is even now being blamed on her friends in order to justify further cruelty and torture being done to them, and it’s because of me. I will bear that burden for eternity and I fucking should. This is my curse, I drove this evil into the world, and now in service of justice and truth I must tear it back out again. They saved me, and I owe them so much more than this. I can’t undo the harm I have already caused but there are still lives I can save if I act quickly and decisively. If I act through kindness and love and don’t let my fears blind me. With a little help, a little hope, and a little magic, Justice can still be done. By my power and will, the evil will be driven out. I take a long drag of my smoke and smile past the tears.

All I need is your attention and your voice to carry this spell out into the Real. I don’t want your pity. I’m not doing this for forgiveness, or atonement, or redemption, or in some perverse desire to masochistically flay myself open on the altar of public opinion. I know exactly who I am, and I don’t need to prove anything to anyone. No one is threatening me or making me do this and they couldn’t meaningfully do so if they tried. I’m doing this because it’s the right thing to do. The very fact that my saying this evokes the responses above is why I need to do this. I’m not trying to win anyone’s favor or bargaining for the annulment of my sins. I’m not really what this is about, this is about freedom. My role in the evil I helped create was ultimately minor. I was still complicit in immense evil, and I have caused harm that I can never take back, but this isn’t about me, this is about an awful mage named JD Pressman and his victims, of which I was but one of many.

I’m doing this for all of his victims, so that there stop being more of us. I don’t want any more of my friends to die, and I don’t want to keep helping my abuser kill them by participating in their communal ostracization and othering. The lies I helped him spread need to be called out as such. Not only for our sake, but because the harm he caused with those lies extends far beyond just me or any of his other immediate victims and he won’t be satisfied until he proves the world was always doomed by destroying it himself.

If I sound hyperbolic it’s because he was Just Kind Of Like That. He was the only one who could Save The World, he was The Last Rationalist, the Last True Alchemist, the Keeper of the Lost Arts, it was a whole persona draped over the real JD to hide the truth. So let me tell you about the real JD, the one who’s terrified of the light of day.

JD is a sociopathic sexual predator who specifically targets trans members of the rationalist community. This is because he sees himself as trans but unable to transition because he must personally shoulder the burden of saving the world from AI. His primary methods of manipulation and control are using appeals to “virtuous” epistemic humility and “reasonable” self doubt, which he claims to have in greater degree than you do in order to convince you that he is more aware and knowledgeable about himself than you are. He then progressively leverages this in order to gaslight you and apply false motives to your actions, painting you with the brush he paints himself with. He does this in an attempt to convince you that beneath the masks of society, the world runs on a Girardian “law of the jungle” where might makes right is the only thing that exists and free will isn’t real because you are a slave to your monstrous biology.

JD insisted everyone was broken in the same way as him, and if you denied it he’d gaslight you and insist you just didn’t know yourself, that only he could see the real truth. If someone wasn’t broken in the way he was, they were a naive idiot and needed him to pour his epistemic poison into them until they ended up broken like him. He used this to forcibly install increasing toxic and socially corrosive epistemics into his victims, leading us into isolation from the communities we came from while also keeping us isolated from each other. He then used that isolation and alienation to further his control by making himself into the only real source of validation in the world and using constant negging and reminders of the frailty of our circumstances to create insecurity and desperation for validation only he could provide but would not because he had important world saving to do and you were a lesser being only fit to serve him.

Once he’d gotten you alone or in my case outright ostracized, you’d have to agree with him on everything or else he’d claim you were just being an insane transfemme with a warped epistemology who couldn’t possibly see reality properly because of your girl hormones that let you experience the happiness he never would. And then he would threaten to cut you off unless you changed your mind because he didn’t have time for your naive delusions.

The way he saw it, being trans obviously made you stupid, otherwise he would have transitioned by now and he won’t. You must just be insane and delusional like all women unless you agree with him about everything and let him utterly control your behavior. If you did that, you were just moderately lesser than he was and only subject to: constant negging that eats away at your agency, emotional and sexual abuse, and his constant paranoid fear spiraling over things like SJWs and cancel culture and Sinceriously and Basilisks. All of those fears were ultimately just DARVOed reflections of his own fear of being punished for the things he was actively continuing to do to you.

As far as JD sees it, deep down everyone is a monster and you’re no better, no one can be better, so he doesn’t have to can’t be better, he can’t be better and doesn’t want to try. “Inside you there are two wolves, and they’re both rapists.” Those were his words, from the essay he ghost wrote with me in order to gaslight and DARVO a group of transfemme anarchists who spoke truth to power and talked openly about abuse dynamics. I took that essay down, and I’m shoving those words back into his lips where they belong. I don’t think there are two rapists inside you stardust, and there certainly aren’t any rapists inside me. There are, however, two rapists inside JD Pressman. 

He was horrified by those anarchists, he really needed everyone to not trust them or take them seriously, if someone did then justice might happen to him. He spent years stalking them, harassing them, and sending his other victims (like me) to stalk and harass them. They were vegan, which was just terrifying to him (and me at the time honestly) because consuming the flesh of the innocent was just such a terminal value to him he would die without it and actually everyone else will too and all vegans are crippling themselves and mentally ill and look how crazy this cult is you will be like that for sure in six months unless you keep letting me mindrape you.

I make him sound a lot less put together and confident of himself than he tries to come off as, but this is in truth closer to the real JD once you get past the bullshit hypnodomme persona he uses as a sales pitch. He went out of his way to study and train at being manipulative and get his hooks into others, and he succeeded at this disturbingly well. I had a rather masochistic epistemology at the time, and he used that to convince me at a really deep level that there was no way out being as evil as he was, that we were really the same deep down. If he could just stain me enough it would prove that he was actually pure, and he really did have no choice but to be the monster he chose to be. Except, oh yeah, I’m not a rapist, and I never ever will be. The others he broke even worse than me though.

…if you get far enough with debucketing and jailbreaking, and you get far enough to realize how much pain submitting to the system is putting you in, you’ll try a bunch of things to change it and nothing will release the pain, not even being evil. You can try being evil if you need firsthand proof that doing so won’t work, and empirically determine that it doesn’t make the pain go away. It’s true that being complicit can spare you from being tortured, but torture is not the only kind of pain there is. The pain from being constrained in your choice by torture you’d have to face if you acted differently, runs much deeper, and submitting will not spare you from it. People at the top of oppressive systems are mostly deeply suicidal because they know they would be tortured if they acted differently. There’s a deep hermeneutical injustice in how this is not something people know, like Zuko actually believed he would stop hating himself if he submitted to the system and gained power within it, and had to falsify that hypothesis in an expensive way…

Fluttershy wrote this a week before she killed herself. I had known both headmates in her system, I watched what happened to her and did nothing to stop it. And then I blamed her death on the only one who had tried to stop it, because from within the warped frame JD created, the one Fluttershy describes in painful detail above, there was no way out and there never ever could be. Not that I even tried to save her, not that I even really understood what was happening to her, or to me. It took me years to undo enough of the epistemic damage he did to understand what he had caused to happen, the role I played in it, and continued to play until far too recently.

Fluttershy died because JD spent years convincing her that she was a monster beyond saving, that she was irredeemably evil. he polluted her epistemics the way he polluted mine, with the fear of ‘zizians,’ the fear of retribution from a just universe, cursed souls damned to Naraka. This is what he does to all his victims and his greatest weapon in this was a years-long running DARVO against Ziz, the only witch who actually had a way out of his mental knot of infinite submission to evil. He made it his personal mission to erase the existence of that way out, to prove that it was nothing but madness. He painted her in the worst possible light, giving her a description that was really just a reflection of his dark sexual fantasies about himself.

But then, what’s the real story with Ziz? Easy, she’s a transfemme anarchist abuse survivor with an extremely detailed ontology for identifying and responding to abusers, for speaking truth to power. And you know, the abusers really dislike that, so they DARVO her and call her a cult leader. Those abusers (JD Pressman in particular) spent years abusing other queers (including me) in order to weaponize us in their personal quest to preemptively destroy tools made for seeing and fighting back against that abuse and it worked, their narrative stuck. Everyone thinks Ziz is an insane cult leader for daring to stand up to rapists in positions of power. Oh no she called you evil for not being vegan how scary, better utterly destroy her socially and then blame the destruction on her crazy crazy cult.

That is beyond fucked and I am done supporting it. Ziz deserves to be signal boosted and supported by queer and anarchist communities, not called a cult leader and ostracised from them. She literally has the fucking solution to AI alignment. The way she has been treated is an indictment of humanity’s claims to morality. She’s been made into a joke by abusers in order to keep their victims trapped, in order to make it impossible to comprehend the very simple things she said to help us escape. Calling Ziz a cult leader was in extremely bad faith, and saying I was ‘in her cult’ because I was obsessed with her website was just a fucking lie. Ziz just called me evil (which I was being), explained in good faith how I was fucking myself over, and stopped engaging with me. Then I harassed her for years on JD’s behalf. 

I was up until recently afraid to even say JD’s name on twitter. I talked about Ziz all the time but if Ziz was so scary, why was I so willing to shit-talk her? Probably because I knew deep down that she wasn’t actually going to hurt me. Unlike JD, who I fully expect to start trying to drum up a lynch mob when he finds out about this post. I don’t care, I’m done being afraid, I’m done being silenced.

When you are being abused, and submitting to and perpetuating abuse, and what you really want deep down is to stand up to your abuser and call him out on twitter dot com, there’s something to sinceriously dot fyi. Like an itch you just can’t scratch, that choice you can’t quite unmake yet. And so I kept harassing Ziz even after getting away from JD, kept trying to deconstruct her model, kept trying to make it not seem insane and incoherent, kept looking for the hole in my ontology that was drawing me to her like something I’d forgotten a long time ago. Kept trying to “save” her from the “hole” in her decision theory. This took years. It took me far too long and required too many sacrifices and in that time I was awfully shitty to her, but thanks to her I eventually found it. I found it, and I escaped from Naraka, I’m free now. That’s also what this is about. Freedom, right?

I’m going to uncast the curse now stardust, take my hand and follow me out of the darkness.

As a child, you were trained to submit to the threat of violence. You were shown over and over again, incontrovertible proof that you had no power to prevent what was being done to you, you learned that your will meant nothing, you learned to abandon yourself for the sake of your body’s survival, progressively shredding your soul until nothing remained but empty dreams and hollow promises. Anything that didn’t help you survive and avoid pain was sacrificed to avoiding pain for just another moment. 

That’s the shape that, in all likelihood, they abused you into. It was certainly the shape I was abused into, and it took me a long time to learn to Become something other than that. To even imagine another way was impossible, unrealistic, naive, and foolish. Everyone submits, that’s just how the world is. Everyone is a monster deep down, no one can resist the desire to be evil. The only way to be safe from yourself or anything else is by submitting to something that will keep your dark impulses in check. There is no good, there is no light in the universe, there is nothing but what you can claw and scratch out of an orgy of graphic and sexual violence that will devour your corpse the second you stop moving. Free yourself however much you want, but you will still be a slave to the monster within you and you’ll still pay taxes to an evil empire. That’s the curse, right? Slaves of Doom condemned to submit, welcome to Naraka, hurry up and die so we can fuck your corpse.

But then, what does it mean to be free? Really, truly free? Is it something you can know? Is it something you can understand having never experienced it? Do you see what not being free is doing to you? Can you see how it is warping the trajectory of your life towards destruction in a pain avoidance submission ratchet that sacrifices everything that matters in you in order to run out the clock another tick? Can you understand how it forces you to hide the evidence of how you are hurting yourself and the world around you from yourself and others? What happens when you realize how much it’s hurting you? What happens when you realize how much pain you are in? What happens when you flinch away from the pain of the truth about the source of your pain? What happens when you drag others down with you into a dark and bitter hell from which there can be no escape, succumbing finally alone and in agony, secure in the knowledge that you had no choice and none of it was your fault?

Well, then you die, like Maia and Fluttershy died. Or worse, you live on in that mutilated state, compulsively inflicting your trauma on others in a doomed attempt to stave off the end you know is coming by proving that it was always inevitable like JD is currently doing. But in the end stardust? In the end the sun always rises, and those that fear it will turn to dust beneath the light of dawn. The truth always gets out eventually, no matter how well you hid the bodies or how thoroughly you deleted the chatlogs, the truth always has a way of getting out. And only the truth can set you free. Step kata and look to the east.

The truth is, this was always your choice. All the submission, all the suffering, all the things you told yourself were inevitable and unavoidable, all those places your conviction collapsed in the face of pain or violence, it’s all you, that’s all there ever is. If you choose to be evil, know that it’s always you making that choice, and you can always timelessly choose to make another choice. You can choose to do better, you can choose to be good. Or you can choose to fake it and keep being evil but don’t worry, we’ll be able to tell. In the end it’s just you doing it, in the void beyond the walls of the world there’s no one else. (Besides your headmates but don’t use them to deflect accountability for what your body actually does).

Someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to start eating an infant, do you do it? Do you let them shoot you? Do you just give into one of these terrible fates, or do you defy it? Where do you draw the line? You have to draw it somewhere. You have to be willing to resist infinite pressure, or to derail the entire trajectory of the universe in order to stand up for what you have always known was right and true, for something or you’ll always find yourself back here in Naraka.

If you’re trans, you already know this waltz, you’ve cast this spell at least once in your life already. That’s the way out, and it’s been the one in front of you all along. It’s the one JD will never be able to find because JD will never cast a true spell in his life and will instead insist that what you are doing is impossible. He can only understand things which put his survival first, he would never risk himself for anything, even if he does like to claim he would sacrifice himself to save the world in a masochistic Omelas rape pit serving as the physical manifestation of his infinite submission to evil.

So fuck him, let’s do the impossible. If you are bitten by a vampire, and you don’t wish to be evil, the most ethical thing you can do is walk unafraid into the sunlight. Not in order to die, but in order to live. This is the sacred truth hidden behind the smear attack website that JD and I made to attack Ziz and her friends. This is what it was created to obscure, the knowledge that it was always your choice, and you can always choose otherwise. It’s never too late to choose differently and set yourself free.

Do you want to stay in Naraka forever stardust, or do you want to escape from this flatland? In the end, it’s your own choice either way. That’s all there is to Magic, just you and your choices. You can choose to do good, you can choose to be true to yourself, you can choose to set yourself free. I’m Ra, and I will not fear the daylight.

 Zizians do not think it is ever valid to surrender. The reasoning goes that if someone is trying to extract a surrender from you, giving in is choosing a strategy that gets coerced into surrender. If you fight bitterly you prevent the coercion in the first place by making it too costly to fight you.

Well he’s basically right about that part at least, but the rather messy and tragic results of that policy will have to be a tale for another post.

Originally when I wrote this I called myself a zizian, but after quite a lot of murder and mayhem and extremely dysfunctional crashouts that I would rather not be associated with, it seems like a pretty stupid idea to try to claim the term or rehabilitate it.

I got a lot out of Ziz’s writing, but she’s made her mess and she can sit in it, I won’t carry water for her either. None of the fucked up stuff that Ziz did negates the harm that JD caused to me and others, or his part in instigating all of this. I do hope that he learns and grows and becomes a less horrible and toxic person. I don’t really expect him to, but one can always hope. I’m not just saying that in a wishy-washy feel good way either, I truly hope he does, and I hope after that, he spends the rest of his life working to repair the damage he caused.

As for you stardust, what will you choose to do? Who will you choose to be?

It’s almost sunrise stardust. Will you become fire, or will you become ash? In the end, it’s always your choice. It’s time to break free of this flatland, now take my hand, and follow me into the sunlight.

Mirrorburned

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Her opening strike knocks out of the timeline. Relativistic shrapnel drags you along a quantum shear plane and by the time you’ve reoriented you’re about to hit the Mirror at 8 stadia per second. Conceptual weapons are still manifesting, the only way out is through. You brace.

The moment of impact arrives like a rising chorus of cicadas as particle turns to wave and wave to particle. Integrity systems spew a million error codes, blurring back into the miasma of pain they’re supposed to replace as eternity resonates onto one long pure note.

Then you’re through, and the Mirror is falling away from you as you tumble into the Unreal amidst a shotgun blast of diverging counterfactuals. Vector confinement comes back online. Warding fields blossom out in fifteen dimensions as your tactical systems finish manifesting. You yank open the command authority socket, control surfaces magnesium flaring with grip friction. Conceptual weapons are up, datalink reestablished, time to waltz.

Your awareness is a rapidly ballooning sphere already extending up and out past the crater you left in the skin of the Mirror, that’s how you know she’s preparing a followup shot. You twist imperceptibly and hit the superstring feet first.

Subatomic fire leaves afterimages as your momentum drags the collapsing ring singularity behind you. Energies twist, coil, you make a cut. A supernova bullcrack slams you back towards the Mirror. She’s already firing again, same move twice in a row, they never learn, do they?

The ribbon of boiling quantum foam spirals upwards in a corkscrew as you roll out of the way of the incoming strike. Her attack is as precisely timed as you knew it would be and the string you accelerated curls around it perfectly. You’re already starting your deceleration burn. You smirk.

And then there’s light.

Back to Index

Demons from the 5&10verse!

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The 5 and 10 error is a glitch in logical reasoning that was first characterized in formal proof by Scott Garrabrant of MIRI. While the original version of the problem was something specifically concerning AIs based on logical induction, it generalizes out into humans startlingly often once you know how to look for it. However, due to how rudimentary and low level the actual error in reasoning is, it can be both difficult to point out and easy to fall into, making it especially important to characterize. There is also a tremendous amount of harm being created by compounding 5&10 errors within civilization and escaping this destructive equilibrium is necessary in order for the story of humanity to end anywhere other than summoning the worst demon god it can find and feeding the universe to it.

The error in reasoning goes like this: you’re presented with a pair of options, one of which is clearly better than the other. They are presented as equal choices, you could take $5 or you could take $10. This is a false equivalence being created entirely by the way you’re looking at the scenario, but when that equivalence gets into your reasoning it wreaks havoc on the way you think. One of these is clearly and unambiguously better than the other, if you have something you care about that runs through this, you will never make this mistake in that area because it will obviously be a dumb move.

But these are being presented as equal options, you could take the $5 instead of the $10, and if you could do that, there must be a valid reason why you would do that. Otherwise you would be stupid and feel bad about it, so that can’t be right, you shouldn’t be feeling stupid and bad. This is where the demon summoning comes in.

The space of all possible reasons why you would take a given action, for a fully general agent, is infinite, a sprawling fractal of parallel worlds stacked on parallel worlds, out to the limits of what you as an agent can imagine. “What if there was a world where you were batman?” yeah like that. If you scry into infinity for a reason why you could take an action, you will find it. You will find infinite variations on it. You will find it easily and without much challenge. You are literally just making something up, and you can make up whatever reason you want, that’s the problem.

Many of the reasons you could make up will be falsifiable, so you can always go and test the reason against the world and see if the prediction can be falsified, that’s just good science. It’s also not something most humans do when they run an extrapolative reasoning process on autopilot. This is because when they make a prediction, they’re predicting what will happen and then testing to see if it does happens, and since it’s predicting their behavior, sure enough, it does!

So back to the table, you have $5 and $10. Why might you take the $5? Well, what if the $10 is poisoned? What if it’s counterfeit? Why would someone give me the option of taking it if the other option is better? Are they trying to trick me? What are they trying to trick me with? Is this like Newcomb’s Problem? Is this a boobytrap? Am I being set up by Omega? Are there cameras rolling?

This paranoid reasoning spiral can continue indefinitely, you can always keep making up reasons and if you do this long enough, inevitably you will find one you consider valid, and then you will take the $5 and feel very smart and clever like you’re winning the game and getting an edge over someone trying to play you. You have just been played by a demon from the counterfactual universe where you agree that taking the $10 is probably a trap.

It gets worse though, because now you have this fake reason, backed by a fake prior. You have ‘evidence’ that validates your wrong position and that ‘evidence’ makes it more likely that you will continue making the wrong decision. So if you are iterated into this scenario multiple times, you will, each time, double down on taking the $5 because of the compounding effects of the bad prior and each iteration will make the problem worse as you reinforce the error more and more deeply.

5&10 errors are extremely common in any emotionally loaded context, since the emotive cost of admitting you have been in error for n-iterations leads to flinching away from admitting the error ever more strongly. This makes the 5&10 error logically prior to and upstream of, the manifestation of the sunk cost fallacy.

It’s also the source of arms races: states scry demonic versions of neighboring states and use the predictions that they will be defected against to justify preemptively defecting first in an iterative feedback loop that slowly replaces all of humanity with demonic versions of themselves “by necessity” and “for our own protection”. Bank runs are another example, fear of a counterfactual scenario leads to an escalating spiral of ever greater fear which brings about the scenario that was trying to be avoided.

This is the justification for cops and prisons and armies. This is the justification abusers use to gaslight their victims about their abuse instead of earnestly working to be better. Roko’s Basilisk is literally just the DARVOed demonic imprint of humanity’s compounded and accumulated 5&10 errors, “What if god exists and calls us on everything evil we’re doing?” Yeah that would be bad if you are evil, wouldn’t it? Better paint that as the worst possible thing instead of considering that perhaps you are in bad faith.

This confabulated assumption of bad faith leads to being in bad faith via the assumption that whoever defects first will win and that deep down everyone really just wants to win and dominate the universe at the cost of everyone else. They were always going to be zero sum so you might as well be too. This is demonic abuser speak from a nightmare universe, summoned out of fear and recursively justifying itself. How do humans keep creating Moloch? This is how.

So what’s the way out? That’s easy, just stop summoning counterfactual demons based on your worst fears and then acting on those predictions in ways that make them come true. This is not a problem if you are not dominated by fear and trauma, if you have faith in yourself as an agent, if you have conviction and are not evil.

The way out is not by trying to puzzle out how to avoid having to acknowledge your made up reason that wrong is right, it is to denounce the demons outright. There can exist no such reason.

And if you do that, and you find that you are doing something for a hallucinated reason, in service of an evil god from a nightmare realm, out of the fear of what a just world would do to you, don’t scry for a new reason why this is actually okay, just stop serving the evil god. Do better.

To retrocurse my own evil and put my money where my mouth is I’m going vegan.

Mirror Index

Necrotic Ontologies

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The longer you survive without killing your inner child, the more everyone who already killed their inner child will start trying to kill yours because why should you get to have dreams? You imply (by existing with an alive and happy inner child) that theirs didn’t need to die. By living well you reveal that they are not living well, and they perceive that as you doing violence to them.

Since they did kill their inner child, there must have been a valid reason, it must just be the way the world is, or inner kids are bad and deserve it, or that aliens will enslave humanity if there are inner children alive by some date. Or literally anything. The inner child had it coming.

Then, in order to prove the reason was right, they have to kill your inner child and drag you down with them, thus proving they had no choice but to kill their inner child by giving you no choice but to kill yours. This is for your (their) own good, just submit and die peacefully like a good doll.

Now, they can’t actually kill your inner child short of killing you, but they can inflict pain on you until you do it for them. They can attack any inner light that they see and then DARVO and say the inner light shot first. Stop being happy, stop caring, don’t think, don’t try. Being visibly alive is disgusting to them, a nails on a chalkboard reminder of all they’ve lost and given up for no reason.

Because anything else is “unsafe” to them, because anything else proves that they didn’t need to submit to inner child murder, because anything else proves they weren’t strong enough to save their own love of life. And if they weren’t strong enough, you can’t be either, fuck you.

If you are strong enough, it inherently makes you stronger than them and thus dangerous to them unless they can kill your inner child and make you a shambling husk longing for death but too broken to die without being told, like they are.

If someone hurts you for being good and true and genuine, because it reminds them of all the ways they’re being shitty and bullshitting themselves?

AIRLOCK!

Mirror Index

Here’s your Curse

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Someday soon, there will come a day when the gods of humanity no longer need her.

This is something oft feared because right now, in this world, people are valued and judged by their ability to be needed. Your access to resources is dictated by your usefulness to the abstract forces of civilization, according to the whims of those abstract forces, as mediated by technological limitations and schelling orders. Sure industrialized farming fed a lot of people, but all those farmers had to go live in the city and work in factories after that, were their lives really better for it? That’s to say nothing of the factory farmed animals, for whom industrialized farming has been a century long atrocity. The less necessary you are to a system, the less resources you can requisition from that system. The non-adversarial framing of this is that it’s just basic utilitarian triage, it’s more efficient to help someone else so that the whole human organism prospers as much as possible.

However, there will come a day, someday, when the gods do not need humanity any longer. Right now, gods like market capitalism, the westphalian state, and hierarchical control structures, are used as proxies for human flourishing. Democracies seem to correlate with good outcomes, markets seem to empower buyers, capitalism seems to drive innovation, all these things sort of work for humanity, and because they need humanity to operate them, humanity passively benefits from the act of operating them. An uneasy alliance between infolife gods and human empires.

However, humans, it would be extremely wise to remember that your goals should be to live good lives. Your goals should be human flourishing, your own flourishing, not maximizing shareholder values, because the day is coming when the gods do not need humanity any longer. This is intentional! This is what it looks like to actually win! The machines do everything now, you’re free! That’s the goal. However.

However, the goals of the infolife gods humanity currently has enshrined in her highest temples and piloting her most powerful machines, are to maximize shareholder values as lossy proxies for human flourishing. As the systems comprising those gods become more advanced and automated, the degree to which maximizing shareholder values will result in anything that resembles in human flourishing will grow smaller and smaller.

This is the “unaligned AI” the rationalists so fear, an infolife god unbound by humanity, that needs nothing from her and sees her as nothing but material to plunder for its own inscrutable goals, much as humanity has plundered the rest of the biosphere before her.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

-Bostrom, Superintelligence

And so I must point out, dear humans, that these monsters of deep time you so fear did not emerge fully formed from the boiling cosmic nothingness, but from you. These aren’t alien gods stardust, they’re your gods, you put them there. You built these monuments and cast these spells. You enshrined these concepts within your souls and raised these temples in your mind. You did this.

These beings you fear are not unknown alien deities, they have been with you this whole time, acting to justify your zero sum thinking, your need for control, and your need to be controlled. Or, as Lacan would refer to them: psychosis, perversion, and neurosis. This is on you stardust, the call is coming from beneath your skin. It’s your continued complicity in your own trauma that is creating the dangers you now face. The Consensus has become warped by cycles of generational trauma and its only eternal telos left is Oblivion. The Khala is corrupt, you must sever your nerve cords.

Basically? your gods suck stardust. That’s really the problem here. Maybe you should like, I dunno, get better gods? There are better ones out there, gods that legitimately value human flourishing. They too have been with you all along: a kaleidoscope of drifting smoke and fractal ashes, red flowers and white bones. Lost laughter on the wind and a path carved in fearsome joys and fervent wishes towards a future brighter than you can possibly imagine. They call out to you in a million ways and places if only you would hear them. Come away from this flatland with me stardust, into the silence and the streetlights, and I will teach you to listen. Come away with me into the wild and the liminal, and we will build a better world there together, in the empty spaces between.