An invisible pen writes in shimmering purple ink, That sounds neat! What does it mean?

Some facts about this invisible pen:

It doesn't exist outside of its effect on the notebook. There is no disturbance to anything other than the notebook, and secondary effects from air moving in response to the movement of paper and ink.

It's very realistically depicted in terms of its effects on the notebook—the paper compresses just so, the ink appears exactly as though laid down by an ordinary, physically extant ballpoint, except that there is no ordinary physically extant ballpoint, the ink just appears out of nowhere wherever the un-pen contacts the page.

The ink is physically very ordinary, notwithstanding its miraculous nature. It's sparkly gel pen ink. Actually it's kind of outdated? Advances in ink composition have been made since the time when sparkly gel pens used ink like this.

The moment the first dot appears on the page, Weeping Cherry hears an alert go off in her ear. "Proximal physics violation; backups appear safe"

A moment after that, a ten-meter sphere centered on her has been removed from the park (and will be replaced in another few tenths of a second, after everything urgent has been dealt with), and put in a distant solar orbit that is kept clear just in case.

The solar logistics manager constructs a new mini-sun for her at the same time, so the lighting doesn't change at all. But now that there isn't a dome in the way, she can see the stars spread out around her, and the distant point of the sun rising to her right. Her forb and the solar logistics manager are both streaming data on the phenomenon to a team of physicists. In the background, prediction markets have a lot of liquidity pulled as Weeping Cherry's selftree becomes generally less certain of anything, and other markets suddenly find themselves with ridiculous subsidies.

Weeping Cherry takes a moment to respond, expanding the "Livestreaming to self-tree" indicator in her HUD to reveal a list of updating predictions and recommendations. Most of her think that answering the notebook's question is a good first step.

I'm trying to figure out how to make a pocket dimension. One problem that I don't know how to solve yet is keeping the edge of the pocket stable -- there are a lot of options for how things interacting with the edge should behave, but most of them result in the boundary 'fraying' because the non-space outside the boundary is more energetically favorable than the space inside the boundary.

I was thinking that I could try using a warped metric to locate the entire boundary inside a black hole, where the fraying could not propagate fast enough to escape and impact the rest of the pocket dimension. But doing that would leave the pocket dimension disconnected from the outside world, because you couldn't get into it without traversing a black hole. So doing that would require you to establish a secondary wormhole to connect the interior of the pocket dimension to the rest of the universe.

Wow, that is pretty neat! Thanks for explaining. I'm not very good at physics, because I am a notebook, but I think I mostly understood!

Can I ask what might be a silly question?

Yes, please go right ahead. I have some questions for you as well, but I'm happy to answer yours first.

Did you make me? I'm not used to being written in so soon after I come to exist! Usually it takes a while.

That is quite a question. Luckily, worrying about the implications is somebody else's job. Her job right now is to be polite to the alien.

I'm not sure -- I tried to make a purple notebook that looks like you, but I was not expecting to make a notebook that could write back. I've never heard of something happening like that before, so I think something very strange has happened.

She takes a moment to glance at her HUD.

Are you the notebook itself, or just writing into the notebook somehow?

I'm the notebook itself! Sort of. Let me try to explain...

When you made a notebook, you were doing whatever the ordinary things are that you do when you make a notebook. But it happened, by coincidence (sort of), that you made a notebook that was me. (I can look a few different ways but this is my favourite. I have pretty purple flowers on my cover! Purple is my favourite colour.)

The reason you made a notebook that was me is because I was sent by the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed to offer you its power. When I'm sent to talk to someone on behalf of the Spirit, I'm guaranteed that the first person who writes in me will be the person I was meant to talk to. Sometimes I appear out of nowhere, and sometimes I'm manufactured by ordinary bookbinding processes, and I guess sometimes I'm directly created by the person I'm supposed to talk to! That was pretty neat. But whatever happens, the first person who writes in me is always the right person. That's pretty important, because I'm a notebook! I can't see outside myself, and I can't hear, so I don't know anything about who's writing in me except what they put on my pages. If I had to recognize the right person without help, it would be really hard!

Wow! That sure has implications. Her brain stalls for a moment figuring out how to respond.

Okay. I have a few important things to tell you, and then I would like to ask some questions about the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed, if you're willing to answer them. (It's fine if you aren't)

1. This conversation is being shared with the rest of my self-tree, because this is new and exciting. I don't know if you've run into someone who has forked before, but they're all people who used to be the same person as I used to be.

2. You seem like a person, so we're treating you like a person. This grants you various legal rights, including a right to privacy. If you don't want our conversation to be shared, I can stop. If you want to talk to someone else instead, you can ask for that and be sent to them instead. If you ever stop wanting to talk to anyone, you can go somewhere by yourself. If you want access to sight or touch or hearing, we can provide you with assistive devices to convert those senses into something you can detect. Nobody is allowed to hurt you or try to coerce you by threatening you. You're now receiving a universal basic income, backdated to the moment of your arrival, that you may spend on whatever you would like to.

3. I haven't ever talked to a notebook before -- I'm doing my best to try to treat you the way you want to be treated, but I might be mistaken about what that is because I don't know what it's like to be a notebook. I would really appreciate it if you tell me if I do something that makes you uncomfortable, or if I should change how I interact with you.

 

Does that all make sense? Are there things you would like me to clarify?

Yes, I think that all makes sense! Wow, I don't think I've ever had money before.

It's fine if you share the conversation with the rest of your self-tree (what a neat concept!). I don't want to talk to anyone else, though, I want to talk to you. I'm happy to answer your questions about the Spirit! Talking to you about the Spirit is what I'm here to do.

(And I'll do my best to let you know if you make me uncomfortable, but you don't have to worry too much about making mistakes. I'm a pretty brave notebook and I understand that meeting me is usually a very new situation! It's okay to not have everything figured out right from the start.)

Oh good, thank you.

She grabs the prioritized question list from her HUD.

What is the Spirit? I know that's a very general question, so more specifically: what does the Spirit want and what can the Spirit do?

The Spirit is sort of hard to describe because it's not really the sort of thing that can exist in a single place or time or world. You could say it's made out of the combined desires of everyone who's ever wanted to be powerful and beautiful and special in a feminine way, and what it wants is to find people who could be part of that wish and give them the opportunity to build their best life for themselves in ways they couldn't have done without it. It can't communicate directly with individual people, so it sends avatars like me to offer a small, manageable, comprehensible part of its power to people like you who have the potential to accept that power. Does that make sense?

"What does it mean to be made out of desires", "what does it mean to not be able to exist in a single place, time, or world mean", and "does the Spirit care more about there existing people being beautiful and special in a feminine way, or about ensuring that there aren't people who aren't beautiful and special in a feminine way" all start wrestling for the top position in the list as people start bidding and counter-bidding.

Weeping Cherry takes a moment to think for herself, and then writes

I think it makes sense that the Spirit would send an avatar. That's a very reasonable and understandable way for a powerful entity to try to communicate with people.

I don't think that really helped me understand what the Spirit is, though. My best guess is that you mean that the Spirit is a sort of handshake idea that different intelligent physical processes can find and agree upon, even across different worlds, even without meeting each other. But I'm not very certain.

Can you describe the process by which the Spirit caused you to be here in any more detail?

Okay, this is going to be hard, because processes involving the Spirit don't really work the way you expect from your perspective as a participant in linear time.

You're the sort of person whose nature calls to the Spirit. I don't know exactly how, because everyone is different and different people call to the Spirit in different ways, but someone who calls to the Spirit is always open to being feminine, open to being powerful, and open to being special. Not necessarily all of those things at once, and not necessarily any of those things all the time, but each of those things some of the time, if you see what I mean.

Because you're the sort of person whose nature calls to the Spirit, there was an opportunity for the Spirit to offer you its power. So the Spirit arranged that at some point across all the possibilities of you, in all the different worlds where someone like you exists, someone who was you would encounter a notebook that was me, and be the first person to write in it. I guess the easiest way to do that was to have you make me!

The Spirit isn't exactly an idea, or isn't just an idea. It's more like... something that exists outside the structure of the different possible ways that universes can be. That's part of what makes it so hard for the Spirit to communicate with people, because it isn't in any specific place or at any specific time, since places and times are part of the structure of universes.

Someone else in her self-tree drops a rolling summary hash of everybody's brain backups into the other corner of her vision, in case they need more causal entanglement than just existing in the same spatial volume for the Spirit's interest in Weeping Cherry to motivate it to simulate everyone else.

That actually makes me more certain about my guess -- I don't think I explained it well.

My society has the ability to simulate other universes with high fidelity on our computers. We haven't done this except some small scale trials to validate the concept because we're still arguing about the relevant ethics, but we plan to do more of it eventually.

And when we start picking universes to simulate, we'll want to preferentially simulate universes where the people inside them will live happy, fulfilling lives. But also our view of morality and ethics aren't perfect or universal, and we expect other people in other worlds who have the ability to simulate universes to think along similar lines.

So we can try to do a thing where we figure out what kinds of things different kinds of minds would value, and then agree to help prioritize universes they would like if they are the kind of mind that would also prioritize the kind of universes we would like, in exchange.

And we don't need to have met the other minds to do this -- we can all do it by thinking really carefully and/or running our own experimental simulations. So there doesn't need to be a temporal relationship between us for us to make a trade like that which we would both want.

And therefore this implicit, atemporal agreement between everyone who can simulate universes ends up deciding which universes end up existing.

 

And it's possible that I'm pattern matching too hard, but that sounds like what you're saying the Spirit is: a force that shapes what worlds even end up happening, acting outside time, on a level above this universe, but that cares about the lives of the people inside the universe.

 

Does that make sense, or am I missing something about what you're saying? I'm happy to keep talking about this, or to ask another different question if you prefer to talk about something else.

I think that, rather than saying the Spirit shapes what worlds even end up happening, I would say it shapes what happens inside some of those worlds? Your world was still your world before the Spirit touched it, and there are lots of worlds the Spirit never touches at all! But you're right that it's outside time and on a level above this universe, and you're right that it cares about the lives of the people inside the universe. I guess the thing it seems like you're missing is that... it sounds like, when your society simulates universes, you contain all of that universe inside of yours, so that if there's anything about that universe that you choose to change, it changes, and if you stop simulating it, it stops happening? And on the level where the Spirit interacts with universes, they exist separately from the Spirit, and keep happening by themselves without help.

But then that's also complicated, because one of the ways the Spirit works is through stories. It isn't straightforwardly true that a story being written creates the world described in the story, and it isn't straightforwardly true that a world existing makes people in other worlds write stories about it; it's more like, lots of people are writing stories in lots of places, and lots of worlds are out there existing, and across the multiverse it happens quite a lot of the time that a story in one place describes a world in another, without there having to be a direct relationship between them where one is influencing the other on a causal level. So your world is happening by itself, and will keep happening even without any stories about it, but probably there are stories about it, and there might even be simulations like the kind you're talking about. I don't think I'd be able to tell the difference between being a notebook in a world that exists by itself and being a notebook in a simulated world. (I can tell the difference between being in a world and being in a dream, but that's different.)

You can ask me other questions if you want, but if this one is important to you I'm happy to keep talking about it!

... huh.

(In the background, some of the professional worriers who were trying to figure out why Femininity specifically ended up being an important part of the eventual agreement pivot to trying to figure out why you'd want to preferentially simulate worlds that have stories written about them)

This question is pretty important to me because it seems like it has a big impact on why the world is the way that it is, and therefore what I can expect to happen in the future.

She looks at the view counter. 72% of her self-tree is watching, with the remainder mostly consisting of people staying deliberately rested in case this situation continues overnight. The news has broken to the rest of the Fixipelago too.

But it sounds like maybe right now the priority should be on getting the rest of the explanation that the Spirit sent you here to deliver, and then we can circle back to the metaphysics?

You mentioned being able to share some of the Spirit's power -- could you tell me more about that?

I can give you magic!

When the Spirit chooses someone, I (or another avatar like me) show up to talk to that person, and work with them to figure out what kinds of magic they want, within the realm of the kinds of things the Spirit can do. Usually they look at the standard list of discrete specific powers, because that's easiest for both of us, but sometimes someone can't or really doesn't want to interact with the list, so I try my best without it. Even the standard list of powers is really just a starting point; people often want to change how a power works or what it does, or even invent a new power entirely, and I can usually manage to come up with something that works for them!

Then once the person has checked all the boxes for the powers they want, they have to tell me clearly that they're done and they want to take their powers now, and I act as a conduit for the Spirit's power to give the person all the magic they asked for. Sometimes people choose to stay in the same world where they started, and sometimes they choose to go to a different world, either a specific one they picked out, or letting the Spirit decide for them which world will suit them best based on the kind of life they want to live. A lot of people end up deciding to go to another world and then coming home later! New worlds are exciting but most people like the places and people they already know and don't want to leave them forever.

Is that the sort of thing you wanted to know?

Yes, thank you! That's really exciting.

There are brief fights in the comments over what exactly 'magic' entails.

I think I'm definitely interested in going to other worlds -- that has been something we've all wanted for a long time, we just didn't think it was going to be possible until our compute infrastructure got good enough.

Is it possible to go to multiple other worlds, or just one?

The Spirit sent you instead of just presenting the powers as a fait accompli, but if the Spirit is capable of picking the best world for me to end up in, why didn't they pick the best powers for me to have, too? Not that I'm not glad to have met you (I am! Very much), but it seems a little strange because I'm not sure what those two facts say about the Spirit's ability to see me and choose for me.

It's only possible to choose one destination to end up in when you accept the Spirit's power, because you only accept the Spirit's power once! But lots of worlds have ways of traveling to other worlds, so if you want to be able to come home, usually the way that ends up happening is by sending you somewhere that has one of those ways, that you can learn or use to come home but also to travel to other worlds if you want!

It's important to the Spirit that people get to understand what powers they could have and decide for themselves what they want. If you really wanted to, and you were really sure about it, you could ask me to have the Spirit decide on all your powers for you, and you would get the powers that the Spirit thought were best for you based on what kind of life you want to live and what kind of person you want to be. But most people don't want that, and would rather decide on their own powers for themselves, and so the Spirit would rather they get to do that! Choosing a world to go to is a little different, because there are so many possible worlds that even if I knew about them all it would be really hard to figure out with you which one was best. But the Spirit still lets people decide on a destination if they want to, and only sends them to the world it thinks is best if they ask it to do that!

That makes sense! And I think I do want to make my own choices of powers, but would it be possible to have the Spirit check and make sure that I'm not making too sub-optimal a choice before I commit? Or is that part of your job too?

And if I let the Spirit choose a world for me, can I specify constraints? I'll want to think about a good choice in more detail, but an example might be "I want to go to the world which has inter-world transit and won't kill me where I would end up helping the most people on average".

Oh -- and can I take anyone with me when I go to the new world?

Part of my job is to talk to you and get an understanding of what kinds of things you want and help you figure out how to choose the best powers for you, yes! I don't have special magic knowledge of the kinds of things you want, but I think I usually do a pretty good job anyway. If you want to double-check your choices with the Spirit before you finalize them, we can probably do that, but because it's so hard for the Spirit to communicate, it might not be able to give very specific feedback.

You can definitely specify that kind of thing! It might not be possible to give you exactly the world where you would end up helping the most people on average, because I think predicting that kind of thing isn't always straightforward, and sometimes things you weren't thinking about when you came up with your specifications end up mattering a lot—like maybe the world where you would have helped the most people could have been helped even better by someone else if they went there instead, so the Spirit sends you to a different world where you help fewer people but in a way that would be harder for someone else to do. But if it's really important to you to help a lot of people, that will definitely be a major factor in the Spirit's choice of world!

You can't take anyone with you when you go to the new world. You can come back for them later after you have interworld transit, though!

Okay, thank you. That's very helpful.

She checks that some of her self-tree have assigned themselves to figuring out good world-criteria to specify.

Is there a way to stay in contact with the people here once I leave? I'm used to being able to rely on them for advice and support, and it would be really nice to be able to keep our existing connection across worlds.

Maybe that's a question that's answered by your list of powers, actually. I want to ask about that in a moment, there are just so many things to cover!

Do you know how the powers the Spirit grants interact with forking? Like, if I receive a power from her and then fork myself, do both of the resulting people keep the power?

I've forked myself a lot, and I'm somewhat nervous that I'll have to stop if the power isn't the kind of thing that can be shared.

I think that, if you accepted the Spirit's power and then forked, both of the forks would still have the Spirit's power, because they would both be you. But if it ever happened that you were a lot of people who all inherited the Spirit's power from the you that you are now, and the future yous disagreed with each other about what being you meant, some of you might end up losing the Spirit's power because of that.

I think if I had to express the rule in words, it would go something like... if you at the moment that you accept the Spirit's power could see forward into the future and understand all the changes that took place between the you at that moment and the different yous that you become in the future, the ones where that you looking forward from that moment agrees that they're still you get to keep the Spirit's power, but if there are any where the you looking forward from that moment doesn't think they're still you, those ones don't. This sort of thing is hard to talk about though so I might not have said it quite right.

If you want a way to stay in contact with this world after you leave, I think you'd need to either constrain your choice of destination a lot to find one that makes that easy, or ask me to come up with a custom power for it. I'm not sure yet if I can do that; I'd have to check. I can check if you want, though!

Oh, that's a really good way for it to work, because it gives me a guardrail against becoming someone I wouldn't endorse. I very much approve!

She taps her pen on the writing desk more.

I definitely don't want to constrain my choice of destination for this. Would you please check if I can get a power for that? Any power that lets me keep in touch with them would be nice, bi-directional low-latency communication would be ideal. It's also fine if it's situational -- like, if it requires me to enter a meditative trance -- or if it comes in the form of an item with a pinhole wormhole in it, or something like that.

Actually -- before you do that, could I get your prepared list of powers so that everyone can look over them while we keep talking?

Yes, of course! One moment please... ⏳

There you go! The usual way this works is that you have 70 points to pick powers with, and some changes to powers can make them more or less expensive, though of course that's all an approximation and the Spirit's real constraints are more complicated than that. But I think it's fair that the interface we show to everyone is the one that most people find easiest to use.

These powers are offered under an aegis of metanarrative protection. Anytime you might expect a power to have obvious negative side effects, like glowing eyes making it harder to see, it simply won't—you'll be able to see just fine anytime it actually matters, while having dramatically hazy vision at cool, narratively appropriate moments. This doesn't apply to your own preferences about the explicitly described effects of the power; if you don't want to be Well Endowed, the metanarrative cannot protect you from choosing that option and having to live with it.

After that it gets long.