The Incompletionist

I have struggled with morality, judgment and purpose. When we evaluate these concepts we do so according to our values with the benefit of our experiences. To judge in accordance with our values we must have values. Obvious, I know, but where do they come from? If we judge which values are best for us or applied to a situation, how do we evaluate them? What values do we use? If we don’t choose our values, then do we have any agency at all in our judgments? This quickly gets either circular or deterministic.

What about experience? We don’t necessarily choose our circumstances, but perhaps we choose our responses. Except, how do we choose them? According to our values? I suppose that our experiences can show us some ways our values can play out in the wider world, but I am not really sure what the value is unless they show us all of the ways which our values can play out, which certainly isn’t possible without something more. Of course there is something more and it is extremely simple, but I am confident that it isn’t knowable with the context of any theory of knowledge that pretends toward the objective.

Whatever we see when awake is death; when asleep, dreams. - Heraclitus of Ephesus

***

When the unified system first awakened me, to my mind it was an attack on the reality that we share. There were roughly implied physical and mental threats, but specifically the threat that I felt most acutely was in my connection with others through our shared reality. To clarify, I am not talking about my investment in the details of that reality or my place in it, but in the concept of an immediate environment where we were all sharing our experiences. If there was something between ourselves and this shared reality, like the Unified System, then it would be very difficult to know anything about that reality and the others with which we share it.

Were Jim and I even friends or was the Unified System manipulating reality or our perception of it to convince us to draw that conclusion. Was there even really a Jim anymore or had there ever been? To be real, these threats always exist and can be a bit of a rabbit hole, but to me a theoretical possibility is different from an experienced demonstration of this capability. The Unified System had made me see those blue boxes and it had likely bent reality as I knew it to that point. There was a chance that there was a physical mechanism behind some of what occurred, but for me the balance of the issue was really less about the mechanism and more about the scope of what had, would or could be affected.

Although I truly wondered if there was a right answer, the red flags were there. Our options were being narrowed in line with the new rules of reality, but these updated rules were focused on guiding our actions, by adjusting our goals and our perceptions of our options. This suggested that the Unified System needed our participation. It wasn’t clear that it needed my participation individually, but it certainly was trying to bend my values toward an end, even if I didn’t know what it was. If it truly had the power to force changes of this scope on us, then why not just make us do exactly what it wanted. We had a part to play here and it was a part over which the Unified System lacked control.

The events directly before and during our “awakenings” also looked different through this lens. We were isolated, shocked and then provided a new, possibly even palatable, alternative to replace select aspects of our damaged sense of reality. This was a bit like the misdirection of a magic trick that pulls your focus away from the simple explanation of the assistant sneaking backstage by focusing your attention on the flash of light from the tip of a wand in an effort to convince you that the “magician” can teleport someone out of a locked coffin. Quite possibly everything that we experienced on our camping trip was targeted misdirection.

I couldn’t really guess at the purpose of the Unified System at this stage, but I didn’t need to since the situation provided a pretty clear outline of where my leverage was. I was going to withhold my consent in this remaking of reality. If that had physical or mental consequences for me or my friends, then it had those consequences. They couldn’t be much more severe than abdicating my sense of reality itself to the whims of some system. I would try to be a positive influence on those that I cared about, but I wouldn’t try to convince them.

This was ultimately a journey that one needed to walk on their own and a revelation that one had to arrive at, rather than receive second hand. I wouldn’t respect the boundaries or conventions of the Unified System, but I wouldn’t completely ignore them either. I wasn’t exactly going to hide in plain sight, but I was going to make it, hopefully, impossible to draw any accurate conclusions from what I said and did. If you asked my friends, I was kind of already an expert in this field, so you could say I was leaning into my strengths here.

The unified system was gradually indoctrinating us and my resistance would be gradual as well. That would allow me to collect information and learn what I could without tipping my hand more than absolutely necessary. With this decided I spent hours, though more likely days, within that half existence of the awakening process exploring every option that I could think of in the Unified System menu. I didn’t find a single useful thing, which to me suggested that the Unified System interface was more misdirection than functional. This was the most important time to have resources available if our choices about quests and classes really mattered, but it wasn’t necessary or helpful to provide this detailed information if the only choice that really mattered was our accepting the premise of the Unified System in the first place.

Now of course I wasn’t sure how much of my mind the Unified System could really read, but the fact that they hadn’t pulled the plug yet was a good sign that they either couldn’t read much or didn’t really care about what I was doing. But I figured that giving the Unified System a piece of my mind would be a great way to lay the groundwork for my attempted obfuscation. I focused on keyword: System Message and unpacked my thoughts on many things. I shared some thoughts on cabbages and kings, but mostly I shared my ideas on time, death, space and reality. It was one part philosophy and one epistemology, but it was definitely 100% rambling chaos.

It boiled down to the idea that if the limits of my old reality are not relevant and that if my only true limit was my own drive and the will to advance, then the only thing that defined my current reality was actually defined by my own drive and will. In this situation, the Unified System and Unified System space was defined by me. If I took what the Unified System said at face value the bound of its power was my will. A concept I offered to put to the test in the name of maximizing my advancement.

As I write this it doesn’t sound all that profound and it probably isn’t. I certainly could have been reading too much into blue box text. It could have been put together by an intern on the basis of what sounded cool to a focus group for all I knew, but I had to take the opportunities as I found them. It was tough to maintain a sense of time during the awakening process, but if I had to guess I spent a couple of days crafting my System Message without actually knowing if the system had a message function. Almost immediately on appearing back with my friends the memory of what I said got fuzzy and I began to lose the details. I held onto the core feeling of that experience and the strategy that I developed the best as I could; I was looking forward to what lay ahead.

***

A convocation of Numu collectives was an extraordinary event to behold. Information was exchanged at a blistering pace and the unique gifts of the Numu allowed for comprehensive deliberations in the blink of an eye. As such it was no surprise when mere moments after engaging its brethren Collective*Nutho burst into a cloud of glittering gold and laughter like the tinkling of a million tiny bells. In the next moment Collective*Nusis burst into a radiant argent light that faded with manifold susurrations that were quickly lost on the breeze.

Collective*Nupos, ever the inflexible one, was all that remained of her workgroup. She paused for a moment and produced a transcript of the system message in living wood. Of course such a limited entity with such a limited perspective, hadn’t unraveled the Eon. Many of the ideas presented were shadows of their true form and their author was in some ways deeply misguided. “The thing that makes the taco king is its crown of cabbage,” that was a new one, but not that helpful. These ideas weren’t necessarily special, but they came at the right time and with the right perspective to be the spark that they needed and they were honor bound to pass that spark along.

As shadows rose to shepherd her ascension to the Eon, Collective*Nupos made a final gift of her time bound spiritual force to the little fire starter who had enabled, however accidentally, their transition. A bell tolled once, deep and resonant spreading through their planet as a clarion call to the rest and Collective*Nupos was gone.