The impact of the image on the Mediator — a storm battering the archipelago of the self — impressed upon the floating screen, jolted him immediately: Audrey stood up abruptly, swayed toward the counter on the kitchen side facing him, and sat on top of it. She sighed. She looked as if she were about to reveal something important.

  In the Mediator’s mind, the quilting point was no longer doubt — downgraded by the emotional climate generated by recent experiences to a latent mental state, capable of resurfacing only in lucidity — but desire: the desire to see Anton again. The fear of seeing Antea. The excitement of seeing Antea.

  Truth be told, there was no quilting point at all: if the stream of thoughts had been allowed to unspool, it would not have stopped — at least according to Lacan, a man who mixed mental masturbation with notions borrowed from disciplines that had little to do with what he claimed to investigate. But you know how it goes: complex and true things, and if you use them for simple and vague matters, someone will assume they are complex and true. Genius. Still, to understand what was happening in the Mediator’s mind, Lacan was useful: for those unwilling to settle for an illusory rationality, he does serve a purpose.

  Audrey was staring at him with a strange, compassionate smirk, hands and hips resting against the counter. Tired eyes. Tired eyes? The image unsettled him. His mind was semantically vacant; the demand for meaning lay beyond the contingent capacities of the neocortex.

  Audrey began to speak.

  “We’ve reached the crossroads of this bizarre adventure I made you live through. It’s time to answer the question that may no longer be your priority, but remains the priority of the story you are in: why are you here?”

  The Mediator’s body tingled in silence. The weight of polymorphic uncertainty pressed upon his attention. Glucocorticoids flooded their channels, a physiological confirmation of total loss of control his own body.

  “The answer is that you’re here because we can’t allow you to meet Antea.”

  A “Why?” burst from the Mediator’s mouth — loud, instinctive.

  “Easy, easy. Today, many revelations are part of the program.”

  Whose program? What program? the Mediator thought, unsettled.

  “First of all, we can’t let you meet Antea because you’re sterile.”

  What?

  The revelation — which he was obviously unable to question, since doubt was no longer the organizing principle of his connectome, and perhaps never had been — pierced him. He would have liked it to be. Or would have liked to want it to be. But fuck recursion.

  The word struck him like a needle driven violently into a testicle.

  Sterile.

  “You see, this reality was created specifically to obtain the ‘key’ from Antea. From what I’ve gathered, in order to obtain this key, she needs to have a child. I don’t know why. Truly. I don’t know the bigger picture either.”

  She wasn’t snickering as usual. She seemed serious. Sincere. Her tone resembled a corporate PowerPoint presentation — the kind that is utterly useless, yet everyone listens to with solemn attention as if it mattered.

  This was not her usual way of revealing intimate truths. Her style was normally closer to a Family Guy cutaway gag — something that could be interpreted as a joke only by her and by her total lack of empathy.

  Her facial expressions, just like her words, now appeared to him as a revolting riddle. But the Mediator was no longer trying to solve it.

  Sterile.

  “The question you would ask me now, if you weren’t rightly stunned by the storm of revelations used as psychological torture, is: ‘Who knows the bigger picture?’ Or maybe not. In truth, there are countless questions you could ask, and it would be difficult to determine the most objective criterion for ranking them by importance. But let’s assume they are these two, closely connected: ‘Who created this reality? And what does it want from Antea?’ As I’ve already said, I don’t know the answers either. Believe me.”

  The compassion in her gaze grew increasingly pure, blending with an unprecedented sadness. As if, through this conversation, she were shedding a weight. A weight that until now had existed as a veil. A sadistic, ruthless, mad veil.

  Those were the same eyes that, during the first months he had spent in that world, watched him coldly while he slaughtered people at her command. The same eyes that showed no trace of moral emotion as his consciousness descended into hell before a little girl in a poor northeastern village, lying among the rubble of the house he had leveled along with everything else. One leg broken. Still alive.

  She was the one laughing thunderously, her laughter blending with the emaciated child’s crying, in a lugubrious atmosphere in which his body moved to end her tiny emotional multiverse.

  The flashback snapped shut with a crack.

  He shook his head.

  “But I think I can tell you something. I say ‘I think’ because I haven’t received instructions on how to behave once this phase of managing your role in the almost entirely scripted narrative we both inhabit is over. I couldn’t tell you exactly why the directives governing how I must deal with you end here.

  You know the saying: ‘The ways of the Lord are inscrutable.’ Are you familiar with the Book of Job? Job was a righteous man struck by unspeakable calamities. His friends insisted he must have done something to deserve such suffering. But when he demanded an explanation from God, the answer did not confirm the logic of merit. God asserted His unfathomable power, reminding him that creation is not a transparent mechanism of rewards and punishments, but a vast and mysterious order beyond human standards of justice.

  We are like Job. By ‘we’ I mean both those who serve as direct emissaries of the creator of this world — like me — and those who are at the mercy of the range of possible narrative trajectories aligned with the demiurge’s objectives.”

  “I don’t even know where to begin…” she laughed, embarrassed. The spontaneity of that embarrassment was disarming.

  In Italy they say “mal comune mezzo gaudio” to suggest that a misfortune, when shared, becomes lighter to bear. He caught himself empathizing with her, if only slightly. Alien sonder was the closest definition of what that speech was stirring in him.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Was this the real Audrey? Or just another performance?

  Doubt began to bloom again. The ultimate truth about that world resumed its function as a quilting point — one that, over the past two years, had faded to the point of intermittently disappearing. It is well known: metaphysical questions bore anyone who does not possess a hypertrophic consciousness, anyone capable of building fortresses of illusion solid enough. As Anton had said in the intradiegetic flashback.

  “Perhaps the most appropriate starting point concerns everyone — us included — except Antea.

  Not all the people in this world are conscious.

  When I first arrived here — and I couldn’t even tell you how much time has passed, since this reality has gone through several ‘pupal’ stages — there were very few conscious entities. And almost all of them came from our original reality, assuming it truly was our original one.

  Over time, however, this world became increasingly detailed. The creator likely gained access to greater computational resources, allowing for a higher degree of environmental specification. And as complexity increased, self-awareness began to emerge — even in creatures native to this reality.

  It is as if Integrated Information Theory truly applies here — the one based on Giulio Tononi’s concept of phi. Anton must have told you about it. Or perhaps not. Or perhaps you simply don’t remember.

  In essence: any system capable of integrating information in such a way that the whole is more than the sum of its parts possesses some degree of consciousness.

  Anatomically, we are far less complex than we were in our original world. And yet, even here, we are able to integrate information. Therefore, we are conscious.

  Other creatures in this place are as well — unless they are philosophical zombies, which I doubt.

  The discussion could become very long. Let’s cut it short: there are solid reasons to believe that self-awareness spread like an epidemic as the complexity of this reality increased.”

  “As you’ve likely realized, our ipseity arrives in this place amputated. And the amputation spreads, gradually blinding us to the emotionally charged portion of our pre-isekai self-narrative. In other words, we progressively forget who we were — until we even forget that we are losing that essential part of our identity.

  It happened to me. It happened to you. It happened to everyone who was cast into this world.

  Except Antea.

  She arrived with her ipseity intact. She is the only individual in this world who cannot be fully controlled by the creator. And yes — I’ll repeat it even at the risk of redundancy — I have no idea why.

  For some reason, her existence is of vital importance to “God.”

  In my view — though this is pure speculation — she is like a virus. And this world exists to isolate her, study her, to develop an antidote to something I do not fully understand. Everything that happened before was preparatory to her arrival.

  Unlike us, however, the creator does not have complete control over her. He cannot precisely determine the location of her arrival. He cannot fully steer the course of future events. He is a limited god.

  For that very reason, he acted on what he could control: the initial conditions. He shaped reality so that the space of possible futures functions as a field of attraction. Not a predetermined sequence, but a range of compatible trajectories that, despite diverging in detail, tend to converge toward his objective.

  When he became convinced he had successfully constructed a world with that property — a world in which almost all possible futures lead there — he “abducted” Anton.

  And transformed him into Antea.

  Of the objective, I know only this: she must reproduce.

  And even that I do not know with certainty. I inferred it from the information I received about your fertility — which I personally tested and about which, I’m sorry to say, I have few doubts.

  But here, anything is possible.”

  “Anything is possible…” the Mediator repeated, dazed, struggling to remain lucid.

  “I said earlier that, unlike us, ‘God’ does not have full control over Antea’s body. So why didn’t he simply turn us into puppets executing a predetermined plan? He wouldn’t need me or the other emissaries of his will if we all just did exactly what he wanted.

  Here complexity increases further: the price of anarchy.

  The price of anarchy measures the distance between cooperation — a solution centrally designed or coordinated — and competition, where each agent independently maximizes their own outcome.

  Paradoxically, to control us completely in this world, our ipseity would have had to arrive already dead, replaced by a new identity containing only knowledge native to this reality. But that would have prevented the technological transfer necessary to construct this chronotope — which appears to be the optimal environment for achieving the only plausible objective we can infer.

  We emissaries are therefore supervisors of God’s imperfect vantage point. Imperfect because of Antea. She is the random variable that necessitates our presence and grants us a fiction of freedom.

  God can control much about Antea, but not her irreducible core: her ipseity.

  For this reason, her consciousness was inserted — much like yours in the intradiegetic flashback — into a body that reflects her most hidden desires, based on the information I already shared with you. Otherwise, he would have had to choose a different objective function than reproduction.

  This includes a marked desire for large dicks.

  I cannot say with certainty whether her lack of powers or inability to understand the local language are part of the divine design, but it seems plausible. She is highly vulnerable. And, coincidentally, someone she knew well before arriving here was isekai’d alongside her.

  The idea was likely that there would be a decent probability that she would sleep with Mark — who, in a brutal world like this, would become her only shield — and that her highly fertile body would become pregnant.

  It didn’t happen. They didn’t have sex.

  Perhaps the creator anticipated that she would not immediately accept her new female identity. But he tried anyway, because that attempt did not contradict the space of futures compatible with his goals.”

  “Regardless of whether Antea is linguistically impaired and powerless by God’s design, she possesses a power far beyond anything we could aspire to.

  A superpower that, in a serious editorial context, would be considered a flaw: plot armor.

  Antea is a generator of self-preserving narrative devices. She is the embodiment of a Deus ex machina.

  In one of the misadventures she experienced with Mark — an insecure incompetent — they survived because of her.

  That idiot had attacked the alpha male of a family of beast-men, the so-called grizzly-men. He would have had no chance if the causal convergence field radiating spontaneously from Antea had not temporarily enhanced him.

  The field then induced several philosophical zombies nearby — including Nahely, a girl who now travels with them — to act in the most convenient way, or one of the most convenient ways, to ensure her survival.

  In a sense, Antea is a semi-intentional system with unconscious access to the computational structure from which this reality emerges, and she modifies it to her advantage.

  In this sense, the objectives of the creator and of the not-fully-domesticated host — whose ipseity remains almost entirely impermeable — are compatible.

  But this is becoming too complicated.

  I’ve thought a great deal about all this, as you can see. I didn’t reach a grand epiphany. But I believe some of what I’ve said holds.”

  The Mediator was slightly dazed. His mind struggled to hold on to fragments of propositions still drifting through his working memory, trying to assemble a coherent summary of the pseudo-answers Audrey had given him. But he couldn’t manage it. Vague impulses suggested he had understood, that he could reconstruct every step, yet he was too exhausted to sustain that illusion for long.

  Audrey let out a relieved sigh.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to someone about this for so long. Among the emissaries, it’s taboo.”

  The sense of release was clear on her face. The Mediator, instead, felt used. A feeling all too familiar. Perhaps those flashes of humanity he thought he had glimpsed during her explanations had been nothing more than a performance. Perhaps the entire speech was hollow. Perhaps there was no God at all. Or perhaps she herself was God, and for unfathomable reasons had decided that he needed to know.

  Logic, when examined too closely, can begin to resemble madness.

  “Don’t you really have anything to add?” she asked, looking away with a gentleness that almost made him soften. He remained silent.

  Audrey stepped down from the counter and headed toward the exit, visibly irritated. She seemed to have dropped every pretense, as though a role had just ended. Before leaving the kitchen, she added, “The screen will stay active for about half an hour. There’s a recording inside that runs over an hour. You can move forward or backward with voice commands: forward, backward, speed up, slow down, stop. You’ll get the hang of it quickly. Enjoy the show.”

  The Mediator’s gaze settled on the screen once more.