Anomaly Ch. 76 (Patreon)

"Good morning. To those watching online, good afternoon, and good evening. To those just joining us, I am Rin Tohsaka, and today, I will be continuing my lecture on the fundamental principles behind the operation of parallel worlds. Do note that this is the third day, but that the previous lectures are available for free. Thank you again to the University of Oxford for inviting me here, and thank you all for joining me."

Rin held her smile until the applause had finished, then set the introduction aside. Three mornings of this, with receptions and conversations that somehow continued after she had very clearly excused herself. She could have been in Japan. She could have been with Sakura, who still hadn’t woken up.

Her fingers pressed against the edge of the lectern. She relaxed them before anyone noticed.

“Yesterday, we discussed the distinction between observing another world and establishing access to it. Today, I want to address an assumption that keeps appearing in your questions: that the world you reach will permit you to exist in it.”

She turned to the board and wrote ‘impossible’.

“An understandable assumption. You have, after all, spent your entire lives somewhere that does.”

A few people smiled. Rin uncapped a second piece of chalk from its paper sleeve, decided she didn’t need it, and set it down. Zelretch could have made this point with a demonstration. She had spent enough time as his apprentice to know exactly how little she wanted to be responsible for one in a crowded lecture hall.

“When we describe something as impossible, we are usually leaving part of the statement unsaid. Impossible under these conditions. Impossible given this history. Impossible according to the rules we have established here.”

“Surely some things are simply impossible?”

The man near the aisle had not raised his hand this time. Rin recognized his voice before she turned. One of the more intelligent in the audience, to be sure. That didn’t make her any less annoyed that he interrupted her.

“Certainly. If you specify what you mean, we can examine it.”

“I mean that infinity doesn’t make a contradiction true.”

“No, it doesn’t.” She waited just long enough for him to look pleased with himself, “Which brings us to the conditions under which a thing can exist. We need to establish those before deciding what would constitute a contradiction. May I finish establishing those conditions?”

He gestured towards the board.

How generous. Rin was tempted to chuck the chalk at his head.

“Thank you.”

She returned to the word she had written, maintaining the pleasant expression that had carried her through considerably more tiresome company than this.

“A creature that cannot exist under our conditions may be quite ordinary under another world’s. A historical event that never occurred here may have shaped every institution there. When the possible worlds are infinite, our experience of this one gives us very little authority to dismiss all the others.”

The young woman in the front row was already writing. Rin slowed slightly to let her finish.

“This is what I mean when I say that impossibilities exist. Things we have good reason to consider impossible here may exist elsewhere. Our own world gives us one set of conditions to work from. Any claim about what exists beyond them would require us to investigate further, however plausible or absurd it sounded here.”

“And we can visit those worlds?”

“Some.” Rin said, shrugging, “Whether you would survive the visit is another question.”

…

The first petal formed crookedly. Shirou forced it between Tyuule and the lightning, dropping to one knee as the impact drove pain through his arm.

“Down!”

Rory struck Tyuule from the side, carrying her into Lelei and Tuka behind the broken wall. Shirou released the shield as it split. Heat swept over his face, and the masonry where Tyuule had been standing burst apart.

He found them through the dust when Tyuule coughed. Rory was already getting up, dragging the halberd clear of the rubble.

“Stay down.”

The scepter passed over Shirou’s head before he could ask whether anyone was hurt.

…

Rin wrote ‘habitable’ beneath ‘impossible’.

“Normally, it is impossible to guarantee that an unidentified parallel world is habitable to humans before obtaining reliable information about it. Infinite possibilities include conditions under which your lungs do not work, your blood cannot carry oxygen, or the matter composing your body cannot remain in its present state.”

The scratching of pens slowed.

Good. This part deserved their attention.

“You cannot test a handful of destinations and declare the rest safe. You cannot exhaust an infinite range of possibilities, and similarity in one respect does not establish similarity in every respect that matters.”

“Wouldn’t we be able to see?” The young woman asked, “If there were people on the other side?”

“What would you have learned by seeing them?”

“That something can live there.”

“Yes.” Rin nodded, “Something. You would still need to establish what it breathes, what sustains it, and whether those conditions are compatible with your body. Appearance gives you a place to begin investigating.”

She added atmosphere and temperature beneath the heading.

“A landscape can look familiar while being lethal. There may be vegetation under a blue sky, with enough light to see by and ground you can walk on. None of that tells you whether taking your first breath will kill you because the ratio of nitrogen and oxygen switched.”

Someone further back stopped with a cup halfway to his mouth. Rin resisted the urge to look directly at him.

“The Gate is an astronomical anomaly. Among all the destinations it might have connected us to, it opened into a fairly Earth-adjacent world. Air we can breathe. Temperatures we can endure. Gravity under which our bodies function. We were able to enter it and remain alive long enough to investigate.”

She let that settle before adding, “We were extraordinarily lucky.”

Rin let the reporters note down her quote for the day.

“The Gate’s existence gives us evidence of a connection. The people who crossed it gave us evidence that humans could survive that particular crossing. Neither observation guarantees the safety of another destination.”

Rin glanced at the clock above the doors. She had checked the time in Japan before beginning. She knew how long remained before she could call, and looking again would not bring it any closer.

Sakura would still be there when the lecture ended. The thought offered very little comfort.

She picked up the chalk.

“Now. A world being habitable also does not guarantee that its history will continue.”

…

Rory caught the scepter on the sloping face of her halberd and let it slide past her. Shirou used the moment to get Tuka onto her feet, then passed her to Tyuule as a crack opened through the paving.

Purple slurry filled the hollow beneath it. He felt the current passing through the Worms towards Ivan and Traced a spear into his good hand.

“You can barely hold a sword.” Tyuule said.

“Then I’ll throw it.”

“Hero.”

He glanced back at her, then drove the spear into the channel. The current faltered beneath his boots, only to return through the adjoining cracks.

Zouken chuckled.

“You might have asked for a plan of the foundations.”

Across the garden, Ivan lifted his scepter without so much as glancing down.

…

“Proper Human History.” Rin said as she wrote the term, “Or Pan Human History, as some call it. You will encounter both names.”

Several people turned to a fresh page. She waited for them, grateful for a question she could anticipate without having to extract it from somebody’s objection.

“The name refers to the continuing course of human history and the related possibilities that remain capable of carrying it forward. The surviving worlds can differ considerably, each with its own circumstances through which humanity might continue to develop.”

“So there’s a correct history?”

“There is a history that continues.” Rin replied. “Be careful with the word correct. It encourages people to mistake a description of how the world operates for an endorsement of everything that happens in it.”

She drew a branching line, keeping it simple. Zelretch would have found fault with the diagram before she had finished the first stroke, but Zelretch was not the one who had to explain this to people still wondering whether an infinite number of worlds meant an infinite number of holiday destinations.

“Think of these as related courses history might take. Some differences allow further possibilities to develop. Others lead towards a point beyond which humanity has no meaningful room to advance.”

“You mean extinction.”

“That is one way to reach such a point.”

“One way?”

Rin added a short branch that ended well before the others.

“A civilization can still exist and have no future worth speaking of in this sense. It might have become incapable of changing. It might have eliminated every difficulty so completely that there is nothing left for it to strive towards. Survival alone does not establish the capacity for further development.”

The man by the aisle leaned forward, but another voice reached her first.

“Wouldn’t eliminating suffering be progress?”

“It could be. Please continue funding your hospitals. The difficulty comes when a civilization has exhausted its capacity to develop any further, however it arrived there.”

A few people laughed, then stopped when she didn’t join them.

She softened her tone for the next part. The question had been sincere, and she knew how easily an explanation of this subject could begin to sound like approval.

“Consider what the people living there might still achieve. A peaceful society could have centuries of discovery ahead of it, while a population enduring terrible hardship might spend every generation struggling through the same problems. To understand where either history is going, we would have to examine the possibilities available to it.”

Rin looked down at her notes, though she knew what came next. She had disliked this part when she first learned it. She could now explain it well enough to stand here answering their questions, though she still disliked having to hear the answers herself.

“Sustaining those developing branches requires resources, and there is a limit to how much can be committed across an infinite range of possibilities. Histories that have reached such dead ends are subject to a process called pruning.”

…

Shirou pulled the spear sideways, breaking the channel beneath the paving. Worms spilled around the blade and vanished into cracks too narrow for him to reach.

Something tightened around his ankle.

He dropped the spear and cut down with Kanshou, scraping the edge along his boot as Rory shouted his name. He threw himself clear. Lightning struck where he had been standing, leaving a trench of molten stone between him and the palace.

His left arm folded beneath him when he landed. He lay still for one breath, then another, trying to make his right hand push him upright.

Beyond the trench, the current continued feeding Ivan.

…

“Pruning.” The young woman repeated, looking from her notes to the branches on the board. In her eyes, Rin could see the beginnings of just a hint of psychosis. Huh. New record, “That’s a rather reassuring word for what you’re describing. You prune a tree because you want it to grow properly. It implies that someone knows what shape it ought to have, and that removing part of it is good for what remains. Are those implications actually part of the theory?”

Rin left the chalk beside the diagram. She had been preparing to explain the mechanics again, but this was a considerably better question.

“They’re part of the metaphor, which is precisely why we should examine them. Once I draw a tree, you begin thinking about healthy branches and diseased ones. You imagine a gardener making a sensible decision. By the time I tell you that a branch contains an entire civilization, the diagram has already encouraged you to regard its removal as maintenance.”

She looked back at the short line she had drawn. It had taken less than a second to put there.

“People living in that history would have rather different concerns. They would have families, obligations, plans for the following morning. We have reduced all of that to a line on the board because we are examining how their history contributes to the development of the whole. You can see how much disappears from the discussion when we do that.”

The man near the aisle raised his hand this time.

“But the image isn’t arbitrary, is it? A tree containing worlds has an obvious resemblance to Yggdrasil. And if you’re talking about the preservation of the whole at the expense of individual lives, religions have been attempting to justify that for as long as we’ve had them. Is ‘pruning’ simply a modern vocabulary for divine judgment?”

“We would have to examine each tradition closely enough to understand where the resemblance comes from.” Rin smiled at him, pleased that she had managed to keep the correction almost warm, “Yggdrasil places existence in relation to a living cosmic structure. That gives us a useful starting point, though any attempt to identify its branches with parallel histories would require us to account for the particular worlds it describes and the relationships between them.”

She picked up the chalk, then put it down again. Another diagram would only give him something else to mistake for a literal description.

“Consider the Greek Fates instead. A life is spun, allotted, and cut. The imagery gives a boundary to something that, from within life itself, feels unfinished. There is always another thing the person might have done, another conversation they expected to have. The cut does not wait for them to feel that their story has reached a satisfactory conclusion.”

“Then where does that necessity come from?”

“That is where the comparison becomes difficult. The Fates give the limit a face, and suddenly we have someone to question. Why this person? Why now? We begin looking for an intention we can appeal to, or at least someone we can blame, because that is how we are accustomed to dealing with decisions which affect us.”

Rin could understand that desire well enough. She had spent too many hours beside Sakura’s bed with nothing useful to do with her anger. There were people she could blame. It had not made her sister open her eyes.

She folded her hands loosely in front of her before continuing.

“The useful question, then, is what those stories allow to happen after the limit has been reached.” Rin continued, “Does somebody carry on? Does anybody remember? Most accounts of an ending are being told for the benefit of people who expect to exist afterwards. That expectation is doing rather more work than you might think.”

The young woman glanced down at her notes, then back towards the board.

“Ragnarök. There are survivors, and the earth rises again. Even the deaths of the gods become part of the history of whatever follows.”

“Yes. Which means that, however terrible the catastrophe, there is still a history to discuss.” Rin said, “You can imagine yourself standing on the other side of it, looking back. Now consider how much of our understanding of an ending depends on being able to do that. A witness. A descendant. Someone uncovering a ruined city and wondering who lived there.”

She waited while the woman crossed something out. At least she was willing to do that. Some of the older members of the audience had spent the better part of yesterday defending notes they had taken incorrectly.

“But the people in the city don’t know whether anyone will find it.” The woman said, “They have to act without knowing how their story ends. Wouldn’t the people in one of these histories be in the same position?”

“They would have the same difficulty we do when attempting to distinguish a temporary crisis from a permanent condition. Living through something does not give you an unrestricted, omniscient view of it.”

“Then how would they know they had reached a dead end?”

Rin regarded her for a moment. There it was. She had wondered how long it would take someone to stop discussing the branches as though they were all conveniently occupied by other people.

“You would need to know what possibilities remained available to that world, including ones its inhabitants may never have considered. A historian examining a declining population or a century of apparent stagnation would have to determine whether those conditions could change, and what might follow if they did. Think how much you would need to know before you could confidently rule out every route forward.”

“And you have that knowledge?”

“I know enough to explain why those observations would be insufficient.” Rin replied, “I have not claimed to be able to inspect a newspaper and announce how much future a civilization has left.”

The man by the aisle lowered his pen. She rather hoped he had written that down before doing so.

He looked towards the diagram again, “But if someone could determine it, surely warning the population would change their behavior. The prediction itself would give them a reason to do something differently.”

“Perhaps. Though a reason to act and the ability to achieve anything by acting are separate problems. You can tell someone that a bridge is going to collapse. That doesn't give them the materials to repair it, or guarantee that there is time to get everyone across.”

“Then you would try to get them off the bridge.”

“I would.”

The answer came easily enough that Rin found herself looking at the short branch again. Explaining the limits of what could be done had always been considerably easier when Emiya wasn't there to take them as a personal challenge. He would have disliked this lecture. Worse, he would have waited until afterwards to ask the one question she couldn't answer, probably while apologizing for not understanding something.

What could they do about it?

The young woman had stopped writing.

“If the warning gave them a chance, even a very small one, wouldn't calling their world a dead end mean you had judged it too soon?”

“Yes. If there were still a possibility of changing the outcome, an account which excluded that possibility would be incomplete.” Rin rested one hand on the lectern, “But be careful. Finding a flaw in someone's explanation does not, by itself, produce a way out of the situation they are explaining. You would still have to find it.”

She could hear someone typing near the back. The rest of the room had become quiet enough for the sound to carry.

“So what are we supposed to do with this?” The man asked. This time, he sounded less interested in disputing her.

“For a start, stop treating the existence of other worlds as a guarantee that there will always be somewhere else to go.” Rin said, “We began with the assumption that you could survive the crossing. Now you're assuming that whatever you reach will still have a future to offer you. Neither is something I would advise building an evacuation plan around.”

The young woman looked down at the page she had filled, her pen resting against the margin. Rin gave her a moment. She had wanted them to take the subject seriously, though she was beginning to suspect the questions after the lecture would keep her here considerably longer than planned.

Someone near the back raised a hand.

“You’ve explained why they’re excluded, and why the word makes that sound more acceptable. But what actually happens to the pruned timelines?”

Rin set her notes down.

“They’re erased.”

…

Ivan stepped across the glowing trench. Frost spread beneath his foot, hissing where it met the molten stone, and Shirou looked up into the shadow of the raised scepter.

“Accept Our judgement with honor.” The Tsar said.

Then he brought it down.

…

…

…

[WARNING: HUMAN HISTORY DETERIORATION VALUEEXCEEDS ACCEPTABLE PARAMETERS]

[COUNTER FORCE AGENT DEPLOYMENT: UNAVAILABLE][COUNTER GUARDIAN DEPLOYMENT: UNAVAILABLE]

[HUMAN ORDER CANDIDATE: UNAVAILABLE][EXPANDING SEARCH PARAMETERS…]

[ERROR: NO VALID HUMAN ORDER CANDIDATES FOUND][EXPANDING SEARCH PARAMETERS…]

[ERROR: NO VALID HUMAN ORDER CANDIDATES FOUND][EXPANDING SEARCH AREA…]

[CONTRACT CANDIDATE FOUND][ERROR: CANDIDATE CONTACT UNAVAILABLE][DIAGNOSING…][RESULT: CANDIDATE RESIDES OUTSIDE OFCOUNTER FORCE OPERATING ZONE]

[RESOLVING…]

[SOLUTION: ENSURE CANDIDATE TRANSFERSINTO COUNTER FORCE JURISDICTION]

[ENACTING SOLUTION…]

…

…

…