Transmissions field in the style of Mikalojus Konstantinas ?iurlionis, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 42: Oh comely

  Planet Jord, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  As time passed and the people of the Confluence had more time to digest the Erd author’s second Confluence book (still only up to Chapter 32), the experience seemed to accelerate certain developments in their society. For a long time now, Confluence mages had been increasing both the amount of time they spent in shared Transmission spaces and the intensity of these immersions. Transmissions fields were a spectrum ranging from verbal communication to full feeling-level inter-penetration, with numerous in-between states of intensity. In the early days of the Confluence Republic, people mostly shied away from what they regarded as privacy-denying levels of cognitive and feeling-state openness, but as the years and decades passed, young people in particular found themselves more comfortable confronting such experiences.

  Teenagers wanted to share everything with their romantic partners and sometimes with their friends, and they turned the intensity of their Transmissions up to ever higher levels and also invested the energy it took to maintain these spaces for longer periods of time. Parents worried, as they always do, and some of these young ones got scarred by the experience of sharing or receiving opinions or feeling-states that it might have been better to keep private, or which they were at any rate not ready to share yet. Others, however, started getting used to radical forms of openness even of rather unwholesome thoughts and feelings, and found themselves increasingly tolerant not only of perceiving such material in the minds of their friends, but also of sharing their own impurities, negativities, and depravities.

  Almost unnoticeably, over a period of decades, Confluence culture found itself moving towards a higher degree of tolerance for these kinds of impurities. People accepted that even their lovers and close friends sometimes harbored negative thoughts and feelings about them, or about anyone and anything else, and were not as offended as they would have been in earlier times. There was a growing recognition of the fact that people are complex and multifaceted and sometimes in the grip of selfishness and negativity, and the occurrence of negative thoughts and feelings were not, to the same extent as before, regarded as shameful and blameworthy. Of course, it happened that relationships and friendships fell apart because one of the persons involved shared their doubts and mixed feelings about the others, but it was also recognized that such complexity was quite natural and therefore unavoidable, and the relationships that could withstand a full airing of the truth, with all its shades and facets, were in the end stronger for it.

  The process might be described as an accelerated evolution of societal norms facilitated by new magical capabilities. As Transmission magics became universally accessible, they allowed for radical forms of mind- and feeling-level sharing, encouraging or forcing people to deepen their understanding of what it meant to be a complicated person intimately entwined with other complicated persons. As one famous therapist put it, ‘In the Transmissions field we confront ourselves confronting others who confront themselves, being forced to see who we are because the other sees who we are and we see their seeing. Our acceptance of the darkness within us reflects our acceptance of the darkness in the other; as the other’s acceptance of self and other mirrors our acceptance, the two deepen each other and bring us closer to each other and to ourselves.’

  In retrospect, it was not difficult to see that major changes were afoot in Confluence society, but at the time, the movement towards continuous high-intensity Transmissions seemed like just one of many changes happening and not necessarily the most important one. With the arrival of the Erd author’s second Confluence book, this decades-long societal movement was somehow amplified, perhaps because the threat against Confluence civilization served as an impetus towards closer connectivity – people seeing danger on the horizon and seeking safety in togetherness – or perhaps just because people wanted to emulate their heroes. One notable development at this time was that people started to expand their Transmissions circle so that it included not only their romantic partners or close friends but also a wider group, especially the people in their global network that they anyway tended to share their secrets with.

  Then, unexpectedly, some people merged their Transmissions circles, thus basically inviting strangers into their minds. This seemed to have started as some sort of hipster more-radical-than-you fashion statement, but the practice caught on, its popularity probably reflecting its usefulness as a means of hiding in the crowd. Paradoxically, the widening of one’s Transmissions circle served as a means of retreat from the demands of the full-on Transmissions lifestyle, with people withdrawing from radical intimacy by widening the circle of intimacy to include so many people that the cacophony of voices provided metaphorical shadows to disappear into.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Another thing that helped people deal with the demands of their Transmissions lifestyle was the cultivation of mental silence. After the publication of the Erd author’s first Confluence book and the opening of the (restricted) School for Life Force Magic, there had been a surge of interest in the skills needed to traverse the Citadel chambers, the most central of which was the ability to silence, or at least to navigate through, one’s own mind, but most people who experimented with this tended to get frustrated at how difficult it was and gave up. However, some started to understand that the ability to navigate past one’s dark thoughts and emotions was useful not only for navigating through the Citadel but also for not sharing unpleasant things through the Transmissions field, providing added motivation for developing this ability.

  Ironically, perhaps, the life force projection needed to enter the Citadel was incompatible with Transmission magics, so the two main motivations for developing mental silence skills could not be combined at the same time. Everyone had to enter the Citadel alone. Many people regarded this fact of life as expressing some sort of important lesson.

  While Transmission states kept being tuned up in terms of their intensity, duration, and scope, the second Confluence book here just served to amplify long-standing trends. The impact of this book on people’s interest in reincarnation was another thing altogether. Back under the Elder regime, reincarnation and related spiritual subjects moved through fairly regular cycles of interest, while never really reaching the mainstream; after the Revolution, people had too many new magics to play with to bother with old metaphysical ideas. But that was before they started reading about Sophie’s exploits as a series of Erd sims.

  One thing was that the SC agents were now superstars, and people in the Confluence were not above imitating celebrities. Another thing was that people who might have gotten interested in the subject on their own behalf were previously discouraged from pursuing that interest because it was generally regarded as daft. And the third thing, perhaps most important of all, was that the publication of the second Confluence book induced something like a mood change in society. Few people regarded the Diankorans as an existential threat, but the Confluence being under any threat at all was new to the post-Revolution world. Also, the fact that citizens found themselves living under very special circumstances added an element of uncertainty and, at least for some, dread. While no one could put their finger on it, it seemed obvious that something unique was happening to the Confluence. Changes were coming, probably to the extent that life would never be the same again, and feeling this development made people grasp for something stable to hold on to. Life continuing after death was just the sort of message they wanted to hear.

  (Some found other forms of comfort. The Foresight Statistics Office reported that energy spent on Mellow and Bliss enhancements had increased by 17% over the last week.)

  It went in a number of different directions. Although Sophie’s story with repeated lifetimes in the Erd sim rather deemphasized the glamor aspect of reincarnation, some people were mostly concerned with identifying previous lifetimes where they had been celebrities or other very important people. Meanwhile, the therapeutic community was interested in how present-day health issues might be related to past-life choices and how present-day practices might serve to resolve negative recurring patterns. Various spiritual communities regarded the string of lifetimes as representing forward movement towards some sort of end goal they often disagreed about and found hard to specify; many people wanted to enroll at the (restricted) School for Life Force Magic in order to glimpse past lives in the Chamber of Memories. Some people also claimed to have experienced such glimpses without initially recognizing them for what they were, and were now busy tracing them like Sophie had done.

  Transmissions field in the style of William Blake, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Utagawa Hiroshige, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Mikhail Vrubel, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Gustave Moreau, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Gustav Klimt, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Gaganendranath Tagore, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Transmissions field in the style of Férnand Khnoppf, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.