Charlotte has little trouble finding Leo Snow, in spite of his current hiding spot. He’s got his old whiteboard setup, and on hearing her question he starts erasing space to work up a presentation.
“What is the nature of the multiverse? Okay…”
Charlotte holds up a hand. “I know you’re tempted to speak mathematically. I’m intelligent, but that doesn’t mean I’m educated in this century’s natural philosophy.”
Leo nods. “Got it. Okay, uh…”
“The universe is a tapestry of phenomena - space, time, and matter. Consciousness traverses this tapestry and turns it into experience. This experience forms our memories, our thoughts, everything that happens in our minds. And in turn, these experiences change the trajectory of our consciousness as we travel that tapestry.”
He draws three divergent lines. “Say that you’re confronted with a choice that has three outcomes. You might go in one of those three directions. We can describe those as lines, or paths, where your consciousness might follow.”
He draws another line starting elsewhere, and joins one of the three choices to it in a circle, with a single line leading away. “Sometimes, there’s multiple paths into an experience, and they converge into fewer paths out. Imagine meeting someone who’ll become your best friend. Whether you met them at a café, at school, or wherever, your path after that intertwines with theirs.”
“Because the large scale structure of the tapestry is fixed, the future can also affect the past, from our perspective. You might say the Revolutionary War is a historical fact - something that must have come to pass - and so if you went back in time to kill George Washington, the War would still happen but in some different way. If you interfered enough, you’d experience a brand new trajectory of events. Things cohere, in spite of small differences, until they can’t any more. Then they diverge wildly. Which is how minds work, which is very very interesting to someone like me.”
He draws a line with a loop in it. “Speaking of time travel, sometimes our experiences cross over themselves. Deja vu, prophecy, time travel, whatever. Either way, the experience generated is new, so it’s not like you re-experience time over and over. There’s always a way out of the loop.”
Charlotte nods. “I understand so far.”
“Okay. So really these lines should be pointing down, because what gives us the arrow of time is really more like a force of gravity, like we’re falling through time rather than moving forward. There’s a lot of parallels in physics between time and gravity, and consciousness, experience, and light. But whatever, left to right is how we’re wired.”
“Complicating this is what we call the psychic fields. A little physics because this is important. A field is just a formula where you plug in an input, like a location, and get a value. Temperature is a field where you say ‘how hot is it over here?’ and get an answer, for example. There’s electromagnetic fields, quantum fields, all kinds of fields.”
“These fields permeate all reality. You can ask questions like ‘what is the temperature’ anywhere in spacetime and it’s always a meaningful question. You can ask questions like ‘what is the density of conscious experience’ and get questions about that from the psychic field too.”
Charlotte holds up a hand. “The Concordance wields emotional energy. How does that fit into this scheme?”
Leo draws more. “Alright. So not every path into the future is made equal. Some choices demand more energy than others. And some choices just can’t be made. Most people can’t will themselves to fly, or turn invisible, or whatever. But, sometimes a seemingly reasonable choice can’t be made because the universe itself won’t accommodate it.”
“For example, imagine that someone damaged space-time itself, in a certain spot. It wouldn’t be possible to walk through it. Going back to fields, you can’t ask questions like ‘what is the density of matter in this spot’. And this is a real thing. For example, as far as I can tell, the Sepiaverse was created by removing the strands of spacetime where positive outcomes were possible. The keynomes served as uh, spacetime looms, weaving new potential futures for people in their vicinity, but outside of that, it was just literally not possible to say ‘I am gonna do a good thing today because that is awesome.’ The spacetime that would represent that outcome was simply gone.”
“So to your question. It takes some kind of energy to surmount the obstacle of making some kind of choices. And a strong enough phenomenon could convert all of the space-time tapestry into experience, I guess. Like we used to burn wood to make fire, then we upgraded to steam power, atomic fission, fusion, Alta Mira-style electron extraction, the Casimir fractal, and other increasingly effective ways to turn matter into energy. There’s effects that can do the same thing - turn electromagnetism into psychic force, or vice versa.”
“I haven’t really studied Concord’s power, but from my understanding, they’re able to do this at scale. Exchange matter for psychic energy, store it, then transform it back into other kinds of forces.”
Charlotte nods. “And why might they distinguish between different kinds of emotions? Love and joy, versus hate and sadness?”
Leo thinks. “Uh, I’m not sure? So this is a guess. We go back to how experiences shift the trajectory of consciousness. I think when you wield those kinds of energies, the same thing is going to happen. No conversion process is 100% effective. Imagine a bomb going off in Halcyon that made everyone totally sad. Like, everyone. Imagine how awful life would be for months, or years. Now imagine that bomb being 90% physical - blowing up the city’s structure, peoples’ bodies, whatever - and the remaining 10% being psychic. Still tragic, in different ways. Now imagine using that same energy to stop a bomb. Sure, you saved the houses and bodies, but the city took a big psychic hit.”
Charlotte absorbs all this. “I see. So an organization dedicated to virtue would prefer to use what we think of as virtuous emotions. But can’t these negatives be turned into positives somehow?”
Leo shakes his head. “All forms of energy we’re aware of obey conservation laws. You can’t cool something without heating something else up. You can’t just destroy energy, only send it somewhere else or shape it into a new configuration, and that takes energy too. Everything in reality holds the potential for transformation, but only so much. So I’d expect it’s equally difficult to turn psychic energies into their opposites.”
Charlotte thinks. “Their enemies would not be so scrupulous, would they.”
Leo laughs. “Oh, yeah, Sablestar. I remember her. Otto and I tangled with her once. You mean her.”
“That’s right.”
“Yeah, I can imagine them using this kind of energy.”
Charlotte hmms. “So if the Concordance stored this negative energy somewhere, and Sablestar and her ilk tapped into it, we could say the Concordance is empowering their enemies.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“A new line of questions.” Charlotte composes herself. Her experience with Crowninshield and Rook is still fresh in her mind. “You compared these moments in time to minds, earlier. What is the difference between a mind and reality?”
Leo chuckles. “You know, I’ve started to think there isn’t one.”
He pulls out a water bottle, carefully squeezes a drop of water onto his fingertip, and holds it up for inspection. “You could say this drop is a mind. It’s distinct from its source - the bottle - and it’s held together by surface tension. You could fill it with stuff - experiences, thoughts, whatever. And like any kind of water, it’s got some kind of power to change things. And drops like this fall during a rainstorm. They coalesce into puddles when they land, and started as undifferentiated water vapor in the clouds, but during the rainfall they’re unique.”
Charlotte gestures at the bottle. “And a larger source like this? Could that be thought of as a superhero, or a god, or something else powerful?”
“Yeah. A potent source of psychic energy, if it’s got something holding it together.”
Charlotte nods. “I see. I think you’ve answered my questions.”
She tells him about the experience with Rook and Crowninshield. To his credit, Leo listens without breaking anything.
All he asks at the end is, “that motherfucker is definitely gone, yeah?”
“I believe so. But I wanted to understand. I have more, but let’s take a break and get some coffee.”
Leo nods. “Sounds good. There’s no parallel universe where I can’t use a break from thinking about Rook Industries.”