13:19 / 24:37, Rotation 592 / 687, 232 AE, 42.024691, 21.666316, Aryss
We don’t really have free will, do we, my love?
What do you mean, my love?
The more I learn about psionics, the more I understand. And you’re my teacher. The strongest psion I’ve ever known.
Go on.
The spirits understand it. Our neurotransmitters. Serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, acetylcholine. I mean that’s the basis of all psionics. The principle of the school of domination is to take free will away, but that raises the question, did we ever really have it at all?
Indeed.
Hallucination and imprinting affect memory and perception. But memory and perception are the basis of all decisions. Decisions will be altered with different inputs, and so a will can be shaped without ever having to force it. That influence. Facticity. Or what that facticity appears to be.
Facts, my love. Yes. Go on.
Even on a more fundamental magickal level it cannot be denied. The magickal principle of causality: every effect must have a cause.
It’s undeniable.
Though we imagine we are in control of our decision, the truth is we aren’t. We’re shaped by our past, our experiences, our essence, our very beings. How can there be an effect without an underlying cause? We just don’t understand the cause.
It’s impossible. No psion could ever understand their deepest subconscious. That is the domain of the spirits. And even they cannot understand themselves. It’s a black box.
Then how can we be accountable for the things we do? We were never in control. It’s all just an illusion.
Just because it’s an illusion, doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
What do you mean?
We still experience the anxiety of making decisions. Even if it’s just our interpretation of what’s really happening inside, that makes it real to us. Our perception makes it real.
It’s a curse really.
If we didn’t feel like we were in control of our own fates, we wouldn’t have to worry, right?
That would be nice.
Condemned to be free.
So, we were free all along.
The absence of free will does not mean the absence of-
-Agency.
…
Think of it this way.
Every moment you experience, you discover what you would have done in that moment. If you had done anything different, would it still be you?
No, it would be some alternate multiversal version of you.
A path slightly different.
Every moment of life, you are learning a little bit more about who you are, and what your place is in the universe.
This comforted Kay-El.
Turning to the next page of his story.
What if we lose ourselves?
Then we lose ourselves, together.
Are you ready, my love?
…
Do it.
totalDomination.gestalt(
[ ‘Kay-El’ Talauth,
Vilithe Callethe ]
)
Kay-El took a deep breath as he felt his love enter the deepest recesses of his mind. This was unlike any psionics he had ever felt before, a hundredfold deeper and more intense than any flaying, imprint, hallucination, mind blast, or puppeteering.
Vi took a deep breath as she felt herself enter the deepest recesses of her love’s mind. She had never attempted this, the unforgivable psionic technique, though she knew exactly how to do it, as all the greatest psions did. It was the only path to the frequently used Power Word: Kill, much more unforgivable than what they were about to do. What they were doing right now.
When a psion and a knight are fused, in reverent breath the elvans called this divine being an Archon.
Breathe.
The Archon inhaled.
Their perceptions reverberated in response, a bubble of super awareness that cavitated through the core of their being and expanded out like a supernova, its light and power illuminating absolutely every single iota and every single quark.
Exhale.
The Archon exhaled.
Great internal galaxies of infinite wisdom swirled around a single grasp- a supermassive black hole where once was their frailty and fear. They were the universe experiencing itself.
Any last solute of redactive encryption was dissolved away. Vilithe could remember everything now. Everything. Though the encryption had been slowly wearing away all these lunas, the rekindling of her hope and wanting – the solvent – now hit her like a dam bursting. A comet streak slamming her despair to extinction, despair that had been so deleterious to her, for so damn long.
She remembered her idols, Hypatia, Marie Curie, and Joan of Arc.
She remembered her love of shoegaze music.
She remembered her fascination with geometry and calculus. But she was not a fan of statistics.
She remembered her love of math rock and prog rock.
She remembered linguistics, philosophers, and their philosophies.
She remembered her knowledge about the entire Mahbahrata, the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Tripi?aka, the Vedas, not just what these stories and texts were but what they represented, what they meant, the holy reverence of meaning to the holy dead, the Godlike Beings.
She remembered a lot about the Godlike Beings.
She remembered her love of chemistry, biology, and physics.
She remembered magick.
She remembered her childhood. Her friends. Her best friend. She remembered her spirit friends, her imaginary friends, Mal was just one of many. She remembered the stories she made up in her head.
She remembered architecture.
She remembered every single one of her Callethean sisters.
She remembered kinship, envy, and banter.
She remembered every conversation, every complicated drama that unfolded in the Nimbii.
She remembered her love of pop music and her love of rock, in general, including punk and indie.
She remembered her archnemesis.
How they eventually made up.
How it all felt so silly in the end.
She remembered the poets. She remembered her favorite poems.
She remembered her first crush.
She remembered her favorite visual artists, and her favorite painting.
She remembered her seven brood sisters, Vineza, Vesabella, Vebienne, Valora, Vadanessa, Veralivia, and Velotte.
She remembered all her family, but she remembered the seven sisters she grew up with, most of all.
She remembered the great monuments of the Godlikes.
She remembered her tutors.
She remembered Princess Allanah herself teaching her how to ride dragons.
She remembered all the dragon races she’d ever competed in.
She remembered her education.
She remembered her youth. She remembered freedom, and not just some semblance of it, but the pure, raw freedom of the potential of her whole entire life, still laying ahead of her.
She remembered her love of R&B, Soul and Neo-Soul . She remembered her love of Hip-Hop. She couldn’t get into metal or jazz.
She remembered times of doubt and struggle, her insecurities as an adolescent elvan, and crises created by her immaturity, and how she triumphed against them in the end.
She remembered her favorite books.
She remembered her most joyous moments of her life in Phyros.
She remembered her first kiss. Her first race, her first time she placed third, and then the first time she placed first. Her first blueberry smoothie.
She remembered her favorite movies.
She remembered all those who ever loved her.
She remembered all those she knew who had died.
She remembered being fascinated by quantum physics.
She remembered that as a Dragonrider, who had to understand the warping of spacetime by grasp and spent her life in a general relativistic world with measurable constants, she was simply astounded by the fact that the creatures who enable it, the nanoscopic spirits, were capable of operating at the probabilistic quantum level, impossible for her to observe.
She remembered the moment her head was blown by this thought.
She remembered her love of anime.
She remembered her favorite videogames.
She remembered the experience of learning everything she knew, and the delight she had in learning it. For now, she knew why she knew what she knew. How she knew what she knew. The universe lit up before her with its intrinsic beauty.
She remembered her favorite electronic and dance artists.
She remembered how much she loved Daft Punk.
She remembered how much she loved their album Discovery.
She remembered how much she loved the music video anime that matched with the album: Interstella 5555: The 5tory of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem.
She remembered how much she wanted to share it with Kay-El.
She remembered her adolescence. Her coming of age.
She remembered her first walk across a Nimbus walkway as a young broodling who had just learned how to walk, staring at the roiling acid clouds from her cloud-suit.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
She remembered the first time she dipped her body into the amniotic sac of Quetzacoatl, her dragon. She remembered how nervous she was, that raw trepidation. She remembered that feeling as clearly as she remembered the Lava Tube now.
Now she chose to remember the first time she felt the Knight Leader’s mind.
Now she chose to remember her Queen Mother Dannelle.
Now she chose to remember her Worker Mother Valermarie.
Now she chose to remember all her sisters again, all their names, and all their faces. She remembered all her love for them. All the moments they ever spent together. Everything she wished she could say to them, even now.
She could clearly remember every single instance she ever used psionics, and how her skill at communicating with the spirits honed.
She now remembered how powerful she really was.
She didn’t just have all this.
She had the entire map of the Knight Leader’s journey through psionics, the memory of every time he learned something new – blur, mirror image, sleep – and more than that, she had the full power of his mind combined with her, their combined willpower, their combined cunning, their combined creativity.
She now knew exactly how much he really loved her. And it was almost too much.
Her connection to the psionic legacy was restored.
The sum of all knowledge of the Godlike Beings.
All of it flowed through her now, and she knew that no one elvan should have all this power. This was-
Power Overwhelming. Power like that of a God.
The Gestalt.
And though with his psionic power they could have remembered all of the knight’s memories too, including his name, they did not. For empathy against the target would be lethal now.
Though they had performed the fusion dance, this Archon was Vi-El, and never to be Kaylithe. Control had been relinquished to her. But it was no longer her. It was them.
Dragonrider and Knight, Rogue Queen to be and Commander of Soldiers, were now one.
It is done.
They could not alter your feelings; for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to.
He knew that the prescriptive use of ‘beg the question’ did not mean the same thing, and he did not care to use it in the descriptive way that Godlikes often did.
As Mal became more like an elvan, Vilithe was beginning to be more and more like a spirit.
He felt so encouraged that she agreed, and the way she thought it- it showed her surprise. He was showing insight that surprised her.
By thought-word alone it seemed curt, but the way the thought was conveyed was so gentle, so reassuring. It was because she wanted to know what he thought.
A machine learning algorithm is nothing more than just a bunch of recursive, self-reinforcing if else statements, right?
The fundamental doctrine of Hinduism: samsara.
In the words of the Godlike Jean Paul Sartre. As the frayed threads of Vilithe rewound itself, as her authentic being reconstituted itself, she could begin opening seams through which to peek into the psionic legacy.
Indeed, they were. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. What stopped them from going rogue earlier?
The irony of him finishing this thought- this was not lost on her.
They were free all along but- there was never any choice in the matter. Not here. Not now. Because he loved her. Freedom is slavery.
Her favorites were the usuals: My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, but her absolute S Tier, above them all, was Ride. Always Ride. She was obsessed with their album, Nowhere.
She was well familiar with Euclidean geometry, as she needed to draw upon this knowledge in her constant analyses of aerodynamics, Riemannian manifolds, and reactive shortest path algorithms, all the better to get the edge on her competitors in the dragon races. She also remembered how much she loved weaving network graphs in her head when she was bored, solving little mazes in her head, or finding the Eulerian trail where possible.
It explained everything! Change was the only constant, really. The function of change over time - acceleration a derivative of velocity, and jerk the derivative of acceleration – the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position when calculating from Newtonian spacetime – Einsteinian spacetime was only necessary on journeys across the void, a journey she had only made once. How could she not love calculus, as a Dragonrider?
There are lies, damn lies, and then there are statistics. She agreed with this statement. She found statistics horribly boring.
Toe, Battles, TTNG, Don Caballero, Hella, Tera Melos
King Crimson, Rush, Porcupine Tree, and of course, she loved, loved, loved Tool. Who didn’t’?
She remembered the romantic languages that she knew, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, but she couldn’t quite fit Romanian in. She remembered Hindi, Bengali, and Gujarati, but there were so many more she had yet to master. She remembered how to read and write in Sanskrit. She remembered all the languages she knew that came from Proto-Indo-European. And the ones that weren’t- she remembered Chinese, and the dialect she inherited, Cantonese, and what she could of Malay and its many variations, and she even knew a little bit of Turkish.
Socrates, Confucius, Diogenes, Mencius, Lao Zi, Parmenides, Plato, Epicurus, St. Augustine, Ibn Sina, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Locke, Hobbes, Hegel, Heidegger, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, Russell, Derrida, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus, Wittgenstein, Arendt, Debord, Foucault, Rawls, Baudrillard
The Socratic Method, the Analects, Cynicism, the Four Virtues, the Tao Te Ching, Holism, the Allegory of the Cave, the Republic, Epicureanism, the Watchmaker Analogy, Empiricism, the Prince, Pantheism, Dualism, the Principle of Causality, Tabula Rasa, the Leviathan, Dialectics/Synthesis, Dasein, Pessimism, Existentialism, Rationalism, Historical Materialism, Master/Slave Morality, Analytic Philosophy, Logical Atomism, Deconstructivism, Anti-Essentialism, Absurdism, Language Games, the Banality of Evil, the Society of the Spectacle, the Panopticon, Subjectivity, Justice as Fairness, Hyperreality, and the Simulacrum.
She remembered the states of matter, the Periodic Table of the Elements, the Laws of Thermodynamics, enthalpy and entropy, exothermic versus endothermic, the potential of Hydrogen, catalysts, buffers, hydrogen bonds, Van Der Waals forces, magnetism, kinetics, redox reactions, mass spectrometry, stoichiometry, isomers, chirality, fission, fusion, she even remembered orgo, but of course she hated it. Who didn’t?
She remembered the Theory of Evolution, natural selection, all the species of Reath that went extinct, also known as cryptids, ecology, biomes, niches, primary predators, decomposers, symbiosis, mutualism, metabolism, homeostasis, the primordial soup, bacteria, viruses, the animal kingdoms, sweet glucose, lipid structures, protean folding, essence- that is, DNA, mitosis, meiosis, eukaryotes, prokaryotic cells, cellular organelles, mitochondria, aerobic energy, anaerobic energy, glycolysis, the Krebs Cycle, phosphorylation, chlorophyll, photosynthesis, electron transport chains, nervous systems, axon potentials, glia, myelin sheaths, endocrine signaling, hormones, enzymes, receptors, the drugs that blocked them- antagonists, agonists, and yes, she still remembered orgo, and yes, she still hated it. Who didn’t?
She remembered Newton’s Laws of Motion, mass, force, velocity, acceleration, work, power, and energy. She remembered inertia and momentum. She remembered torque, centripetal force, and centrifugal pseudoforce. She remembered oscillation, vibration, harmony, dissonance, grasp- or gravity. She remembered fluid dynamics. She really, really loved physics.
Neolithic, Mesoamerican, Ancient Egyptian, Dravidian, Mughal, Classical, Etruscan, Byzantine, Merovingian, Visigothic, Carolingian, Medieval, Romanesque, Gothic, Songnic, Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Renaissance, Victorian, Ottoman, Art Deco, Deconstructivism. But her favorite was Bauhaus and Brutalism. It’s not the journey, it’s the destination.
She remembered her love of Taylor Swift, George Michael, Billie Eilish, Sigrid, One Direction, especially Harry Styles, but she didn’t like Zayn. She loved Gorillaz, Chet Faker, Bombay Bicycle Club, Blur, Oasis, Pulp, The Verve, Suede – she loved Britpop – Joji, Olivia Rodrigo instead of Sabrina Carpenter, New Jeans instead of Blackpink, Ellie Goulding, Lorde, Ella Eyre, Alvvays, St. Vincent, King Princess, Dua Lipa, Gracie Abrams, Tears for Fears, Lady Gaga, Disclosure, Sylvan Esso, Lyn Lapid, Bastille, NoMBE, YACHT, Emei, HAIM, Phantogram, Oh Wonder, Skylar Grey, Destiny’s Child, BANKS, HONNE, Florence and the Machine, Lenii, The XX, Frankie Valli, Lyn Lapid, 王菲 , 梅艷芳, 任賢齊, 王力宏, 優里, 宇多田光, and of course, Michael Jackson… who didn’t? Despite what he may or may not have done.
The Pixies, Radiohead, Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, David Bowie, the White Stripes, the Black Keys, Alt-J, Ratatat, TV On The Radio, Dire Straits, Bloc Party, Alabama Shakes, Funkadelic, Khruangbin, Phoebe Bridgers, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Tame Impala, The Cranberries, Queens of the Stone Age, Blondie, Portugal. The Man, Steve Miller Band, MGMT, Garbage, Cage the Elephant, OK Go, FIDLAR, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Semisonic, Nirvana, Iggy Pop, Alanis Morissette, the Smashing Pumpkins, Beck, Milky Chance, Green Day, Bnny Rbbt, Hole, Fleetwood Mac, Yo La Tengo, Sleater-Kinney, Blind Melon, X Ambassadors, the Rural Alberta Advantage, Alice In Chains, Pearl Jam, Paramore, Jefferson Airplane, Rage Against The Machine, and she knew she shared this with Kay-El. But what she did not share with Kay-El was an appreciation for Guns N’ Roses, Lynyrd Skynyrd, or Led Zeppelin. Her guilty pleasure was Coldplay. But her absolute favorite rock band was Queen.
Rumi, William Shakespeare, Al-Khansa, Bharavi, Kalidasa, 李白, Sappho, Abu Nuwas, Bā?abha??a, Sylvia Plath, 杜甫, 和泉式部, Dante Alighieri, Amarsimha, Maram al-Masri, Si Prat, Emily Dickinson, Vishakhadatta, 王維, Maya Angelou, 辛弃疾, T.S Eliot, 岳飛, Susan Sontag, 楊慎, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 白居易, Pablo Neruda, Langston Hughes, 張繼, Oscar Wilde, Kahlil Gibran, 蘇軾, Walt Whitman, Alexander Pope, Allen Ginsberg, Edgar Allen Poe, E.E Cummings, John Milton.
A fan of longform, Vilithe always felt like Eve had the main character energy in Paradise Lost. But the one poem she dearly loved, more than all others, was Neruda’s Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche – tonight I can write (the saddest lines) – romantic Vilithe had always imagined someone longing for her so. What she had never thought of, however, was what it would feel like the other way around.
Georgia O’Keefe, William Blake, Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko, 陈佩秋, Vermeer, El Greco, Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and of course, Salvador Dali. Who didn’t? She did not like Pablo Picasso. And of course, she would have killed for a dress made by 郭培, Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent.
One painting stood out to her amongst all- it was El Greco’s View and Plan of Toledo. She couldn’t explain why. She just liked it.
The Temple of Heaven, Petra, Masjid al-Haram, The Pyramids of Giza, Versailles, Angkor Wat, The Forbidden City, the Eiffel Tower, Borobudur, the Obelisk of Axum, the Terra Cotta Warriors, Cristo Redentor, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, Lal Qila, Potala Palace, Mysore Palace, Meenakshi Temple, Duomo di Florence, Duomo di Milan, Citadel of Aleppo, Kizhi Progost, Alhambra, the Leshan Giant Buddha, Notre Dame Cathedral, Jetavanamara, St. Peter’s Basilica, the Great Wall, Osaka Castle, Brú na Bóinne, the Chand Baori Stepwell, Buland Darwaza, the Dome of the Rock and the Temple Mount, Buda Castle, Himeji Castle, Cairn of Barnenez, Sagrada Família, the Colosseum, Gommateshwara, the City Palace of Jaipur, Ziggurat of Ur, the Golden Temple, Baalbek, the Temples of Bagan, Tikal, Neuschwanstein Castle, Sigiriya, Stonehenge, the Mezquita of Cordoba, Taj Mahal, Mehrangahr Fort, the Colossi of Memnon, Pena Palace, Hohensalzburg Fortress, Acropolis, Brihadisvara Temple, Kailash Temple, the Grand Palace, Chichen Itza, Machu Picchu, the Atacama Giant, Vijayanagara, the Nazca lines from a wyvern’s eye- though she had never been to these places and never could, wreathed by death mist as they were, she could see them all in her mind’s eye as if she was standing right there, or flying high above.
They could never take that away.
Whitney Houston, James Brown, Alicia Keys, Marvin Gaye, Rihanna, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, Tash Sultana, Prince, TLC, John Legend, The Fugees, Bruno Mars, the Weeknd, the Supremes, Sly and the Family Stone, Patti Labelle, Sade, Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Boyz II Men, Earth Wind & Fire, Macy Gray, Ashanti, Blackstreet, Tina Turner, Miguel, Al Green, Masego, Asaf Avidan, Ray Charles, Thundercat, Brandy, Usher, Lucky Daye, H.E.R, Bryson Tiller, Ella Mai, Lionel Richie, Brent Faiyaz, Kehlani, Tinashe, Chaka Khan, Aaliyah, Rhye, Ta-ku, SZA, Aaliyah, Beyonce, Sam Cooke, Edwin Starr, Sam & Dave, Jungle, Billie Holiday, Isley Brothers, Wilson Pickett, D’Angelo, India.Arie, Frank Ocean, the Temptations, Amy Winehouse, Corinne Bailey Rae, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Paolo Nutini, Little Dragon, Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye, and of course, Aretha Franklin
Nujabes, Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest, Kid Cudi, Nas, Outkast, Tyler the Creator, The Roots, De La Soul, The Fugees, Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, NWA, Pete Rock & C.L Smooth, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, A$AP Rocky, Tierra Whack, Dead Prez, Doja Cat, Run DMC, YARMAK, Moor Mother, Talib Kweli, Saba, Lil Wayne, Rakim, Dan the Automator, J. Cole, Childish Gambino, Jurassic 5, Vince Staples, the Neptunes, Pharrell Williams, Clipse, Pusha T, JID, Jay Electronica, Anderson Paak, Erykah Badu, Yasiin Bey, Mobb Deep, The Pharcyde, R.A.P Ferreira, Tkay Maidza, Pink Siifu, No Wyld, Mac Miller, Common, and she liked the discography up to The Life of Pablo, but agreed that Ye quickly got washed after that. She appreciated Eminem’s lyricism, but didn’t like a lot of the content. She found Jay-Z’s braggadocio boring. She couldn’t stand Drake. And of course, she loved the Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur. Who didn’t?
It was Kay-El who loved metal. But she kind of liked Opeth.
It was Kay-El who loved jazz.
Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1984, Brave New World, Snow Crash, The Count of Monte Cristo, Grendel, Watchmen, The Left Hand of Darkness, Midnight’s Children, His Dark Materials, the Dragonlance series, obviously, even Anne Rice’s books and Animorphs – how she was fascinated by cryptids, and of course she had guilty pleasures as a broodling – and of course, Lord of the Rings. She remembered not liking Harry Potter anymore. Still, Jane Eyre was the one that had a special place in her heart. Vilithe remembered she could be a bit of a romantic. To love someone despite a twisted, horrible flaw, a secret. She couldn’t stand any of the characters in the Great Gatsby, even if she did have to admit the prose was excellent. Nick was such a simp.
In the Mood For Love, Alien, the original Planet of the Apes, the entire reboot saga, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Roman Holiday, Battle Royale, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Interstellar, Pulp Fiction, The Silence of the Lambs, Logan, and pretty much anything French New Wave or Spaghetti Western. Her absolute favorites were Breathless and Man of La Mancha. And she did not care for the Godfather, couldn’t get into it. She felt it insisted upon itself. Ironic, considering her guilty pleasure was Crazy Rich Asians.
She remembered how she learned to know about it at all. She remembered when she was introduced to the idea of a one-dimensional object – with her fascination with geometry it came naturally – and from there, string theory, and so on. And she remembered how she became fascinated with trying to solve the fundamental ontological magickal problem- the union of general relativity and quantum mechanics.
She remembered every movie made by Studio Ghibli, the Godlike Master Hayao Miyazaki. Her favorite was Nausica? of the Valley of the Wind. She felt Whisper of the Heart didn’t really go anywhere. She loved Dragonball, Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Attack on Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Jujutsu Kaizen, and Death Note. But she didn’t like Naruto, Bleach, or Gundam. But if she had to pick a single series that she loved the most it would have been the various reincarnations of Neon Genesis Evangelion, especially the rebuilds. She remembered she liked Rei best.
She didn’t really play that many videogames. But she loved the Legend of Zelda series, the Fallout series, most of the Sonic the Hedgehog games, and enjoyed socializing with the Super Smash Brothers series on occasion. Her main was Zelda or Sheik, which she switched up to keep her opponent guessing. But her absolute favourite game of all time was Baldur’s Gate 3- she adored Astarion and Shadowheart. She gave up on Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Those were someone else’s favourite game. She found Starcraft too hectic. And the servers shut down, so no one played League of Legends, thank goodness. Oh, and she also loved Mario Kart. But who didn’t?
Flume, Giorgio Moroder, Aluna Francis, Chase & Status, Polo & Pan, Bassnectar, ODESZA, Hayden James, Modeselektor, Apparat, their collab Moderat, Kraftwerk, The Avener, Massive Attack, Flight Facilities, Stromae, Moby, Photay, James Blake, Kavinsky, CHVRCHES, Gramatik, GRiZ, M83, Cashmere Cat, Rudimental, Bob Moses, Big Wild, Jai Wolf, The Blaze, Nightmares on Wax, C2C, Parra for Cuva, Goldie, Chrome Sparks, Santigold, Gorgon City, MEMBA, FKJ, Fatboy Slim, Dimension, Adam Freeland, Keys N Krates, Jabberwocky, Whethan, Pretty Lights, Bonobo, Four Tet, Hot Chip, Maribou State, Tycho, Rampue, SBTRKT, Gilligan Moss, Poldoore, Wax Tailor, The Prodigy, R?yksopp, Nosaj Thing, Marc Rebillet, New Order, Mura Masa, Pendulum, The Avalanches, Faithless, Mount Kimbie, Portishead, Nicolas Jaar, Junior Boys, Aphex Twin, Tourist, And of course, Caribou.
But her favorite was still Alive 2007. It really helped her appreciate their third album.
Even Vilithe herself would admit, that if she had lived in the Lost Age, her tastes could be best described as ‘millennial hipster’. It was too bad that the creation of culture drastically slowed after the Catastrophe. She would have quite enjoyed hearing something fresh and new. Despite the spirits’ best efforts, all they could produce were facsimiles. Still sounded good! Just not original.
Still… not quite.
The question was no longer that empathy could be lethal. The only question was who it could be lethal to.
