Bob Rife in the style of Egon Schiele, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.

  Chapter 3: A violent yet flammable world

  Simulations headquarters, Mikla metropolitan area, Confluence dimension

  Year 42 of the Confluence Republic (local time)

  “Pretty grim place, huh?”

  “Has its moments, yeah.” They were watching an aggregated news report covering the past week’s major events in the Erd simulation. Bob Rife, the simulation supervisor, was entertaining a number of prominent guests, showing them a few highlights – if that was the word for it – from Erd’s recent history. There were terrorist attacks, massacres, wars, and almost unimaginable levels of violent crime. “In some ways it seems to have been getting worse lately. We don’t know why yet.”

  Erd was not the only full-scale simulation operated by Confluence Diviners, but it was by far the most well-known. Much of the interest in the place could be traced back to the fact that an Erd author had, bizarrely enough, written a history of the final days of the Elder regime, but that was not the whole explanation. As Bob never got tired of pointing out, Erd was arguably the simulation that most closely resembled the pre-Confluence world. It had the same basic setup, the same fundamental structures – and many of the same problems. Erd was an inherently fascinating place.

  These days, even more so. Something was stirring in the Erd simulation. After decades of progress, Erd society now seemed to be regressing back towards the darker eras of its past. There was a rise of authoritarian rule, even in places that had paid dearly for their previous descent into nationalist frenzy and which should, if guided by anything resembling common sense, be well inoculated against it today. Lately, there had been a number of weird and improbable occurrences in this regard. In one of the most powerful Erd nations, a major contender for the top leadership position was openly inspired by a dark-era totalitarian demagogue that had caused particularly impressive levels of damage, and while this would normally have sufficed to make the vast majority of the citizens reject him, they did not do so at this particular point in time. Similar situations could be observed in many other nations. And when a long-standing authoritarian nation attacked its neighbor to conquer land and resources, large segments of the overall Erd population blamed the victim for what had happened. It was as if the Erd sims had gone collectively insane.

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  Bob Rife was not sure what might be driving this peculiar drive towards societal psychosis, but he knew he had to watch it closely. He had invested large resources in searching for signs of outside interference in the Erd simulation, suspecting that some nefarious force – he had no idea who – wanted Erd society to collapse. However, no one had found anything. Perhaps, he thought, some sort of natural rot had set in. For one reason or another, simulation spaces might be inherently unstable and ultimately doomed to collapse. Some people – simulation theorists among them – had argued that the Erd sims may, somewhere deep in their minds, understand that their simulated existence is so constrained, so limited that they have no choice but to reject it. No choice but to rebel against it. No choice but self-destruction.

  Nevertheless, the other simulation spaces – two of which were older than Erd – had not seen any such emergence of determined self-destructiveness. As of yet, the problem was limited to Erd, which suggested to Bob that it was probably caused by some Erd-specific issue. Which in turn suggested that perhaps it was Erd’s very resemblance to the pre-Confluence world that was the source of its problems. Erd is like the ancient world before the dawn of magical consciousness and unification, except that what had happened here could not happen there, because magic cannot be simulated.

  Of course, the Erd author had maintained – in a message widely believed to originate with the High Renegade – that magic could nevertheless emerge spontaneously, but Bob and the other Diviners maintaining the Erd simulation had never seen any sign of that. They had watched for it intensively, but no outburst of spontaneous magic had ever been observed. In this regard, Erd was still. For all its sound and fury, Erd was silent in magic.

  Behold the Erd simulation in the style of Hieronymus Bosch, as interpreted by DALL-E in February 2025.