Maybe we’re overly pessimistic. It just occured to me that Aerhien’s world might actually be on the unlucky branch.
Suppose that the “branching point” is not whether or not the hero succeeds (that is, one branch lives, the other is destroyed). Instead, it could be whether or not the dust “finds” another way of attacking.
In the other branches, the defeat of the dust was finally successful (at the first try in one world, second try in another, or ~fiftieth attempt in the nearest-neighbor branch).
It is only in the unlucky branch that the dust keeps finding new ways of being nasty, and thus only in the unlucky branch there is a never-ending need to summon new heroes.
The other worlds don’t need to keep summoning heroes because they simply won, not because they simply lost.
Note that in this case most instances of Aerhien would live in in “nice” worlds. That is, among worlds with Aerhien, most measure is concentrated in successful worlds. However, among worlds with a newly-summoned Hero, most if not all measure is concentrated in threatened worlds (even if this is only a tiny sliver of the “total” measure).
I remember reading once about an experiment that was said to make rats superstitious.
These rats were used in learning experiments. They would be put into a special cage and they'd have to do something to get a treat. Maybe they'd have to push a lever, or go to a certain spot. But they were pretty good at learning whatever they had to do. They were smart rats. They knew the score, they knew what the cage was for.
So they did a new experiment, where they put them into the training cage as usual. But instead of what they did bringing the treat, they always got a treat exactly 30 seconds after going into the cage. This continued for a while, and what happened was the rats each learned an individual behavior to bring the treat. One would go to a corner, another would turn in circles, another would stand up on its hind feet. And sure enough, the treat came. Their trick worked.
I imagine the society in Eliezer's story had something similar happen. Given the anthropic effect we are postulating, they don't actually have to do anything - a certain fraction of the worlds will get lucky and survive. But after it happens a few times, the survivors may well assume that what they were doing at the...
Given the anthropic effect we are postulating, they don't actually have to do anything - a certain fraction of the worlds will get lucky and survive.
No, the fraction of worlds which "get lucky and survive" is determined by the strategies the people use.
I am not Omega - you can call me the sum of torque and wavelength... that's not even translating, is it - and I cannot see your source code. However, I will go ahead and offer you, epsilon upsilon, the following deal:
If you tell me that you flipped a coin to determine the current hero's gender, then I will mail you a check for 100 USD, in support of this admirable method for overcoming bias. Other forms of ritual sacrifice to the Random Number God are acceptable, but not meditation - I can see your hardware, and your brain is not a proper temple of the Random Number God.
As a sovereign rationalist, you are free to reply to me or not, accept my deal or not, and lie to me or not. I await your reply or lack thereof!
Ha! I tried doing that, the generator came up female... and I realized that I couldn't make Aerhien a man, and that having two "hers" and "shes" would make the dialogue harder to track.
Sometimes a random number generator only tells you what you already know.
(FYI, I was in an airport at the time, so I decided to close my eyes, look in a random direction, open them, and see what gender the first person I saw was... and even though they were both female, I then realized I had to discard the result.)
Uh... I have to ask, at this point, if you've ever tried your hand at writing fiction. Some characters are male, some characters are female, some can be either. The hero might have been either-able. Aerhien wasn't. She is the wise female council leader, not the wise male council leader. Galadriel and Elrond are not interchangeable. And besides, she was female in my mind and that's that.
I hadn't expected that you consulted, then disregarded, the Random Number God.
It's also worth noting that the nameless hero started out male, and Aerhien as female, on account of those having been the applicable genders in the dream - this is a dream-inspired story, my first. I consulted the RNG to try and reassign the hero's gender but discovered almost immediately that it would have been awkward.
The dream originally occurred from the hero's perspective, btw, but from a writer's standpoint it was obvious that the main character couldn't be the hero.
Notes:
(1) As best I recall, this is the first story idea to come to me in a dream, that has actually worked. Though it's more of a story fragment than a story. And I left out the part about how Albert Einstein was the hero summoned immediately before this one, and then ever afterward Einstein was only happy when working on carving a sculpture of a dragon, because when I woke up, that part didn't seem to make any sense.
(2) I think the hero might be overcomplicating things and taking an overly direct approach. I can think of something else I'd be trying in this situation. Besides intelligence-enhancement spells, I mean.
Ah yes, intelligence enhancement spells. I like to call this a "Morrowind Singularity." Drink intellect enhancing potion: craft another, better, intellect enhancing potion. Repeat until incredibly intelligent. Craft special weapon using enhanced intellect, defeat boss in a single hit.
Does that actually work?
(I can't decide whether that would mean Morrowind's game mechanics are broken, or just really awesome.)
Yes, and both.
It is also possible to increase your jumping to such a high level that you jump across the continent in one leap. However, the spell wears off before you have crossed halfway, so you have to refresh it just before landing in order to not die on impact.
You are the walking dead, and this is a dead world spinning, and many other worlds like this one are already destroyed."
"But this world is going to live anyway. I have decided it."
"That is my own world's heroism."
I think your quoting is messed up here. All three of these lines are the hero's, correct? You should remove the end quote from the first two lines.
Well, it certainly gave me a good strong confusing. You could at least append a ",' he continued." or something.
Have you played any, or are you a fan of, interactive fiction? If so, and you haven't played this particular game before, I recommend you look at The Gostak. It's an entire story written using standard IF principles and conventions, only every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb has been changed to be semantically unrecognizable but syntactically familiar to an English speaker. It is based on a thought experiment from The Meaning of Meaning; in short, the meaningless sentence "The gostak distims the doshes" allows you to generate three interconnected floating beliefs, one about the gostak, one about distimming, and one about doshes.
The core of language and communication is common convention. If your intent is to create a visually-pleasing pattern of pixels on a screen or ink on paper, you can change any part of your writing you like. You can change every word to a made-up word that only uses half-height letters, use the capital X as your sentence-ending punctuation, and as long as the story is internally consistent, people could still conceivably generate meaning from it. If they try hard enough, they might even generate the meaning you intended, but you would by nece...
I also had the same reaction. I had to re-read the three sentences a couple of time to convince myself it was the hero who said them all.
The convention also seemed weird when I started reading English — my native language uses different conventions for dialogue, not involving quotes — but now I find it “non-standard” uses (like yours) confusing.
Oh, well, the author gets to pick :-)
Nice story. I was about to say that while the Hero was right in considering anthropic explanations of the Counter-Force, he probably should have considered that merely as a candidate hypothesis and waited until he examined the records before concluding that anthropic effects were the entirety of the CF... Until I recalled this bit: "...Were you planning to mention that the 'hero' which your council chooses and anoints, often turns out not to be the real hero at all? That the Counter-Force often ends up working through someone else entirely?"
Which, given that the councilors seemed to admit to, supports an anthropic explanation...
Except that there is, apparently, a piece of evidence against anthropic explanations of it: Given the anthropic CF, wouldn't there then be many more worlds in which the hero tried and failed completely, and they had time to summon another hero?
The implication seems to be that each time they had a hero go up against it, there was some success somehow somewhere, even if not through the hero's own efforts or even through him or her at all.
For that matter, wouldn't there be far more worlds that ended up with them saying "We used to have a Counter...
Of course the conclusion that the Counter-Force was the anthropic principle was wrong in this case- the counter force was actually narrative necessity (unless Eliezer wants to claim he actually analyzed this kind of thing on billions of fictional worlds and only wrote about the one that survived).
And this isn't just a joke. From a Bayesian perspective, what is the anthropic principle? Well, there are a bunch of facts that must have been the case in order for us to be in our current situation (in general, alive). One could ask why these facts happen to be t...
It surprises me that nobody's shared my immediate reaction: that the world is most likely a simulation (run in another world that makes sense) which is set up to obey narrative causality (i.e. the Counter-Force) rather than a coherent set of laws. In other words, a Supervised Universe. And given that, I don't believe the main character should conclude that his Genre Savviness means the end of the Counter-Force...
ETA: Huh, somehow I missed ShardPhoenix's comment saying the same thing.
All else is not equal.
The anthropic principle would tend to involve the most minorly improbable thing.
ie. The whole volcano issue: which would be more improbable, not having the ridiculously close brush with defeat in the first place, or surviving it?
On the other hand, an authorial hand tends to seek out victories of low probability in preference over not just defeat, but also over victories of high probability.
So, is Aerhien's immortality the result of something like a quantum suicide? :)
This is a good piece of SF, but it suffers from a severe case of an ailment common to the genre, which is that someone who's never heard of X (in this case the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle) isn't going to have a clue what the hell you're talking about. Additionally, it's kinda hard to tell at first what elements of the story are made up (magic words, dust, summoning, etc) and what we're supposed to connect up with something from science (I would have figured out ahntharhapik principle eventually, probably).
I caught on when the hero said the Counter-Force would never return, although what really made it click was when ShardPhoenix called it a "quantum luckworld", which is a beautifully descriptive term. Still, I would have liked to see the hero go on to actually explain a little of the ahntharhapik principle to the council at the end; then it wouldn't just be a good story for the LW audience but a good story for anyone. Right now, you have to figure out the payoff for yourself, which only works if you are already familiar with the underlying concepts.
Indeed; once one understands that failure comes with a whimper not a bang, the history of our own world seems to me to contain quite a few _just barely_s, from a planet barely large enough to evolve sentient life, to quirks of psychology that led people to make advances the benefits of which could not have been apparent at the time. This story sums it up pretty nicely.
Isn't it much more likely from the hero's perspective that he's in a (rigged) simulation (that therefore may well keep going as it has been) rather than in a genuine quantum luckworld? I guess it depends how many unlikely victories there have been, and how unlikely they in fact were. Still, the protagonist seems to be jumping to conclusions a bit.
I did like the story though.
"Ah..." Ghufhus said, puzzled. "How do you... know all this? Is there a Counter-Force in your own world?"
Fool, Aerhien thought to herself. The hero had seemed puzzled by the idea, at first, and had needed to ask for examples. She decided then and there that Ghufhus would meet with an accident before the next council meeting; their world had no room for stupid Eerionnath.
That's a bit harsh, don't you think? Maybe the Counter-Force is known by a different name in the Hero's own world, and he asked for examples to make sure they're ...
Actually, why doesn't the Hero's world have a Counter-Force? Shouldn't every world have something like it? How many times have our world escaped from the brink of nuclear annihilation, for example?
It's not a question of how many times we've come dangerously close to annihilation, but of how obviously we've done so.
In Aerhien's world, it's obvious because, yes, it's happened many times, but especially because it's happened in such a way that they've noticed it every time, thanks to the Dust's habit of gradual conquest and oppression.
In our world, however... well, you ask how many times we've "escaped from the brink of nuclear annihilation". We don't know, exactly, and we don't know how close we really got to annihilation. It's not obvious that we really got that lucky, so we had no reason to dream up a Counter-Force.
I'm not sure why it took me this long to realize this, but by the anthropic principle, the Counter-Force is almost certainly not the anthropic principle, but something that really exists in the world, e.g., some kind of intelligent agent, physical force, principle of magic, or rule of simulation.
Consider two worlds that are otherwise identical except that world A has a real Counter-Force, and world B doesn't. Initially, world A has lower measure since it has higher complexity. But as time goes on, the fraction of world A that survives will massively outweigh the fraction of world B that survives. So, both the Hero and Aerhien should conclude that they're almost certainly in world A.
I was waiting to see how long it would take for someone to point this out.
And the "answer" - which, yes, I devised in advance - is that the Dust destroys its worlds completely by compressing the probability out of them, whereupon the probability mass ends up in other worlds. Sort of like "mangled worlds" only these are "squeezed worlds" that have the reality-juice squeezed out of them.
However, anyone in a particular world thus destroyed, gets to observe the takeover of the Dust, since the Dust requires some time to actually compress that world out of existence.
Alternatively we can suppose that a majority of all worlds performing summonings are those in Aerhien's situation: no worlds with a "real" Counter-Force, or worlds that permanently destroyed their Dust, are performing summonings in significant measure. For example, the Dust's existence could be integral to the summoning process.
I think this needs a bit more explanation to be readable to normal audiences. Now, not explaining the 'magic words' of our world right away isn't the problem. That, in fact, is a good way to make people think of ideas they have heard before anew.
The problem can be fixed by starting the story a few paragraphs earlier, with the council's exposition. A little exposition before hand is good for people who aren't used to fish out of water stories common to the genre. Everyone has a first right?
Good story! The Tolkien reference was nicely done; is Aerhien's background your own invention or inspired by another source? I get the feeling I've seen it somewhere, though that could be merely a matter of having seen each ingredient separately.
My one quibble about the hero is that he deduces too much from too little data - in particular, the probability that the counterforce exists, is an exponential function of how many times the world has been saved so far; in his shoes I'd look at the records before making a call on that one.
Maybe the Dust is self-replicating thingies that can jump between worlds. Whatever tactic the last hero tried would have worked against the Dust in some Everett branches and failed in others. The Dust we see next would be something that survived the previous tactic.
I just had a dream, of playing a LessWrong MMORPG based on this world (actually a MUD with Roguelike ASCII graphics, if you have any idea what that means :-). Well, almost playing, because I woke up before I could make the first move. But apparently we could spend Karma to buy special items. This must be a sign that I've been spending too much time here...
Am I right in my understanding that the Dust doen't actually evolve? That the old tricks don't work simply because the Counter-Force decides to use something else that day?
And what is the Dust?
Oh, A++ will read again.
When I was reading, I first thought the Dust was entropy:
"defeated only by luck" --> There's only an infinitesimal chance of beating the law of entropy.
"structureless and empty" --> Entropy is defined by its lack of order.
"Always the Dust is defeated, always it takes a new shape" --> Any destruction of entropy is counterbalanced by its increase somewhere else (e.g. life, control systems).
The "it takes a new shape immune to its last defeat" is a bit harder to explain, but I guess you could say it corresponds to, "you can't burn something twice".
The Counter-Force, then, is Bayescraft, or a "cognitive engine" -- any mechanism by which regularities in the world are identified, thereby creating more irregularity (see above).
And of course, how the hero says the world contains the seeds of its own destruction.
But then, that explanation started to make less sense as the hero seems to think he can permanently stop the expansion of entropy.
Out of curiosity, do we know anything about the native language of the hero? Ahntharhapik and khanfhighur don't seem to be from existing languages (Edit: by which I mean, using this or similar spelling).
Is there anything significant here for the story, or is Eliezer (say) just avoiding the assumption that the hero is an English speaker?
I wondered before I got to the end if it was supposed to be the anthropic principle they were dealing with, or if there was some less obvious answer. In the main character's place though, I don't think I would have assumed that solution. If there is a near infinite number of universes in which all possible outcomes are expressed, we should expect there to be some worlds with such contrived looking histories, but the implications of a method that could summon entities from one universe to another would be so absurd that I would tend to conclude that that was not what had actually happened.
What's the difference between the Dust and entropy?
Whenever something new comes into existance, there are new ways of breaking possible. The space of entropic possibility is large, so even old things can occasionally break in new ways.
Less direct point: How can you tell how improbable/aesthetic your universe is?
Maybe you could collect all of the short stories you've posted into a book and publish it. I'm not sure if that would be good or bad for your reputation. It might make you seem less serious.
"Sci-fi/fantasy writer Eliezer Yudkowsky says the intelligent machines could take over the world!"
Awesome. But was the LotR reference sufficient camp? Surely you wanted to link to TvTropes. It could at least have used a reference to Aeon Flux.
This reminds me of one of the "Probability Zero" short-shorts from Analog SF. I don't know if they're doing them anymore, but they did for awhile under the current editor.
I don't remember if you believe in quantum immortality, Eliezer. Will the Hero get a thousand chances, or infinitely many chances?
The Dust expands slowly, using territory before destroying it; it enslaves people to its service, before slaying them.
So the anthropic principle applies to the hero's getting summoned, not the people's survival. Ouch.
I apologize if someone already postulated this, but I saw the Counter-Force as something most equivalent to Quantum Suicide.
Or, essentially, it never existed in the first place - That there are many worlds where Aerhien and her compatriots or their equivalent exist, but just as in a Quantum Suicide you only wake up if the trigger isn't pulled, so do only the worlds that keep getting lucky survive.
Thus, this latest hero is keeping the big 'news' from being dropped - That the luck they've been depending on is just that, and they're a world which has kept on ...
Am I the only one disappointed by LotR references being way too easy for such a fiction-knowledgeable crowd as this one?
"Allow me to make sure I have this straight," the hero said. "I've been untimely ripped from my home world to fight unspeakable horrors, and you say I'm here because I'm lucky?"
Aerhien dipped her eyelashes in elegant acknowledgment; and quietly to herself, she thought: Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven heroes who'd said just that, more or less, on arrival.
Not a sign of the thought showed on her outward face, where the hero could see, or the other council members of the Eerionnath take note. Over the centuries since her accidental immortality she'd built a reputation for serenity, more or less because it seemed to be expected.
"There are kinds and kinds of luck," Aerhien said serenely. "Not every person desires their personal happiness above all else. Those who are lucky in aiding others, those whose luck is great in succor and in rescue, these ones are not always happy themselves. You are here, hero, because you have a hero's luck. The boy whose dusty heirloom sword proves to be magical. The peasant girl who finds herself the heir to a great kingdom. Those who discover, in time of sudden stress, an untrained wild magic within themselves. Success born not of learning, not of skill, not of determination, but unplanned coincidence and fortunes of birth: That is a hero's luck."
"Gosh," said the hero after a long, awkward pause, "thanks for the compliment."
"It is not a compliment," Aerhien said, "but this is: that you have taken good advantage of your luck. Our enemy does not speak, we do not know if there is any aliveness in it to think; but it learns, or seems to learn. We have never won against it using the same trick twice. It is rare now that a hero succeeds in conceiving a genuinely new trick, for we have fought this shadow long under our sun. For this reason we have taken to summoning heroes from distant dimensions with other modes of thought; sometimes one such knows a truly new technique, and at least they fight differently. But far more often, hero, the hero wins by luck."
"Huh," said the hero. He frowned; more in thought, it seemed, than in displeasure. "How... very odd. I wonder why that is. What kind of enemy can be defeated only by luck?"
"A nameless enemy and null," said Aerhien. "Structureless and empty, horrible and dark, the most terrifying thing imaginable: We call it Dust. That seems to be its only desire, to tear down every bit of structure in the world, grind it into specks of perfect chaos. Always the Dust is defeated, always it takes a new shape immune to its last defeat."
"I wonder," murmured the hero, "if it will run out of shapes, and then end; or if it will finally become invincible."
(One of the other Eerionnath shuddered.)
"I do not know," Aerhien said simply. "I do not know the nature of the Dust, nor the nature of the Counter-Force that opposes it. The Dust is terrible and our world should long since have ended. We are not fools enough to believe we could be lucky so many times by chance alone. But the Counter-Force has never acted openly; it never reveals itself except in - a hero's luck. And so we, the council Eerionnath to prevent the world from destruction, are at your disposal to command; and all the power and resource that this world holds, for your battle."
And she, Aerhien, and the council Eerionnath, bowed low.
Then they waited to see if the hero would demand dominions or slaves as payment, before condescending to rescue a people in distress.
If so they would dispose of him, and summon another.
This one, though, seemed to have at least some qualities of a true hero; his face showed no avarice, only an abstracted puzzlement. "A hidden Counter-Force..." he murmured. "Excuse me, but this is all very vague. Can you give me a specific example of a hero's luck?"
Aerhien opened her mouth, and then the breath caught in her throat; suddenly and involuntarily, her memory went back to that huge spell gone out of control which had blasted the then-form of the Dust, killed the hero her lover, ruined their home and country, and rendered her accidentally immortal, all those centuries ago -
Ghandhol, the second-oldest of the council, must have guessed her silent distress; for he spoke up to cover the gap: "There was a certain time," he said gravely, "when the hero of that age, sent off the entire army of the world in a diversionary attack against the strongest fortification of the enemy. While he, with but a single friend, walked directly into enemy territory, carrying undefended the single most valuable magic the Dust could possibly gain. Then the Dust captured and corrupted the hero's mind. And when all seemed absolutely lost, they only won because - in an event that was no part at all of their original plan - a hungry creature bit off the hero's finger and then accidentally fell into an open lava flow, which in turn caused -"
"That was an extreme case," said one of the younger councilors; that one looked a bit nervous, lest this hero get the wrong idea. "None since have tried to imitate the Volcano Suicide Hero -"
"Ah!" said the hero in a tone of sudden enlightenment.
Then the hero frowned. "Oh, dear..." he said under his breath.
The councilors looked at one another in mute puzzlement. The hairs pricked on Aerhien's neck; she had lived long enough to have seen almost everything at least once before. And her lover had frowned, just like that, an instant before his spell went wild.
The hero's brow was furrowed like a father whose child has just asked a question which has an answer, but whose answer no child can understand. "Do you..." he said at last. "Do you have knowledge... about the khanfhighur... that's not even translating, is it. Do you know about... the things that things are made of? And are the things constantly splitting all the time? Not singly, but in - in groups -"
The other councilors Eerionnath were staring at him in mute incomprehension. But Aerhien, who had been through it all before, gravely shook her head. "We do not possess that knowledge; nor do we know why our sun burns, or why the sky is red, or what makes a word a spell; nor has any summoned hero succeeded in raveling them." Aerhien held up her hand. "Hand, made of fingers; beneath the finger, skin and muscle and vein, beneath the muscle, sharrak and flom. That is the limit of our knowledge. Some worlds, it seems, are harder to ravel than others."
The hero waved it off. "No, it doesn't matter - well, it matters a great deal, but not for now. I only asked to see if I could get confirmation... it doesn't matter."
Aerhien waited patiently; they were rare, this sort of hero, but the more distant and alien sort did sometimes treat her world as a puzzle to be solved. She usually sought those similar enough in body and mind to feel empathy for her people's plight; but sometimes she thought of the great victory won by the Icky Blob Hero, and wondered if she should look further afield.
"What would happen if the Dust won?" asked the hero. "Would the whole world be destroyed in a single breath?"
Aerhien's brow quirked ever so slightly. "No," she said serenely. Then, because the question was strange enough to demand a longer answer: "The Dust expands slowly, using territory before destroying it; it enslaves people to its service, before slaying them. The Dust is patient in its will to destruction."
The hero flinched, then bowed his head. "I suppose that was too much to hope for; there wasn't really any reason to hope, except hope... it's not required by the logic of the situation, alas..."
Suddenly the hero looked up sharply; there was a piercing element, now, in his gaze. "There's a great deal you're neglecting to tell me about this heroing business. Were you planning to mention that the 'hero' which your council chooses and anoints, often turns out not to be the real hero at all? That the Counter-Force often ends up working through someone else entirely?"
The members of the council traded glances. "You didn't exactly ask about that," said Ghandhol mildly.
The hero nodded. "I suppose not. And the Volcano Suicide Hero - what exactly happened to him, that caused no hero to ever dare tempt fate so much again, in the history you remember?"
"His home country was ruined," Aerhien said softly, "while the army marched elsewhere on his diversion. It threw him into a misery from which he never recovered, until one day he set sail in a ship and did not return."
The hero nodded. "Poor payment, one would think, for saving the world." The hero's face grew grim, and his voice became solemn and formal, mimicking Aerhien's cadences. "But the Counter-Force is not the pure power of Good. It seems to care only and absolutely about stopping the Dust. It cares nothing for heroes, or countries, or innocent lives and victims. If it could save a thousand children from death, only by nudging the fall of a pebble, it would not bother; it has had such opportunities, and not acted."
Ghufhus, the youngest member of the council, grimaced, looking offended. "How is it our right to ask for more?" he demanded. "That we are saved from the Dust is miracle enough -"
Ghufhus stopped, noticing then that the other Eerionnath were sitting frozen. Even Aerhien's mask of dispassion had cracked.
"Ah..." Ghufhus said, puzzled. "How do you... know all this? Is there a Counter-Force in your own world?"
Fool, Aerhien thought to herself. The hero had seemed puzzled by the idea, at first, and had needed to ask for examples. She decided then and there that Ghufhus would meet with an accident before the next council meeting; their world had no room for stupid Eerionnath.
And the hero himself shook his head. "No," the hero said. "You have never summoned a hero who remembers a Counter-Force like yours."
This was also true.
"Nor will you ever," the hero added, "unless you try some way of seeking that specifically, in your summoning. It would never happen by accident."
Aerhien willed her stiff lips to move. It should have been wonderful news, but the hero himself seemed anything but happy. "You... have fathomed the nature of the Counter-Force?"
The hero nodded.
"And?" Aerhien said. "What is the rest of it? The part you are still considering whether to tell us?"
Ghandhol's eyebrows went up a tiny fraction, and his head tilted ever so slightly toward her, signaling his surprise and appreciation.
The hero hesitated. Then he sighed.
"The Counter-Force isn't going to help you this time. No hero's luck. Nothing but creativity and any scraps of real luck - and true random chance is as liable to hurt you as the Dust. Even if you do survive this time, the Counter-Force won't help you next time either. Or the time after that. What you remember happening before - will not happen for you ever again."
Aerhien felt the nausea; like a blow to the pit of her stomach it felt, the end of the world. The rest of the council Eerionnath seemed torn between fear and skepticism; but her own instincts, honed over long centuries, left little room for doubt. The distant heroes sometimes knew things... and sometimes guessed wrong. But after a hero had been right a few times, you learned to listen to that one, even if you couldn't understand the reasons or the logic...
"Why?" Ghufhus said, sounding skeptical. "Why would the Counter-Force work all this time, and then suddenly -"
Ghandhol interrupted with the far more urgent question. "How can we restore the Counter-Force?"
"You can't," said the hero.
There was a remote sadness in his eyes, the only sign that he knew exactly what he was saying.
"Then you have pronounced the absolute doom of this world," Ghandhol said heavily.
And then the hero smiled, and it was twisted and grim and defiant, all at the same time. "Oh... not quite absolute doom. In my own world, we have our own notions about heroes, which are not about heroic luck. One of us said: a hero is someone who can stand there at the moment when all hope is dead, and look upon the abyss without flinching. Another said: a superhero is someone who can save people who could not be saved by any ordinary means; whether it is few people or many people, a superhero is someone who can save people who cannot be saved. We shall try a little of my own world's style of heroism, then. Your world cannot be saved by any ordinary means; it is doomed. Like a child born with a fatal disease; it contained the seed of its own death from the beginning. Your annihilation is not an unlucky chance to be prevented, or an unpleasant possibility to avert. It is your destiny that has already been written from the beginning. You are the walking dead, and this is a dead world spinning, and many other worlds like this one are already destroyed."
"But this world is going to live anyway. I have decided it."
"That is my own world's heroism."
"How?" Aerhien said simply. "How can our world live, if what you say is true?"
The hero's eyes had gone unfocused, his face somewhat slack. "You will deliver to me the record of every single hero that your history remembers. You will bring historians here for my consultation. Your world cannot survive if it must fight this battle over and over again, with the Dust growing stronger each time. It is my thought that on this attempt, we must neutralize the Dust once and for all -"
"Do you think that hasn't been tried?" Ghufhus demanded incredulously.
The hero smiled that twisted smile again. "Ah, but if you had succeeded, you would not have needed to summon me, now would you? Though I am not quite sure that is valid logic, in a case like this... But it does seem that none of the other heroes fathomed your Counter-Force, which puts an upper limit on their perception." The hero nodded to himself. "All things have a pattern. Bring me the records, and I will see if I can fathom this Dust, and the limit of its learning ability - there must be a limit, or no amount of luck could ever save you. All things have a cause: If something like the Dust came into existence once, perhaps a true Counter-Force can be created to oppose it. Those are the ideas that occur to me in the first thirty seconds, at any rate. I must study. Bring me your keepers of knowledge. They will be my army."
Aerhien bowed, in truth this time, and very low, and the Eerionnath bowed with her. "Command and we shall obey, hero," she said simply.
The hero turned from her, and looked out the window at the red sky, and the small dots on the land that were the homes of the innocents to be protected.
"Don't call me that," he said, and it was a command. "You can call me that after we've won."
"But -"
It was Ghufhus who said it, and Aerhien promised herself that if it was a stupid question, his accident would be a painful one.
"But what is - what was the Counter-Force?"
Aerhien wavered, then decided against it.
It might not matter now, but she also wanted to know.
The hero sighed. "It's a long story," he said. "And to be frank, if you're to understand this properly, there's a lot of other things I have to explain first before I get to the ahntharhapik principle."
