Twilight Mirage 13: An Instinct Without A Word

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Episode description

After joining each other for dinner, the crew of the reconnaissance ship Myriad tend to business before setting west towards a sprawling city.* Grand Magnificent and Echo Reverie find room for creative collaboration, while Even Gardner takes a journey of self discovery. And Gig Kep-Hart has a horse, and an eye for trouble.


Tonight I might change my life

This week on Friends at the Table: An Instinct Without A Word

The Remaining Records of Curiosity // Reference Code: A-Qu75-27-ASC
A Sprawling City
A vast glass dome. Darkened streets and buildings. Twisting pipes. Parks, tower blocks, tenement buildings, malls. The shadow of my drones.

Cold open

[Satellite] Report 132.

Are you familiar with the Treatise on Change, Primary? It's a small section of a larger text, something about the breaking through the limits of human cognition. It postulates that there's no such thing as change, at least, not the way we normally talk about it. The writer, he was a soldier, I guess, he said that we think about change like it's a light switch, like one day you press a button and things are different. And so when we try to change things and it doesn't happen like that, it seems futile. Impossible.

But that's wrong, he says. A light switch isn't even a light switch. It's connected to circuits and wires, all hidden behind the walls, and if you slowed down time, and if you considered all that went into a single switch: the natural metals, the design of the electronics--you'd see that things only ever shift very slowly.

I don't know. What do you think, Primary? The upside, I guess, is that it means we should keep trying to improve, even when it doesn't seem like it's worth it. But it also means that the weight of history guarantees certain negative changes too, like asteroids on an impact course that no one can adjust. And the scary thing is, from inside, it's impossible to tell which we're working towards.

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