>>4042380| Nothing.
One by one, darkness started getting illuminated, as TV screens flickered on one by one. At first it looked like they were suspended on thin air, then their combined faint glow revealed traces of an enormous machine. Various sizes, makes and eras — many were ancient CRTs and LCDs, there were a lot of plasma and quantum dot rigs, quite a few VR headsets, some holographic displays, plus some tech that Fubuki hasn't ever seen. The brands were, as far as she saw, all companies that outright shut down, so there was probably the same deal as with IKEA. Currently the TVs were, it seems, all dedicated to showing ambiguity of the metaphor about the sky being the color of a dead TV channel.
"What is this?"
"This is your life." Mori pulled a remote out of her, uh, shirt and switched the channel on a mid-00s Acer.
The 'watching your life going in front of your eyes' metaphor was going to be literal today, apparently. It played on a loop, birth to death, and if she wanted, she could pay attention and slow down individual events. She chose not to dwell on, though.
"These are your alternative, potential fates. The choices you made that result in significant divergence from your life as you experienced it." Mori switched a few more channels, seemingly at random. Seeing herself mingling with other people that she did not recognize was odd, because she felt like she did know them for her entire life, experiencing an otherworldly and intense sense of deja vu. "Most people have a simpler tree of life. This is not to say that their overall lives were inconsequential and their choices didn't matter, but were tracking branches and not detours. It does not matter karma-wise if you had graduated from Juilliard or had dropped out to be mentored privately if you became a world-renowned jazz musician either way, met the same people, touched the same people. It honestly just ends up being bar trivia. For various reasons, Fubuki-senpai, your choices diverge wildly, resigning you, over and over, to different potential fates." Mori flicked on more channels one by one as she was talking. "This is one of the causes of your karmic balance being so hard to calculate."
"What do you mean by karma? The way you keep using the word is odd."
"Guh? Oh uh. Sorry, my fault. Look, when I say karma, I actually am saying ጌሬኽ". A monosyllabic guttural word that Fubuki probably did not have the throat structure to pronounce. In life, anyway. "I am speaking High Abyssal, and your mind-vestige translates this word as a misleading equivalent. What I mean is changing other people's lives for the better, helping them realize the potential they have been given, in accordance with your own potential across branching fates. Except it includes your effects on other people's karma, and vice versa, and so on. We intuitively understand these things, it's hard to explain."
| Nothing.
"Mmhm."
"So, the calculation is exceedingly difficult in your case. I don't think it will be a surprise where and when most of the branching starts." Mori hit a few more buttons, and hundreds, perhaps thousands of displays lit up together at once. All of them had the same scene somewhere in the loop: Fubuki ruffling through a grimoire, mixing paints, carving runes into the floor into an enormous circle... "This is when you went through with the decision to enact enormous amounts of suffering without relief on a person you knew and know loved you the most in the whole universe. All for what? An utilitarian calculation that it will be all balanced out?"
"You do not need to tell me any of that. You know what I did and why I did it. You know I have been asking myself this question every day since."
"And that makes it okay to perform literal fucking human sacrifice, canine?" There was a metallic tinge in Mori's voice that she never had on Earth, plus an echo-like quality to it. Fubuki really had the feeling that she was talking to something that was not constrained within one personality.
"I am ready to pay for this and have always been. I knew this day would come, reaper. I have not done it with hopes of making my afterlife cushy."
"No, that's not- look. Do you know how close you were to saying 'fuck it' and breaking the spell?"
"Every day. Every day I forced myself not to do it. The thaumic backlash was too dangerous. It was the only way."
"It's not just that. The negative karma that the anchor siphons, it accumulates. Festers. In every timeline you comforted him, you made the world a far worse place than it started off as. These three entire rows, that's just this scenario. Top right is you coming to him on his deathbed. You both got incinerated soon after. You know how?"
"Faulty wiring in the hospital?"
"Close. Global thermonuclear war."
They stood in silence for some time.
