Olz Hap in the style of Félicien Rops, as interpreted by DALL-E in January 2025.

  Chapter 7: Septidi

  Mikla metropolitan area

  Year 5638 of the Confluence

  Countdown: 16

  Olz Hap

  This morning’s bad news from the Foresight Statistics Office was that the drop in productivity had reached 44% and exhaustion cases continued to increase at an alarming rate. The Excession Investigator for his part reported that the investigation was progressing steadily but had nothing concrete to point to.

  Olz was tired of this. Tomorrow she would make her move.

  Some people left Confluence society to set up utopian communities in the wilderness. This was usually motivated by some religious or ideological ideal, although the largest religions tended to converge on Mikla because they wanted to be near the Citadel.

  If such communities had survived over longer periods of time, they might effectively have become independent nations, although they would need to work with the different fields of magic for the education of their children. Under Confluence law, parents had no right to deprive their children of magical training, although it was up to each child how much effort they wanted to invest in this.

  (Most children loved to learn how to do magic and were happy to practice and train a lot. But not all.)

  It was not clear to Olz if this Confluence law would be imposed on people who had dropped out from society, and she supposed that if you really wanted to, you could have a child without telling anyone and deny them magical training.

  In any case, upstart utopian communities always collapsed within a few decades. The regularity of it was kind of surprising, really. It was almost as if it were a natural law or something saying that independent communities cannot last.

  There were also stories of such communities ending in violence or mass suicide, often because renegade magic drove people insane. Some forms of religion and ideology could make a person disregard even the most basic law of magic – stay in your field – and the price was invariably steep.

  The dawn of magical consciousness and unification under the Confluence was truly a unique and incomparable event in world history. Most people agreed that nothing of similar significance had happened either before or after.

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  It was an event – at the time, a process stretching out over several generations, although seen in a long-term perspective it was practically instantaneous – that changed everything. Mostly for the better, and often vastly so, but some things were lost in the process. Natural philosophy and technology, for instance, soon went into terminal decline.

  Relatively speaking, anyway. In the exuberant early years, people used Divination magic to understand things that had long been beyond reach, such as how to harness the power of nuclear fusion.

  Clever engrams were designed to simulate the inner workings of a nuclear fusion plant, and within a few years they had cracked it. Transmuters built a functioning prototype, and for a decade or two it seemed like a revolution in power generation.

  But then it gradually dawned on people that keeping these power plants running was a bit of a hassle, and since Transmutation magic rapidly replaced older forms of industrial production, the world no longer needed as much electrical power. It was easier and more elegant to just have Conjurers produce whatever electricity was needed.

  Today, there was still an electrical network, because people who were not Conjurers were unable to produce heating and lighting and the easiest way to distribute such goods was via the old electrical system.

  Newly established cities sometimes experimented with other distribution systems, which also worked fine, but electricity was a good medium for keeping homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and to keep lamps, fridges, and ovens operational.

  Divination and Conveyance magic also opened up for dramatic progress in space exploration. For several centuries after the Confluence, there were hordes of Diviner astronomers who kept exploring and investigating nearby solar systems.

  Before long, they had found thousands of habitable planets, several of which were in fact inhabited – but only by the equivalent of animals. All the world’s Conveyers cooperated to send expeditions to some of those planets, and they brought back samples and maybe viruses (probably not – great care was taken in this regard, and the viruses involved in the Virus wars were magically reinforced).

  For a while, the Confluence had permanent observation posts on 16 different planets spread out over the nearby regions of space, but maintaining all of this was taking a heavy toll on Conveyers and the benefits were not obvious. Eventually, one decided that it was better to focus on Conveyance nodes here on earth, so that the citizens of the Confluence could travel around the planet hassle-free.

  Intelligent life – some sort of civilization – was never found, although the search went on for a very long time and millions of planets were investigated. It seemed that intelligent life was either very rare, or very short-lived or, you know, very concerned with hiding themselves from alien observers.

  This made some people think that maybe we should be more careful too, and Protectors were charged with obfuscating the existence of the Confluence from alien Divination magics. Having detected no such prying attempts after more than five millennia, Olz was not even sure if the Protectors bothered to maintain the obfuscation – most people just assumed there was not anyone out there, at least not within striking distance.

  Not in physical space, anyway. Over the second millennium OTC, Diviners had discovered that there also existed several magical dimensions – it was never quite clear whether this was one space with several different dimensions, or several different spaces, perhaps with their own undiscovered dimensionality.

  (For her own part, Olz was not quite sure what the difference between one multidimensional space and several unidimensional spaces might amount to in practical terms, but she probably did not need to understand it either.)

  Exploration of such spaces was ongoing, although nothing very substantial had been discovered for a long time now. Great care was taken not to trigger anything bad, but it was not impossible that the Demonic wars, and maybe also the Glitter, were the result of Confluence explorers stomping around in places that other beings regarded as their home turf.

  The Protectors had set up a monitoring system to stop careless Diviners from trying to penetrate into unknown magical regions on their own, while maintaining a slow-moving official expedition. Every year there was a report from this expedition, but it never really discovered anything new.