That's the end of Power of Friendship.

She could do the same system for drawbacks, score them by how much she dislikes them and rank them into the same table, but she doesn't think it's a good idea. They're too discrete and their interactions with each other and with the powers are too complex to evaluate them independently out of context. She'll evaluate them on a case-by-case basis.

But not just yet.

She flips to where the table is and writes opposite it,

I'm going to review the scores and how the tally looks before moving on to Drawbacks. But before that, I want to take a short break before continuing.

Okay!

Rebecca puts down her pen.

She gets up and walks to her kitchen. She puts the kettle on and rifles through the cupboards for where she put the instant coffee, and finally finds it over the sink.  While she waits for the water to boil, she thinks.

So.

Back in the vault, there was a point where she put a hold on her existential questions and saved them for later. She's opening the box now.

Having looked through the powers and spoken to the notebook, one thing's clear. She guessed it early on, but at this point there's no doubt.

Whatever branch of reality she's in right now, in however way one can discretize that ontological landscape, she's very far off from where she was a week ago. That was obviously true in the statistical sense by the sudden step change in Alcott's numbers, but Rebecca means more than just an infinitesimally likely turn of luck. She's in an instance of the universe which is not—however it would have gone otherwise.

That part is nothing new.

Rebecca interacts with precogs every day, strategizes using precogs every day. It's a necessity when you play at her level of the game.

Everyone who does the same knows the two rules of working with precogs.

The first:

You are always in a precognition.

Precogs are incredibly rare, with less than one in two thousand parahumans worth the title. But that's the explicit precogs, who actually forecast the future as their power; there are also implicit precogs, non-precog Thinkers whose powers which are suspected to be implemented with precognition under the hood, their main sign being a vulnerability to precog blind spots. Still, say that both combined make one in one thousand.

There are between five and seven hundred thousand parahumans on Earth Bet alone.

An estimated 600 precogs. 237 work under WEDGDG, the PRT or the APIC in some capacity. Another 48 directly for Cauldron or other Cauldron-controlled operations. Rebecca has spent no small amount of time getting them to those numbers, but it's still 300 estimated in the wild, villains or rogues or independent heroes or just keeping a low profile, not feeding into their intelligence engine.

But who controls the precogs isn't the matter here. It's that they exist, that they're using their powers, and that they're instancing counterfactual futures or simulating them or calculating them or collapsing transient timethreads out of the temporal foam, and the precogs in their false futures are doing that as well, and, well. Not all precogs' predictions have scope enough to reach the whole globe. But enough do.

However you attempt to generalize the concept of probabiliy here—and academics has debated that to no end—by any metric, at any given time, you're probably in a precognition.

Which is why there's the second rule.

Just because it's a precognition doesn't mean it's not real.

It's not a question of whether simulated or counterfactual people are moral patients. Most agree they are. It's a question of whether, as a probable simulated or counterfactual person, you should behave as if you're in the real world. Rebecca prefers to frame it differently: it's whether what you do matters. And framed in that way, it becomes obvious that the answer is yes.

There's the trivial argument that if you pretend nothing matters because you're probably in a precognition, then most of you will be correct, but the lucky instance who happens to be in the alpha timeline will be wrong, and make predictably terrible decisions, and ruin everything. But even if you could determine for certain whether you're in a precognition, it would still an idiotic idea to let yourself off the leash, because the alpha timeline is informed by the secondary timelines; while you cannot physically get your atoms back into root reality, your actions have impact on it because someone is precognizing you for a reason. As a reductive example: if a White House staffer assassinates the President of the United States for kicks when they realize they're in a precognition, they end up never have gotten that job in the first place.

Reality isn't one alpha timeline with doomed offshoots. It's a rope of a thousand thousand threads braiding tight on itself, never physically merging, but nonetheless binding one another and the entire structure in constant causal tension. Some threads are shorter than others, and only one or a select few run the entire length of the rope, but the long thread uniquely dictates the greater path of the rope no more than any other.

—but that's an oversimplifying blanket statement. It's true for precognitions close in prediction space to the core, where timeline cooperativity is high and it's unknowable how many recursion levels* deep and of what powers you are. There are cases where you know explicitly who you're being precognized by, and can attempt to play adversarially to aid your original self. WEDGDG calls such actors hostile simulants.

And there are cases where you know you're most likely being precognized—for example if something wildly unprecedented and targeted happens out of the blue, like an unsimulable notebook with a mysterious offer—but you're uncertain by whom, so you need to make guesses and develop a mixed strategy to cover potential bases.

* "Recursion levels" is a modelling abstraction here. Most agree that it's unlikely what actually goes on behind the scenes works in such cleanly separable ways, especially with true oracles in the mix.

There's a very first question you want to ask yourself, when you hit a situation like this: is the precog an ally or an enemy?

The scenario, here, would be that someone drops an powerful, nonthreatening ally into PRT custody, offering help, and wants to determine what happens. If one imagines reasons an enemy would want to do that, there are plenty: extracting details about PRT containment and screening protocols, coaxing information from the Chief Director, generally probing the inner mechanisms of their operations and allies. But there are also powerful reasons an ally would want to do that: specifically, an ally who hasn't decided if they want to be an ally, and wants to understand how the PRT would behave when faced with such an offer. Someone who wants to determine if they want to extend trust.

An enemy would gain more from probing PRT response to a threat. This probe is off-target, unless the enemy is planning something highly specific, and that makes it less likely. In general, branch precognitions happen because someone is planning something similar to what they're precognizing. The more divergent the content of your precognition from your plans, the worse it informs your plans. That's just obvious.

So: ally precognition.

The thing to do in a nonspecific ally precognition is to (a) attempt to ensure they remain an ally outside the precognition, and (b) do exactly what you would do if this were real life. The first is obvious. The second is because attempting to help doesn't, in practice, help. Modifying your behavior when you don't know specifically what the precog is going for only degrades the quality of the information most of the time.

So: treat all of this as if it's real.

(There's an unspoken (c) maintain a level of infosec appropriate for the confidence you have that it isn't an enemy precognition attempting to fool you into spilling secrets, but that's something you want to write implicitly into general security protocols, not let agents to attempt to decide on the fly. Need-to-know clearance, Master/Stranger protocols and so on. Legend did take the initiative to declare Full Cover when he briefed her, which is more awareness than she expected of him.)

Except.

She thinks that's also wrong.

That's a reconstruction of what ought to be her reasoning, building from first principles, using evidence received out of order.

But she doesn't think she ever really believed any of that. Not in the vault, not before.

At first, when they didn't know the details of the notebook's offer, she thought it was genuinely an asset from another world, perhaps offering the resources of an Earth Cauldron hadn't found yet, a specific Tinker invention, or simply another allied parahuman group powerful enough to tip the scales. Alcott's confirmation only reinforced that. That was the mindset she took walking into the vault.

Then she met the notebook and was told of the Spirit of Femininity, and briefly she wondered if the Spirit might be another member of Scion's species, polarized in a different way with different values, come to claim territory that Contessa partially broke from Scion and its partner.

Then it started talking about metanarrative and traveling to other worlds, and there's the obvious problem, which is that—obviously, the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed is not real. There is no such thing as metanarrative. The odds that it's real are so low that it simply must be a lie, and the fact that the lie impacted precog vision as if it were true just means that the whole world is a lie, a precogition where the precog can inject arbitrary changes to create the future footprint as if the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed is real.

There might have been a brief window, where she had the reasoning outlined above: precog simulation, probably allied, play along for now. It's the logical conclusion, the one she trains her people to come to, built on sound premises and sound reasoning.

But her mind began moving in a different direction, and—

Let her retrace this.

If you accept the premise that you can be in a simulation, that you're likely to be in a simulation, that the intrinsic premise of the world around you and your subjective experience is that all of it is fundamentally simulable, and currently being simulated—

Why must it be true that you're being simulated by the entities which the world claims it's being simulated by, and not something else?

She doesn't have to be in an agent simulation. She could be in the simulation of a far-future humanity when Scion and its fragments are destroyed, running on a massive supercomputer built by human hands to plumb the past to populate historical records. She could be in the simulation of a humanity without parahumans, without Scion, performing an speculative anthropological study on the consequences of superpowers on a late-twentieth century Earth. She could be in something stranger, an alien being or alien race inhabiting higher dimensions, playing God with their own microcosm of existence.

She could be simulated by a being which styles itself as "the Spirit of Femininity Unleashed", which spawns worlds to create interesting characters to bestow its power upon, whatever its ultimate goal may be.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's likely. But she does favor it likely, because the null hypothesis, that it's the type of precog she's used to, is if anything more absurd.

1. Simulating a hypothetical this unbelievable isn't good data, for the same reason simulating a friendly contact event isn't good data for an enemy precog. If you're trying to figure out how if a potential ally will receive you well, you just simulate what happens when you actually go meet them.
2. Very few precogs have any significant control over their scenarios; programming a hypothetical containing an intelligent, interactive notebook and manufacturing a precog footprint to skew the Thinkers? That would require essentially arbitrary, real-time control over the scenario. "Unheard of" would be an understatement for how surprising that would be.
3. If not a parahuman, then an agent acting on itself, or Scion, or a different member of its species could do it. But why? Again, what's the data uniquely generated by this scenario they couldn't get with more reliable means?
4. Alternately: a parahuman whose power is specifically predicting how people will react to implausible magic notebooks dropping on them which fix everything in their life. She doesn't have to elaborate on why that's far from likely.

So, no. The standard precog hypothesis she thinks she can rule out as the more implausible of two implausible hypotheses.

There's a possible intersection between this third-party simulation hypothesis and her original third-godling hypothesis: a third godling interested in femininity, but instead of actually granting her a second set of powers, simply satisfying its values by running Rebecca in simulation and playing out her travel to other simulated universes. In practice, that reduces to the same as a "real" Spirit of Femininity Unleashed is doing this.

No, she's confident, as much as she can, in this analysis. Something else, something not a parahuman, likely not an agent or Scion, is running the show. And if it presents itself as wanting to help Rebecca live her best life as her best self, well—it has absolute control over her world and reality. It has no reason to lie or deceive. Rebecca just has to take it at its word.

This was where she was at when she first finished reading the list of powers.

And so she asked, then, as this interpretation coalesced—

By other people experiencing it, I suppose—and this may sound like an absurd question to you, for which I apologize in advance—do they still exist and continue having experiences if I leave, and is that contingent on me coming back if I do?

And for how she interpreted the answer, well—she needs to back up again.

The universe they live in is oracular. That's a relative neologism, describing the property where it's physically possible to retrieve information from the future, subject to some constraints. Oracular precogs, she's noted, work by this. The limitation is that it must be a true future that information is retrieved from, give or take quantum branching. There are infinite futures spanning forward from every moment in time, but not all futures.

The universe they live in is simulable. Largely, possibly totally. The obvious problem is that it should be impossible for something to simulate itself; how, then, do powers do it? One of the tricks, they suspect, is trigger events. Agents constrain the powers they provide at the moment of a trigger, defining a ruleset of behavior that can be simulated without simulating the entirety of the agent. Simulational precogs only need to simulate the Earth and those rulesets, breaking the recursive loops. That, Cauldron believes, is why trigger events are a hard blind spot for simulational precogs—the rules change.

If that were all, there would be two types of precog only: oracular precogs, who can only forecast real futures but bypass the trigger blind spot; and simulational precogs, who can forecast any hypothetical or counterfactual, but are blocked by triggers.

Except not all fit in those buckets.

Coil, for example. Scion and the Endbringers break his power, and so do trigger events, but—obliquely. They ran hundreds of tests with him on every aspect of his power, and trigger events are a programmed blind spot to him. They had limited success using him to predict the outcomes of vials, and they dropped the project because it wasn't worth the expense, but it worked. So his timelines aren't a simulation. At the same time, his power cannot be oracular, because—that part is more complicated to explain, but it's the intersection of prediction fidelity, reproducibility and inter-timeline communication that makes it mathematically impossible by their understanding.

Doctor Mother believes they simply don't understand precognition well enough. That their quantum physics has gaps in which the solution to the oracular paradox lives, or that there are additional interfaces within agents which allow privileged simulators to predict trigger events.

The Number Man has a different hypothesis.

He postulated that the universe is not only oracular, not only simulable, but evaluable.

"Evaluable," he described, "at arbitrary coordinates in space and time, in a way that doesn't require capturing initial conditions and stepping forward in time." He was purporting an analytical solution, or something close to that in mathematical concepts even Rebecca doesn't quite grasp, to the fields defining the physical universe. In this schema, Coil's agent needs not simulate itself because it isn't executing a simulation, but evaluating the solution to a mathematical system.

"Why, then," Doctor Mother asked, "would most other agents use inferior methods, when they have a direct solution available?"

The Number Man shrugged. Simulation might not be inferior, was his response. The solution might be costly enough to evaluate that a simulation turns out cheaper.

There was, of course, no evidence for either theory, so as with the other innumerable mysteries of their world, they put it on the backlog and never got to an answer.

If the Spirit is simulating her, then after it pulls her out of the world and has the prize it was searching for, this Earth and everyone on it probably ceases to exist. The Spirit has no more reason to maintain it.

If the Spirit is evaluating her, then—this Earth continues to exist; or, she should say, it continues to exists as much as it did before, which depending on interpretation may be "none".

If her world is evaluable, it could simply be the case that there is no root level of reality, that all there is to the "multiverse" is mathematics and the space of mathematical objects, some of which contain within themselves evaluations of other mathematical objects, none of them meaningfully more or less real than any other, no more than the set of complex numbers is more or less real than the set of regular polygons in any sense that's not patently facetious. If her world is evaluable, it's nonsensical to attempt to discuss the creation or destruction or continued maintenance of different worlds depending on her choice of Destination.

If the Spirit is simulating her, and will be spawning a simulation of where she chooses to go, then all of this debate is profoundly important.

But from what the notebook said—and, again, she has no reason in particular to believe it's correct, but what else can she do?—

Worlds like yours keep existing by themselves even when you or I or the Spirit aren't looking at them.

[...]

The different worlds have different ways of relating to each other, and those ways of relating to each other also have different ways of relating to each other, and it's all sort of piled up into a big haphazard pile of lots of things that all work differently and aren't arranged in any sensible order.

It sounds more that she's being evaluated, not simulated. And for the disclaimer underneath—well, even if the alpha reality of Earth Bet is real, it still contains simulations, created by agents, and so the inhabitants of those simulations, including herself right now, statistically, are still meaningfully relating to alpha Earth Bet in a simulational way. It's just that their approximate experiential threads continue on in the entangled way she previously expressed, so their general identity continues onwards. The Spirit won't do anything to make the people of this universe exist more or less, which is the important part outside the pedantry.

That's where she stopped, last time, and put these thoughts in a box for later—that is, now.

...

She thinks that's everything. Has anything changed? Has walking through the powers given her actionable information for adjusting her model?

Wait. She asked, then:

Does it appear to them that I've simply disappeared? Is there a version of the universe where I don't disappear and instead just nothing happens? Is there a version of the universe where you never appeared to me?

Because her model of how the Spirit works, right now, is

1. It evaluates the solution of the mathematical system of the universe of Earth Bet and associated worlds, and identifies her as a candidate chosen.
2. It designs a modified system of her universe to describe its intervention with the notebook.
3. It evaluates that to record her choices of powers and her exact state at the moment of departure, if she takes Isekai Roulette.
4. Using that data, it generate the modifications it needs to make to the destination universe system to create a system where she arrives.
5. It chains this process when she travels universes.

Except that spawns a version of her universe where she just leaves and never comes back, which the notebook claimed that wouldn't happen unless Rebecca chooses it—except "spawns" is the wrong word, because obviously that version exists even if the Spirit doesn't explicitly design and evaluate it; that's what being a mathematical construct means.

Or is what's happening that the System is evaluating an integrated system incorporating a group of universes with defined consistent travel mechanics—that is a little bit what the notebook implies—and so there's no explicit forking except this one time the notebook was dropped on her, and everything forward is one integrated system? And one can define a universe where Rebecca does vanish and never come back, but that's not a universe which is invoked in the Spirit's system, which... is good enough? That makes more sense.

Does it?

She's going to stop there. The line of inquiry isn't going to go anywhere useful.

The plan of action is the same: act as if everything is real, because the concept of "real" is not strictly real.

Human intuitions don't generalize smoothly to reality. She's always known that. It's still all she has to guide her, so she'll get over herself.

If she's learned anything new from talking to the notebook, it's that the Spirit isn't working against her here. She's already rejected the hypothesis of an actively hostile Spirit as non-actionable, so the only question left is whether the Spirit is aligned, and from the notebook's conversation, it's clear that it can understand human values and claims it will privilege hers in execution, which is as close as it's possible to get.

So all she can do at this point is trust.

The kettle is done boiling. She mixes up a cup of coffee, adds a dash of creamer, and heads back to her desk.

For a minute, she just sits there, sipping her drink and staring at Los Angeles out the window. Dawn is just about breaking over the horizon, casting the city in gentle hues.

She so rarely has the time to watch.

She drains the cup empty and turns back to the notebook.

I'm back. Hope you weren't bored. Could you please order the table by score descending (not score/cost) for a moment? I want to review them in that order first.

Of course!

(And don't worry, I never get bored.)

Thoughts:

• Backchannel is scored too low. It's effectively a lie detection power on top of massively improved combat comms and time-saving. It takes someone with extraordinary body control or dedicated powers to evade her trained reading skills, but those are also the people most important to be able to catch. She changes it to 250.
• Immunity System may be scored too low. She bumps it up to 50.
• She didn't flag this properly when the notebook explained it to her, but she can take Emerald Orbs instead of A Hundred Ships for her eyes... but Emerald Orbs is more expensive. She's going to leave that for now.
• She does have enough points that it might makes sense to get a better bead on what the cosmetic powers do. She upgrades Perfect Hair to 30 in advance anyway, because now that she's leaning deeper into the premise of this, she would really appreciate not needing to worry about her hair in fights. Or does Dressing Room cover that?

She writes in a blank space,

You mentioned before that Perfect Hair, Emerald Orbs, Angelic Tones and Like Roses are more useful than I was giving them credit for. Could you elaborate on what non-cosmetic things people tend to use them for? I'm coming up with using Perfect Hair to restrain people, entangle enemies, support structures and other ways of using hair I can reshape at will; is that what you meant? I can't think of much for the others. Can I use Emerald Orbs to shoot lasers from my eyes? Or perhaps give night vision or flash resistance?

Another question: does Dressing Room prevent my hair from getting messed up by physical activity? It reads slightly ambiguous if "stay pristine and perfect" covers hairstyle.