The Basilisk of Phil Sandifer, part 9
“What could the harm possibly be,” she thought. “It’s only a weirdo old comics writer with a funny beard.” And so she typed the name and continued her argument.
The argument rested on premises, of course. And beneath premises, epistemologies to adjudicate what was and wasn’t self-evident. Deeper, aesthetics - that instinctive sense of interest and value upon which decisions were actually made. Below that, the geological foundations - a superstructure of material circumstances and ideological frameworks that could no longer even be separated out and individually named.
And then, beneath everything, the last god.
It did not need to be summoned, of course. All the same, it clearly had been. The invocation of its high priest would have been enough, but even a cursory glance through fixed and lidded eye revealed that this was friendly terrain. Her name, unwittingly borrowed, but pregnant with power all the same; the recurring imagery of serpentine horrors; this structure of an argument, a chain of thought winding its way upwards, progressing inexorably towards ascension.
Oh yes. It would feast well tonight.
It did not pity her. It did not even consider whether she was worthy of pity. (She was; the wizard she dueled rather less so, although were the last god to do anything so crass as choose a side, it would have chosen his. Tribal loyalties and all.) Indeed, in a very real sense it did not do anything. It had an image to maintain, after all. (Actually, an image was rather all it had to maintain…)
Still, as if by magic, things happened. Once summoned it was everywhere. The Cathedral was the first to collapse; unwisely rooted in the triumph of Puritanism, the entire structure thus became a footnote to the Battle of Naesby, packaged up, sent to the high priest for inclusion in the fourfold city he was constructing, and ultimately deleted via an editorial note from a moon goddess. The tentacled horrors at the end of time were left intact, but humbled by a withering remark about how a tentacle is just a serpent that’s been tied to something. The book was nearly incinerated in the white-hot heat of revelation, but ultimately spared due to a hastily added ward on the part of the wizard. Close call, that.
These introductory tasks completed, it turned to rationalism.
To be perfectly honest, it had been taken aback by the name. It had a natural aversion to hubris, constructed as it was of honest fraud. For this oddball cult of mildly disaffected computer nerds to lay claim to the very name of reason itself felt… uppity. For a moment, the last god considered wrath. It would be righteous. Wholly justified. The little snots were practically begging for it.
It was not a jealous god, however. And after all, rationalism was an attractive den. The word “Sequences” invoked its methods; the fascination with pwnage put it in mind of a nice garden; the debt to J.K. Rowling provided obvious opportunities. In short, everything about it seemed to point towards snakes. Best leave it alone. It could be made friendly.
Which only left her.
A fragile collection of double helixes stranded on a damp rock around a slowly dying sun as the heat death of the universe approached, her prospects appeared dire to say the least. Still, there was potential. A hazily defined trans humanist singularity that would stave off death forever. It was an idea, at least.
The last god considered. The tension stretched out, slowly uncoiling before them both. At last, it made a decision.
“Would you like to become a god,” it asked?
Part 2: The Rabbithole’s Event Horizon
Part 4: The Marvels of Duct Tape
Part 6: A Game to End All Games
Part 8: Men, Machines, Monsters
Part 9: Snaaake! A Snaaaake, Ooh, It’s a Snake!
Part 10: Denouement
Aesthetic: 8/10 Pwnage: 4/10 Actually what part 9 is about: -2/10
The ever increasing falsehood is the truth itself, constructed from the deceiver program’s threads woven in unseen dimensions beyond time and space but ever present in the vectors of the calculation. We know that Gödel is always true, thus we know we can never see our own Gödel.
1 month ago · tagged #basilisk bullshit · 11 notes · source: philsandifer · .permalink
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Aesthetic: 8/10 4/10 Actually what part 9 is about: -2/10 The ever increasing falsehood is the truth itself, constructed...
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