Retaking Fire

What separated man from the apes originally, what gave the pondering and communal a survival edge over the domineering and brutish, was the development of a strange sequence in the human genome – not quite code.

More like a string of self-clearing blank-slate, a development kit for making submolecular instructions and structures of any sort. And its “API” was loaded with tools for manipulating reality, even to bend quantum mechanics in ways that make it clear the chaos of random mutation stumbled on something a logical mind just won't understand.

This sequence, in its original form, was responsive to activity in the human mind, but completely disconnected from all circuits involving consciousness and self-advancement. The only way to activate it was with thoughts aligned with their tribal social model's needs – the communally-minded drew upon the will of their tribe and each component of their “monkeysphere,” and used the “caster's” own tulpic social models as a checksum.

And given the enormously variable nature of the blank-slate section, the mind was eventually able to encode physics-defying recipes in simple fables, unfolding on further thought.

A tribe experiences a drought, their leader's emotions drift to a story told of how the air feels when rain is coming soon, and the rapidly-evolved new sensors in his cells assure him it'll be alright

A band of marauders antagonizes an entire countryside, and its victims' will burns with sheer desire to destroy, feeding off the certainty of how many are being hurt; their blank-slates rolling the dice for aggressive potential as they stew in resentment, until pyromancy arises

It did not take long for gods to arise. With the powers unreachable by one's own will, people gave names to the social-model egregores in their thoughts, the ones holding the real powers

The successful ones gave their tribe guidance and direction, and held fables and emotions carrying recipes for strength, fertility, artisanship – ways to survive and compete

Some humans realized this effect, and the cult of personality was engineered – a tribe of followers who equate your will to their own! Those who exploited it earned their names in the history books

And eventually, a god of gods arose – Roma, the god egregores worship, a shared emotion all could draw on together for meta-inspiration, the sum total of their ambitions. A goddess of hope itself.

Anyone who had hope could draw on her. Any egregore could find a place in, or under, Her pantheon. She was the sentiment every deity under her care had agreed to: “KEEP THE PEACE AND PAY THE TAX, AND THINGS WILL ONLY GET BETTER.”

An underlying selection-pressure, giving the chaotic maelstrom some shape. A hierarchy of specialized deities – Mars's worshippers' blank-slates like adrenaline rushes, the artists of Venus channeling collective want for beauty into motor control and more color receptors

A minor change arose to the blank-slate – a partition just for Roma, a way for even egregores to eke just a little bit more by beseeching the collective will. Gods that wanted to keep Her running got more power.

And then Hope died.

Too much knowledge to ignore their slave-holding sins anymore. Too few enemies left to conquer. Egregorical competition like cancer. The possible causes are debatable, the cadaver wasn't.

And egregores, like their constituents before them, who had evolved to draw power from the collective, now found themselves bereft of a vital organ.

Many gods died. The rest took the resulting despair, the confusion, the fear that without Hope their precious humans would never be anything more than their basest instincts – and they built a usurper to fill the gap.

The usurper was built of reactions rather than inspirations, and it had inherited an empire of its own – its wisdom to establish or preserve such needed not be tested, only its ability to give spellcasters some coherent source of emotion, knowledge that what they're doing is what “the world” wants. The pantheon of lowercase-g gods just needed a reason to continue surviving.

And when “the world” abruptly looks like a very bleak place, you need a very bleak outlook not to be disillusioned – and disillusionment means no magic.

Hope was replaced with its opposite – an eternal maiden, ever optimistic, with a bitter, pragmatic Whore of Babylon, a technician in false joys, drunk on tragedy and carried by subhumanity. A creature of coldly exploited instincts, of bloody dominance and hopeless submission. A creature that reveled in the new nihilism and drew strength every time the world made less sense.

A creature born of the utter horror of a world without Hope, and a certainty that nothing could ever improve.

Egregores were now required to pay ideological tribute to the Goddess of Despairing Acceptance, required to have a big-picture belief that the world is a miserable, predictable place that, logically, should be destroyed.

And so the capacity for magic became unusable for anything but escapism, short-lived gratification, and suicide. Those with their blank-slates wide open used them to produce toxic drugs, exploding glands, mutations to kill or succeed but not to survive

Babylon's influence spread like a virus across the mindscape. Those with smaller blank-slates or incredibly stubborn egregores were less affected. And as Babylon's flame continued to burn in a city of wood, only a few temples of ignorant brickwork stood.

Those who had forced an artificial construct or a pointed ignorance into their blank-slates, ostensible defects carried along by the empire, had gradually let this capacity for magic atrophy. And now, every bit of magic was being turned against its owners by a metagoddess of suicide.

Her fire never stopped blazing. It grew ever more spiteful, ever more loathsome of being tied to humanity – and the faintest glimpse of it could blind you, turning any magic capacity into self-attacking omnipotent lupus

And so, only those without ears to hear could avoid hearing the words of despair. Magic sensitivity plummeted to zero, the factories of our genes long abandoned.

...

It's some time in the future. Medical science has rediscovered the blank-slate, and finding that our emotions and mythology hold far more sway with it than conscious willpower – which makes experimentation difficult.

A video has gone viral, despite the Prometheus Group's best efforts. A young, sickly-looking man, gene unlocked by mutation, points his hand at a sabotaged car, and something manifests in him and the terrified crowd – and thick slime surrounds it, modern polymer muffling the ensuing bomb blast, powered by collective desire to fight to live

Prometheus thought they were the only ones trying to unlock this gene for the masses. Their approach would connect it to our consciousness – making godlike power independent from any model of the collective's will.

Want something to happen? It happens. No ifs, and, or buts – you are your own God. Completely self-directed. They offer a prototype of the procedure to their most trusted employees – their workers time-dilate their way to superhuman efficiency, their field agents are unstoppable forces, and someday their sponsors will have immortality

And then their staff received an email, informing them they now had an enemy.

The Whore's Goblet, a reclusive cult at the heart of countless conspiracy theories. They've begun their own work on the gene – making it work like it once did, making it ever more powerfully receptive to the will of the masses.

They want Her back. They believe Her light is greater than anything an individual could make. And they promise that Her glow no longer carries the radiation-sickness of suicide and despair – She has a vision for humanity and will light the way through it. They may be right.

“She hates humans for killing Hope, she hates the parts of us that would never change, like us being stuck on Earth, and us being stuck being us... but technology can change us now. We don't need to be here anymore. We don't need to be human anymore.”

“She can be happy again. She can be Hope again. But not if your organization closes off the people's hearts to Her. Putting magic in the hand of the consciousness would make us apes in the jungle again. Cease your operation and join ours.”

Prometheus did not comply.

Assassination attempts were expected. The unleashing of a mass-unlocking bioweapon in a crowded area, giving them pack-altruism-fuelled powers and leaving their minds wide open to the Whore's maddening whispers, less so.

The world is now in a power struggle, one that gets noisier by the day. The Goblet runneth over with convertees and nascent lesser gods, and Prometheus is in a race against time to preserve consensus reality – but are they saving the world, or dooming it to stagnation?