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Wyrd & Leveller stuff

Posted By: SiliconDream =PN= (as3-2-85.HIP.Berkeley.EDU)
Date: 5/6/2000 at 4:40 a.m.

Boldly combating the assertion that Myth's story has been all talked out: Here's some thoughts on the nature of the gods and all. Some of them have been stated before, but I think a few

We generally assume that the main religious tenet of the Mythworlders is correct--that the Mythworld is a Dream of Wyrd's, a simulation running on his brain. Now, it's pretty clear that at some point the nature of this simulation and of the dreaming process was radically altered. Initially, the Mythworld seems to have been a lucid dream, a conscious work of imagination. We can see this in the fact that Wyrd is said to have felt "inspired" before creating the world, and that he wrestled with Nyx for control of it. On the other hand, the modern Mythworld seems to be neither entirely known to Wyrd nor entirely under his conscious control. Look at, for instance, Fetch--as a part of the Myth reality, the Fetch are merely information in Wyrd's mind, yet they act against his will and can hide from him under human skins. Now of course it's possible that the Mythworlders simply don't understand Wyrd's true intent, and that he's fully aware of everything that's going on and approves of it all. It may even be that none of that religious framework, the other gods and their vendettas, is actually true. But if we take the Myth texts at face value, Wyrd has in fact lost a certain amount of control over his dream.

Now, what event caused this loss of control? The immediately obvious candidate is the shattering of the One Dream. According to Myth legend, Wyrd drew his power to create the Mythworld from the One Dream, to which certain creatures (at least, the Trow) return when they die; the vengeful dark gods shattered the dream into the 49 Dreams; and when an archmage learns all 49 the world of Myth will be somehow transfigured (probably for the better) and that archmage will perhaps become an avatar of Wyrd himself.

As I interpret this, the One Dream is Wyrd's conscious mind. The dark gods struck at Wyrd physically, "after the death of the gods but before the age of men"--in other words, before the Younger Races arose. This caused the divine equivalent of "brain damage"--Wyrd's consciousness was heavily damaged and "shattered" in the sense that large quantities of information and data-processing routines were made unavailable to his core consciousness. All the information his mind once held is still in there--it's just not assembled meaningfully.

Wyrd now lost control of the Mythworld. Much of the information defining it was among the knowledge he'd lost, so he was no longer omniscient with respect to it; many of the "subprograms" controlling its evolution were also lost, so he was no longer omnipotent. Meanwhile, those lost information packets--the shards of his mind--manifested themselves in the Mythworld. Since they existed on the same "level" in Wyrd's mind as the Mythworld itself, they appeared as physical objects: the Rune Stones of the 49 Dreams of Wyrd.

When an archmage contemplates a Rune Stone, he's essentially reading its structure and downloading the information encoded therein--the information from a fragment of Wyrd's mind--into his own brain. He can then cast a powerful Dream spell; I'm not sure whether the information in the Stone tells him how to cast the spell, or whether he accesses that fragment of Wyrd's mind and influences it to cast the spell for him. Based on the fact that the spells are actually called Dreams, I suspect the latter; when you cast a Dream, you're basically calling up an aspect of Wyrd and asking it to Dream a certain effect into the Mythworld.

Should an archmage learn all 49 Dreams, he will have all the vital information--the "system software"--of Wyrd's mind in his own head; he will then become Wyrd's "avatar" because he'll be running a copy of Wyrd's original intact consciousness in his brain. At this point, Wyrd will be able to reestablish total control over his dream, and the Mythworld will become what it was meant to be. It's possible that Wyrd's consciousness will not be able to function properly if it's running from the "second level" of his mind--that is, it's running on the brain of a simulated being in his mind--but the avatar could presumably copy the program up to the top level by encoding it in the physical structure of the Mythworld.

Anyway. Now we get to the more interesting part--the Leveller.

I don't know if anyone here has read "The Zahir." It's a story by that übercool d00d Jorge Luis Borges and is, like most of his work, ahead of its time. The Zahir, in the story, is an aspect of God--an everlasting object that has appeared in myriad forms over the ages: a tiger, a blind man, a golden mask, a vein in a marble column, a penny. It is distinguished by its terrible power of being unforgettable. When a human once looks upon it, it will gradually occupy their thoughts more and more (even if they never encounter it again), and its image will fill their mind's eye so that they react less and less to sensory stimuli. Eventually they just sit there drooling and being spoonfed, perceiving and desiring nothing because the whole of their consciousness is devoted to envisioning and considering the Zahir.

In more modern terms, we might say that the Zahir introduces by its sight a virus into the human brain--the "thinking-about-the-Zahir" program expands and replicates and eventually uses up all available brainpower. Cyberpunkish books like Snow Crash probably come to mind. The story, though was written in 1950.

I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. If the Mythworld is running on Wyrd's brain, then presumably it's using up some fraction of his mental resources--it represents information which has to be stored, and its evolution over time represents data-processing which has to be performed. Now, suppose that another commonly-held belief of the Mythworlders is correct--namely, that the known Mythworld is the only part that truly exists because it's the only part that Wyrd really envisions. But we know that the known Mythworld is expanding--exploration and migration are constantly pushing back the frontiers of ignorance and revelaing new seas and lands. Does this not suggest that the field of Wyrd's vision is also expanding?

What I'm thinking of is roughly analogous to the way the game world, as created by Bungie, expands. In Myth: TFL, the Mauls simply did not exist. There was no information in the games or texts which referred to them. In Myth2, the Mauls did exist. This is not to say that, *in the game world*, the Mauls suddenly popped into existence sometime after the Great War; instead, the world was rewritten so that the Mauls had been around as long as most other species had. In the same way, Wyrd isn't including (at the moment) the farther reaches of the Untamed Lands in his Dream. But his damaged mind is driven to subconsciously maintain consistency, so if a sentient creature from the known lands heads down to the Untamed Lands and has a look around, they're not going to see nothingness. Instead, Wyrd will add this area into his dream, with million-year history attached. And no one in the Mythworld will be able to tell that, a short time ago, the region didn't exist. Put simply: places in the Mythworld (outside the known lands, at least) don't exist if no one's looking at them. So the more beings there are in the Mythworld, and the more widely spread they are, the bigger the Mythworld becomes.

Another possible factor in the Mythworld's size is its mixture of order and chaos. You may disagree with me, but it seems to me that a half-order/half-chaos world takes more power to run than either a completely orderly or a completely chaotic one. In an orderly world, every phenomenon should (I think) be described for all time by some more-or-less-simple pattern, derivable from the underlying laws of nature; in a chaotic world, no calculations need be made other than running a random-number generator over and over again to output every value which describes the world. But in a half-and-half reality, you have to take into account all the chaotic perturbations and then laboriously calculate out all the predictable, orderly effects. You don't have the computational shortcuts of the completely orderly universe, nor the paucity of calculation of the completely chaotic one.

All this should suggest that a Light-dominated Mythworld tends to be much larger, and grow much faster, than a Dark-dominated one. Population growth is less restricted, because civilized creatures like Humans and Dwarves rarely suffer population constraints (like limited available food) as badly as primitive beasts like Ghôls and Myrkridia; advanced technology and magic promote exploration and the expansion of the known world; and the balance of order and chaos requires more computational power.

And this may pose a problem for Wyrd. The more mindpower he devotes to the Mythworld, after all, the less he has for important tasks like eating and breathing (or whatever the equivalents are for a creature like him.) Normally when someone's imagining something so complex that they don't have room to think about other stuff, they have the option simply to stop imagining it and get on with their business. But poor brain-damaged Wyrd is stuck with his dream. He can't do anything about it as the dream gets bigger and bigger and occupies more and more of his mind--a mental cancer.

Enter the Leveller. His goal, for some unknown reason, is to save Wyrd's life by slowing the erosion of his mind and the growth of the Mythworld. He can't destroy the dream outright, which is why no Leveller ever destroys the Mythworld even though we know they have the power to--given that Wyrd's mindshards are embedded in the dream as Rune Stones, that would be like shooting someone in the head to remove a brain tumor. All he can do is to try to slow or reverse the Mythworld's usurpation of Wyrd's memory and mindpower. And so he decimates the Mythworld population in order to decrease the size of the known world; and he retards or reverses magical and technological progress in order to slow the rate at which the known world grows; and he seeks to tilt the world to an extreme of order or chaos in order to make it simpler and require less memory and data-processing. All this is a bit hard on the Mythworlders, of course, but the Leveller couldn't be more merciful even if he wanted to--if Wyrd dies, the Mythworld dies with him. Its best chance for survival is to have the Leveller contain it until Wyrd's mind can be repaired.

You may wonder why the Leveller doesn't simply work to have as many archmages as possible out searching for the 49 Dreams in order to reconstruct Wyrd's mind. I'd answer that having hundreds of archmages wandering around would probably cause massive expansion of the Mythworld, as they travel to distant lands and other dimensions, and Wyrd's mind would probably be irreparably overloaded before the One Dream could be reassembled.

Whew, that was long and unproved. To sum up--Wyrd consciously imagined the Mythworld to start with. Sometime before the creation of the younger races but probably after the appearance of the Trow, the dark gods attacked Wyrd and left him with brain damage and chunks of his mind scattered throughout a now-uncontrollable Mythworld. With the appearance of the reproductively-viable younger races, it became apparent that the Mythworld might expand to fill Wyrd's mind and kill him, so the Leveller began his campaign to limit its growth. Eventually, we may hope, either the Leveller and other divine allies will heal Wyrd, or the One Dream will be reconstructed from within the Mythworld. Then Wyrd will be free to consciously guide the Mythworld and run it as he sees fit. Which we can only hope will be with justice and mercy and all that good stuff.

You'll notice I largely left Nyx, Segoth and the Eternal Champions out of this exposition; I'm not really sure where to fit them yet. But there's still lots more thinking to be done.

Comments? Ridicule? Dirty jokes?

--SiliconDream

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  • Wyrd & Leveller stuff
    SiliconDream =PN= (as3-2-85.HIP.Berkeley.EDU) -- 5/6/2000 at 4:40 a.m.

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