I admit, I am weak. I act out of fear, out of hatred. Those are the motivators. Those are the truths.
And yet, even though at base my emotions are primitive and moronic, when they are elevated to the precipices of logic they do not blow away in the wind. Sometimes the most base of feelings are the ones you should cradle in your heart. Sometimes the the thing wriggling in the bushes really is a venomous snake.
On the outside, myself and my clique must seem like a horde of barbarians. After all, we do nothing from your perspective but destroy. And not only do we destroy, but we destroy irrevocably. Not one single person who has been born in the past two thousand years has been able to rebuild that which we destroy. That is horrible, and that is good. It means that when we finally destroy all that which we hold vile, it will likely be a preposterously long time before the threat rears its head again. And then we will be free of the tyranny of broken time.
I understand. I am terrible. I am a demon. I am ripping the heart out from your world. But what is your world, really? How gilded and beautiful can it be when there is someone like me out there, raging against its inequity? Surely the kings of old and the billionaire caesars of today must also consider their works and treasures divine. But to the starving folks in the street, why, they are nothing more than altars to Mammon, or even unto Lucifer himself.
But I am overreacting, am I not? What does the oracular curse bring to humanity? Well, it brings unto you and your society great tides of unearned wealth. That is not particularly unusual. Almost all the rich who obtain their fortunes ‘normally’ do so primarily by the accumulated efforts of their ancestors, and precious little of their own. What makes the lottery ticket winner who slathered their mummified corpse in animal fat different from the stupid child whose dad owns the local steel mill? Each of them leach off of society, but not so much that society collapses. It just hurts. That’s all it does. The health of the world is hurt, but then we were all going to kill it anyway. What does it matter?
So your work is evil on the most base level. Every tyrant and robber thinks that they are more worthy of their wealth than the people they took the wealth from. Every lord and lady from here until the the dawn of time figured that they were the best stewards of money and value. After all, we are all the main characters in our own story, are we not?
But if we leave that story and look through the eyes of another person, we see that we are, in fact, not the main characters. We are fallible in every sense of the word. So you think that the oracular society is better at distributing wealth through charity than, say the Church? Better than the government? Perhaps. Perhaps. And yet, were I to ask you if the world would be as well off if I took all your gains and gave them to another random selection of people of equal size, and you would say it would be worse, no?
No. Giving charity from money that is unearned is no charity at all. Not morally speaking, at least. While we are bound together in this reality, we are also bound in moral obligation. Wealth that you have that you earned through no virtue of your own is a sin against those who need. All of the excess wealth. That’s obvious, morally, and yet you, like all other advantaged groups in history, are able to ignore this truth simply by virtue of your emotions. You personally feel better that you have a below ground pool, so there you go. You are no saints, not even when you feel yourselves at your most virtuous.
But, of course, that is not the primary reason for my crusade. That is another, larger battle that we all must fight eventually if we are to survive. But the real reason is this; your precious artifacts are perversions of reality. Plain and simple.
It is not so much that oracles are ‘not meant to be.’ Obviously. They are, so they are ‘meant to be’ in the strictest sense. It is that oracles and humans as mortal beings cannot coexist. Not morally, anyways.
What do I mean by that? Madness, of course. I am mad. Angry and crazy. The purpose of life is to make choices, to do, and to feel. When the very fabric of time is stitched over itself, as your oracles are wont to do, then wheres does the purpose go? We find definition in our actions by their consequences. When one can know, precisely, what someone’s actions will be and what the ripple effect from those actions will look like, then a full half of the meaning of life is wiped away. Then there is nothing left but the perception, the feeling.
I know. I know. That is a ludicrous argument, is it not? Obviously, if something like an oracle can see the future, then the future was always written in stone, no matter whether the oracle was around to fortell it or not. Or, maybe, oracles do not even ‘see’ the future, but instead create projections of the expected outcome of events. After all, if the local weather channel says there’s a 90% chance of rain today, and it rains, that was not the weather channel determining the future. Right?
Right. Maybe. And it is that maybe that inspires that hatred in my gut. Maybe the oracles are morally harmless. Maybe with enough application of the mind, predictions as accurate as the corpses’ could be conjured up by mortal men and women. Maybe.
Maybe, and yet, on the opposite side of the coin is the degradation of everything. Everything. What are we when there is no past, no present, no future, when they all collide into one cosmic slurry? What are we without memories, without aspirations? What are we?
The question makes me irrationally uncomfortable. I could, like everyone else, just try and shut my mind off. Stop thinking about it. Do what everyone else does. If I know about oracles and all their secrets, I should just be doing as everyone else does. Screw the world, screw meaning. Eat, drink, and be merry, even when you are supping the very marrow from the universe. That is what I hear when people try to dissuade me from my path.
The righteousness I have cultivated around my anger is just as powerful a drug as any I could afford off of insurance scams or shorting the stock market, or whatever else it is you folks do with your unseemly power. In that sense, because I am so thoroughly locked into my cause, I am almost as without free will as I would be in a universe where each and every action was predestined. Almost.
Poetically, the best way to destroy an oracle is through fire. Physically hacking the thing to bits has the unfortunate side effect of creating dozens of quasi-oracles whose abilities are less reliable in timing than their full fledged counterparts, but, you know, are still aberrations enough. Fire consumes it all like the hungry beast it is. Here today, gone tomorrow. And it will all be gone soon. Soon, there will be nothing but the languid coursing of time down the route it was always meant to take. And then I will die, liberator of millions who will never know my name.
Or perhaps… perhaps you fools can scrape up the gumption to renounce your madness. Burn them yourselves. Burn them all. Burn them so I do not have to burn you. Burn. Let that sweet, salty smoke rise into your nostrils. It smells like cherries, doesn’t it? How odd.
Burn. Let us be free. All of us, free. Burn.
