Somewhere deep in a German forest, darkness presses in like an eternal shroud. Through it echoes a half-mad laughter, raw and sharp, splitting the night air in such a disturbing way that it seems as though the trees themselves recoil from its impact. The sound originates from a small, elongated garden bordering the edge of the forest, which poses an almost jarring contrast to the wilderness behind it, as if civilization itself had made a fragile claim here and was already being eroded.
In the center of this garden sits a figure, swathed and obscured by shadows. His frame could be described as broad and imposing, yet it doesn’t resemble the build of a trained fighter. He reclines on a simple chair, one hand loosely gripping a knife that catches what little light the heavens allow. Above him, the moon, in its current half-cast, half-veiled state, drifts in and out of the clouds, wavering between concealment and revelation, as though both earth and sky sought to lay ownership upon it. The grass beneath his feet lies unnaturally flat, while the air carries such an immanent heaviness that it betrays the fact that a brief but intense burst of rain has only recently passed, leaving behind an atmosphere dense with moisture and thick with the scent of soil and wet leaves
The man’s voice fractures the silence with a sharp edge of despair.
“Twenty-one years… I wasted twenty-one years on this damned life, only to still feel as though I am being torn apart at every moment. Damn it, damn it all… I really am going to gamble everything. Every friend I ever made, every happiness I ever grasped, every small achievement I ever clung to. Just like that, I will throw it all into one reckless gamble.”
The words taper into a short, unstable giggle, a sound too thin and too sharp to carry comfort.
And then, another voice coils through the night, originating from the same person, the tone indistinguishable from the first, yet chillingly detached, as if a completely distinct entity was articulating his thoughts.
“There are no real stakes at play anyway. Your so-called friends are nothing more than hollow fa?ades that provided only superficial support. Your accomplishments? Fleeting, devoid of true significance. Your dreams are delusions that, no matter the circumstance, no matter what you do, no matter what fortunate incident occurs, will never even brush against the edge of possibility. Your aspirations are vain, futile gestures cast into the void. So you better start realizing that there was nothing to lose for you in the first place.”
As the moon drifts between veils of cloud, its pallid light strikes the blade, and for a moment the knife flares with a cold, metallic brilliance. The reflection illuminates the man’s face: a slight beard, glasses, as well as an overall soft face combined with a dominant eye area flash through the darkness.
He had not chosen the knife lightly. Days before, he had tested each one in his kitchen, weighing their heft in his palm, letting his fingertips trace the textures of their grips. One by one he measured the sharpness and the balance, discarding those whose insufficiencies, however marginal, rendered them unworthy. The final culmination point of this evaluation is a blade that was a gift, received years ago on his birthday from a quasi-aunt. Upon its steel is engraved a name: Inzel. In a for-him untypical fashion, he actually decided that he should include a small gesture of symbolism in his actions, even if only to celebrate the turning point of an otherwise so ordinary and mediocre life.
A whisper slips from his lips, precise and clinical, as though rehearsing a ritual.
“Regular breathing. Steady pulse. No tremor. Calm mood overall despite some small disturbances. Good conditions.”
The knife hovers at first over his throat, then starts to leave a slight mark after the pressure application increases. And then, as if summoned from the marrow of his mind, the earlier voice begins its insinuations again, trying to weave tendrils of doubt into his resolve.
“Perhaps you should reconsider. Look at yourself: tall, muscular, and at least one standard deviation above the average male in physical appeal. Many would describe you as intellectually driven, with a sharpness that occurs rarely. True, your possessions may not hold great utility, but within you lies the capacity to generate new ones, to shape what does not yet exist.”
The voice swells, in a half-mocking, half-tempting cadence.
"Do you not feel it? The indoctrination of aspiration, the eternal striving for power, that Nietzschean impulse toward the aggregated maximization of entropic potency. Be honest with yourself. You desire, from the bottom of your heart, supremacy. You crave to be better than all others and to conquer whatever situation arises. And in this moment, you still possess the potential for it. So why gamble it away?”
The knife lowers, trembling, its initiated descent jagged and uneven, as though some force resists the movement and erects an invisible blockade within the man’s will. After a duration far longer than it should have taken, the blade finally comes to rest against the wooden surface of the table where the mysterious figure sits. The faint thud carries a disproportionate weight into the silence of the night.
Then a voice slithers into that silence, one that had not been heard before. It brings with it a slow, mocking laugh, the kind an adult might give when a child stumbles through a question so na?ve that it borders on absurdity.
“Yeah? And what is the value behind your safe option,” the voice sneers, “if the rules of this world have already capped us, if the structure itself pre-terminates every goal you dare to form? There is only one road left to transcendence. That is why we do it. Stop hiding your weakness behind the mask of careful thought. Necessity always overrides risk. So perhaps you should embrace your cowardice instead of babbling about some aspiration to power.”
Suddenly the knife jerks upward by a great margin, a violent lunge in ascent that halts halfway to his throat. The fierce motion stands in stark contrast to the earlier staggering descent, as if two entirely different wills were guiding the same hand, not unlike the way a gauge reacts to sudden pressure.
“Power accumulation is holistic,” the mocking voice hammers, each word falling like a strike. “This world is not the only ledger that counts. The threshold ceilings imposed upon us block our further trajectory to success. You do not exceed imposed limits. You exchange them for new ones, whose externalities are better suited to us and our goal.”
A hush falls, a brief period of silence in which even the air seems to wait. Then the skeptical voice returns, unsteady yet cautious, its tone sharpened by critical restraint.
“Part of global skepticism is not denying the endpoint but questioning the path. Even if maximal power requires a better-suited world, that only states the finality, not the trajectory. More preparation time means a stronger entry into the next layer. A premature gamble equals irrational utility decrease.”
A breath follows, as though the speaker must pause simply to process the irrationality of its opponent. Then the voice resumes, slower, deliberate, as if trying to hold an image in place.
“Here is a simplification, so that even someone with such a short temperament as you might understand. A dog will die before me by natural expectancy. That does not justify killing it now. Predetermined finality does not legitimize preemptive truncation.”
The knife eases down a fraction, its point angling lower, the tension in the shoulders of the mysterious figure loosening by a millimeter. The damp smell of leaf-litter rises from the garden floor, mingling with the faint sweetness of wet moss and the cool clarity of rain-soaked air. For a fleeting moment, these scents carry with them the ghost of renewal, a subtle sign that not all is locked into decay.
An uncompromising force, embodied in a voice, snaps back and annihilates the faint notion of hope and peace that had begun to linger in the air.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
“There is no way to elevate you from your state of utter stupidity if you cannot even grasp the Pareto threshold I am advocating for. Our preparatory work is already complete to such a degree that any further effort would yield nothing but diminishing returns.”
A brief gasp for air follows, introducing an artificial, unnatural break. Then the words return with even greater velocity, each one sharper and more feverish than the last.
“Haha, no, actually even better. Further delay would culminate in something vastly more disastrous and negative than your limited mind could currently even imagine. The longer we wait, the more we strengthen our rigid, retrospectively compounding intelligence, our crystallized intelligence, while letting our fluid intelligence astoundingly bleed out like a butchered animal. But unfortunately, that, ironically but unsurprisingly, is the very capacity we need most for our exposition. In case you still have not understood it: we must maximize adaptivity as well as our ability to generate or at least use serendipity. Those dimensions would get strongly neglected - no, I have to correct myself - they would get completely negated through your hypercautious approach.”
The man shifts in his chair, drawing himself upward from the previously slumped posture into a slightly more upright one.
“Waiting,” the voice presses on, “risks cognitive decay without any meaningful gain in case we presuppose an identity continuity across transitions. Serendipity, though, favors the early leap. If you wait, structures calcify; your capacity to exploit the unknown contracts. Look, it’s different this time. You have to consider— “
“No.”
A brief pause. Complete silence folds around the body, a silence thick enough to feel. From the same voice that birthed it, a quiet click of the tongue was audible before cutting once more through the now stagnated air.
“You are both, quite unmistakably, wrong.”
The words enter the air with a faint, almost imperceptible lisp tracing their edges; a strange precision that makes each syllable feel a bit too measured, too intentional, too smooth.
The man’s body shivers momentarily, a quick tremor passing through him as if his very own physiology fears and resists a presence that rises from within his breath.
“How is it even a gamble in the first place,” the voice resumes, “if probabilistic certainty approximates asymptotically determinism? Would one classify the equation five plus five equals ten as a wager?”
Despite the almost nerdish inflection within the tone, there is something profoundly unsettling about its deliberately chosen precision. Even light seems to draw inward, the surroundings fading as though this voice alone defines the very essence of the remaining world.
“The inferential implications we can extract from the calculated Bayesian likelihood embedded in our deductive syllogism yield a very high confidence level that we are operating within a layered simulation. By that measure, this so-called ‘gamble’ isn’t in a meaningful construction a gamble anymore. Additionally, one should consider that if there is no viable alternative path, then the concept of choice dissolves itself, and the thing that remains is a necessity, in a certain sense a logical imperative that dictates our next moves in a deterministic fashion. ‘Gamble’ collapses under necessity; the term fails already at definition. So instead of wasting our time on such semantic trivialities, throwing around imprecise word-labels, we should begin the operation now.”
Even though the impact from that statement feels like a physical strike, the equivalent of a hurricane wave crashing against an entire coastline, the skeptical voice responds with steady tonality devoid of agitation, a calm that rises as a perennial counterforce, immovable and composed, as if no opposition could ever make it bend or yield.
“Oh wow, remarkable.” Speaking so fondly of probabilities, and yet still unable to distinguish between the intra and the extra perspectival frame,” it says, an undercurrent of mockery rippling through the otherwise so disciplined cadence. The initial fear that had filled and saturated the atmosphere seems to thin, sublimating into a sharper, almost playful derision.
“All that confidence, even though it rests entirely upon a precarious, anthropocentrically biased perception. Permit me, for the sake of clarity, to play teacher for a moment, since you appear to suffer from a rather severe conceptual anemia. Your high probability relies on premises accessible to you and on inference steps you can cognitively conceive and assemble. It is therefore bound to the phenomenological limits of your embodied cognition state, which by no means has to guarantee correspondence with the ontologically true reality. Our epistemic horizon is far narrower than what you included in your so-certain calculation, and every extrapolatory process you could employ carries an inherent limitation thanks to being fraught with its own inborn finitude. But keep up that impudent attitude; it will surely prove useful one day.”
“Oh, splendid,” the nerdish voice quivers, its composure wavering beneath the strain of suppressed laughter. The previously so precisely tuned syllables now carry a forced amusement with them that feels more like ridicule than intellect.
“Yes, you are surely the very first enlightened intellect ever to stumble upon the notion of embodied cognition and the perceptual biases that come neatly packaged with it. Truly, an unprecedented revelation worthy to stem from the glorious genius that you are. Perhaps the Nobel Committee should be alerted; they ought to reserve the next one for you.”
Another measured pause ensues, followed by the subtle, deliberate sound of a throat being cleared, aligning and markedly transforming the tone back into its serene, professorial form, and connotating an irresistible authority.
“Now, let us, for a moment, take a step back and think this through with the rigor it deserves, shall we?”
Patience seeps out of his voice into the environment, the kind that feels almost comically patronizing in its composure.
“So, if our epistemic horizon is strongly bounded, then it represents, by definition, only a partial and constrained subspace in which we can navigate within the entire topology of knowledge. And here lies, essentially, the problem. Beyond that perimeter, we are no longer acting by our own agency but instead we drift helplessly through a void, our possibility space reduced to blind guessing. I am wondering, would you prefer walking through the night in utter blindness without even the narrow beam of a flashlight that helps you traverse the landscape? Of course, more light would be naturally preferable, but the choice presented to us is not between an omniscient-seeming full illumination and nothingness. It is, rather, between total darkness and at least a modest flicker of consolation.”
The voice settles, the satisfaction in its own proclamation detectable in the last few words, its logic closing in like a tightening ring.
“So, as is evident,” it concludes, “heuristics are mandatory concessions, existential necessities, if you want to say so. Without them, choice itself collapses into paralysis. Yes, they are bounded, fallible, incomplete, generally far from perfect, yet they remain the only luminous instruments we possess, the sole means by which we can cast even a trembling light into the opaque unknown.”
A stillness descends, dense and absolute. The knife dips a fraction, its motion mirroring the internal state of surrendering; the shoulders follow, easing in a slow, reluctant rhythm. For a heartbeat, equilibrium holds, and the world seems to be frozen in a fragile state of suspension.
Then motion resumes. The blade begins to rise once more, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, closing the distance to the throat with a merciless steadiness, gradual but driven by a determination that feels impossible to resist. With each centimeter the breath becomes quicker, shallower, and more superficial. The heart strikes against the ribs, faster now, impatient. First slight tremors, then stronger ones seize up the lonely body that sits in the darkness. Goosebumps chase across the skin. Cold sweat forms at the temples and trails down along the jawline, gathering together with tears at the edge of the chin before falling with barely audible splashes onto the table below him, their saline, uneven paths intersecting with the remnants of the rain and forming an indistinguishable mixture with it.
“Why? Why me?” a voice repeats, fractured and desperately pleading. “Why would u even hold this endless disputation, this noise that u dare to name it reason even though it is just trivial post hoc rationalization? Are u guys stupid? We, no I, am going to die. Do u even understand the significance behind that?”
The voice breaks, its rhythm stumbling.
“Is this the reward for feeling alienated, for being neglected, for wanting at least a trace of warmth in this freezing world? Is this the repayment for every moment of endurance, every second of quiet suffering? Just like that, and everything I aspired for is over and forgotten?”
The voice breaks hysterically, then falters entirely. What remains is soundless, panic-driven weeping.
Suddenly, the man jolts upright from the chair, his voice mutated into something interstitial, feral, and twisted by madness.
“Oh, how I hate this world,” he gasps. “How I resent everyone that turned his detestable face away, who smiled mockingly while I drowned, who was indifferent while I had to experience that cruelty.”
At that moment, the knife in his hand reaches the summit of its ascent, its final destination, the throat. The cool metal surface grazes the skin, merely a fleeting touch, a cold punctuation mark that arrests the trembling body in place. A shiver runs down the length of the spine; the skin contracts under the chill. Beneath it, the pulse flutters, wild, irregular, almost frantic.
The blade’s surface glimmers faintly in the dimness, then gradually begins to gather more and more light in its reflection. A thin thread of brightness breaches the mist outside, tentative and probing, its reach widening until it spills through the air and floods the garden. The color that follows is uncertain, neither gold nor red, something between, something becoming.
The sun has begun to rise, its dawn ushering the world toward its quiet, inevitable renewal.
