ROTD

In this system¹, people mostly live in 0, which consolidates anastral² non-planets, e.g. asteroids, rocks, dust (moons are contentious).

1. Every system is a solar system.

Every system is a solar system.

2. Anastral means the opposite of astral…

Anastral means the opposite of astral, so I could have also used unastral, but anastral kind of has a better ring to it. So if it's not a star and it's not a planet, that means it's like a small rock, asteroid, comet, dust, etc. Right? So all of these at some point were engineered into a giant ring, right? So it's like the asteroid belt. You can think of the actual asteroid belt as like an in-progress version of this. Right? So everything that could go in the asteroid belt does go in the asteroid belt, so to speak, and, you know, its position sort of, you know, I'm not quite certain, but it forms a giant 0. So basically if you're nobody, you live in that giant 0 belt, right? So it's a giant ring, and people call it 0, and we can sort of type it out as just the number 0, and it's like a literal symbol of what it actually is in the solar system, which is a big ring. And it's for people who are not, you know, elite or wealthy enough to live inside a natural number.

So the shape of 0 is familiar and literal. To live inside a natural number³ is a sign of elite status, wealth, connection to power. In this system, the odd numbers are considered the natural numbers in everyday use, with multiples of 3 considered self-evidently preferable. The even numbers are considered a very dark, dangerous occult business, avoided without question in the presence of others, and seen as a sign and omen of something awful.

In this system, when something new happens, it is considered an emergent property of the system, considered as a happening to be the legal property of the system, having been conceived therein. When the same thing happens again, it is socially considered only once happening a third time, at which point it is considered an existence. To happen only twice is considered an anomaly and typically sends people into a panic because historically when things happen an even number of times, you know, people believed it brought about terrible tragedy as punishment. So 2 is seen as uneasy, nervous, ominous limbo between emergence and convergence when it comes to existence, at least in this system.⁴

4. Background numerology

Background numerology

It can emerge from the book or from the minds of some of the characters, and it shouldn't be obvious at first, that lots of the different realms of science and math and thought sort of really, you know, at different points give the most homage to either 0 or 1 or ∞ as a concept, or as a kind of the central concept around which it orbits. So just as a quick example, I think, you know, algebra really revolves around 0, probability really revolves around 1, and I think geometry really revolves around ∞ when it comes to, I don't know, I guess it's just my feeling. That's a part of what, you know, I want to kind of emerge from the book, of a better sort of, like, non-imposing numerology, right? So the sort of numerology of the bureaucracy of this world should be like, they impose restrictions on numbers. But the better sort of numerology is one that doesn't impose restrictions, but instead, like, provides understanding, right? In a non-fictional way.

The riddle is somewhat as follows.⁵

The previous image shows role and identity in the system. In the region corresponding to 0, there is no dog. This means that at the beginning of our story, someone lacks a dog. Also at the beginning of our story, there is still a concept hanging over society as a looming image (nothing more) of the sun as God.

Yuri could be the original scientist from 0. Science had only made significant progress on the planet, and the sun came to be understood yet highly deified. Yuri is the moment the sun becomes finally reckoned with as a scientific object. An idea came to his head: Is it a clock? Obviously, it was a star (and for a time it was extremely not obvious that the sun was the same, to some order of approximation, as other stars). But it was not obvious how much astral behavior was just repeating on a clock because its scale of time at which it repeats is so much longer than human life most of the time.

Extremely rare and volatile events, like solar flares and magnetic field interaction and gravitational interaction, were ever observable more than once within the collective lifetimes of humanity. And even then, the ability to forecast was effectively 0 before Yuri. A part of what Yuri was able to do, although nobody ever found his notebooks or knows what his thought process was, was to model the sun as a clock, not on a clock. What that changed was scientists stopped modeling the sun as an isolated system itself (e.g. treating its ejections as outside itself) and started modeling it as the clock of its surrounding system, thereby treating the course and purpose of solar behavior an unscientific pursuit, because it is really a mechanism conducting the course and behavior of its surrounding life and mentality therein.

In this system, and so far, evidence shows it applies to all systems, the conducting sun is teleologically an engine for the sustenance of life and mentality.

Much like the weather, the roller coaster of solar emission shapes the behavior and evolution of each sun's surrounding life and mentality. I say mentality because Yuri's discoveries led to a revolution in scientific understanding of all mentality and the basic fact that it is strongly driven by solar emission.

Yuri is considered the turning point from the cave to the light, so to speak, because people finally had rational explanations for so many things all click into place at once, including what ideas are physically, what tends to cause them, how much of our inspiration is our own, where inspiration comes from when it's not immediately clear, the reason for the urge to name experiences like brainstorm, why the rate of discovery and new ideas increases during periods of increased solar emission, why destabilizing world events like war and revolution tend to occur every 11 years due to the sun.

During moments of extreme solar emission, all life receives an increase of mental events, including not just animals, but plants and all things interconnected with the overall system. This can have catastrophic effects on entire species and ecosystems in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, this can be a rejuvenating experience for the mind in all creatures, as it basically washes away stale electrical connections and frees up new perspectives and brings exciting new images and ideas to mind.

People experienced it, but after Yuri, people finally had an explanation for it. Some in government had known, but obviously kept it secret and obviously tried to contain the idea once it spread. But ultimately, broader knowledge of the relationship between the sun and mentality led to the widespread acceptance that dangerous insurgencies were now scientifically forecastable and preventable.

There is Phenyo (pronounced like the Peño in jalapeño) who lives in the loaf of bread in 1. His father, also Phenyo, founded Jalapeños, basically the Chipotle of this system, but inspired by Nando's, and it caused a sensation, introducing diets that are spicier and spicier to each subsequent generation of consumers.

Our Phenyo really hates his lot in life and wants to be a panelist⁶ to reform that institution from within and to restore its original methods of experiment, hypothesis, inquiry, debate, writing, and freedom of the count (allowing all natural numbers to freely occur as opposed to the universally respected social contract that any even number occurs solely in intermediate calculation).