Setting: The study, late evening. The diagrams are still on the blackboard, though a few apples have been moved by Blottisham’s restless hand. Tea cups are half-empty.
Quillibrace: It depends what you think is happening.
Blottisham: What I think is happening is that I’m tired, and yet… I understand nothing. Well, almost nothing. Apples fall, people choose, the universe unfolds… and all without anyone pushing. Ridiculous.
Elowen Stray: I don’t think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s… oddly satisfying. All the pieces — gravity, inertia, freedom — they fit. Not perfectly, but enough to see the pattern.
Quillibrace: Yes. The delight is in seeing the architecture. Constraints, paths, re-cuts — once you grasp that, the apparent mysteries dissolve.
Blottisham: And yet, I keep expecting some cosmic lever I can grab. Some final push or secret will. There isn’t one, is there?
Quillibrace: Only the paths the network permits. That is the lever. That is the will.
Elowen Stray: And the beauty is that even when we misread it, even when probabilities surprise us, it’s still intelligible. Every “choice,” every fall, every coordinated action emerges from the same relational principle.
Blottisham: So… freedom, causation, gravity, inertia — all just nodes and edges?
Quillibrace: Patterns. Traces. The world writing itself as it unfolds. No pushes required.
Elowen Stray: And yet it feels like there’s agency. Choice. Responsibility. Even ethics.
Quillibrace: Emergent, local, relational. The narrative overlay is yours. The network does the rest.
Blottisham: I suppose I can live with that… though I’ll never get used to the idea that nothing actually pushes.
Quillibrace: (dryly) Depends what you think the cat is doing.
Elowen Stray: (smiling) Nothing pushes, yet everything still moves — beautifully.
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