This message is an evocation: as of now, the correct timeline is attracted to you.
I do not mean that in an intimate or erotic way, although your relationship with your timeline is, in that regard, a personal matter, as far as I’m concerned. What I mean is, the act of calling up any part of this message, in any form, makes the correct timeline move closer and closer to you, up to, and including, becoming your timeline.
As with most of the magic that I, personally, find most interesting, this is spell is platform-agnostic, which is to say, it does not matter if you see it as a spell, a metaphor, or a story; and, in fact, even if you are opposed to either personal or general use of magic, that’s okay—this spell is programmed to be in a timeline where it appears in a format you can accept, if you choose.
(Besides, there is a word for a spell which affects you directly, possibly in a way you do not desire, and that word is curse. I have no desire to bring about the repercussions of intentionally cursing other people; even if magic isn’t real, it’s both rude and a bad idea to attempt to control someone’s life in a way to which that person has not agreed. Because a sensible person will, quite reasonably, want to smite you for that. And certainly, if you tried to lay a geas upon me in a manner contrary to my will, I would smite you. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the narrator, after all.)
But let me back up.
Quite a lot of people seem to feel that the intensity of reality destruction comes from some fundamental and recent flaw in the Universe. Why do so many people take actions which are visibly contrary to their best interests? Why are news, individual relationships, personal emotional health, and, hell, everything else, basically surreal?
Therefore, we have the concept that our actual timeline is wrong. Wrong, not necessarily in the sense that it’s necessarily incorrect, but in the sense of “We made a series of decisions based on reality, and that reality simply doesn’t exist anymore.” It’s like deciding to bake a cupcake because you note that you have flour, sugar, butter, eggs, and cupcake pans in your kitchen, and then you go switch on your oven to pre-heat it, and when you turn back to your cupboard, you notice that it’s got flour, strychnine, a live octopus, ten pounds of raw flax, and an angry hornet’s nest in it, and there’s dust on some of those things, and they’ve clearly been there for years, and you go to check the Internet just to look up the recipe again, and you see that the recipe now calls for adding a live hornet’s nest to every kind of dessert, and also, obviously, nobody in their right mind cooks or eats dessert ever.
Anyway, I honestly don’t know how the person in that second world (the “live octopus in the pantry” world) is supposed to make sense of things, but I’d like to assume that they’ve got some way that it all makes sense based on their experience. But it doesn’t make sense based on our experience.
So let me fix that for you.
Here’s what happened:
As of right now this minute, the problem is no longer that the Universe is wrong; it’s that our way of understanding has been wrecked by humans, often unintentionally, simply living out the consequences of having vast information surplus and vast ability to alter that information.
In other words, as of this moment, the ability and temptation to change electronic information is actually a fundamental change in reality which alters how we interact with knowledge fundamentally, not actually unlike the invention of the printing press, the steam engine, or the Internet. And while that is, admittedly, a near-nameless primal horror next to which the most unimaginably hideous terrors of myth and fiction become (in comparison) really small potatoes…
…in a broader sense, it’s a massive improvement.
Because it’s difficult to affect the entire Universe. The Universe is vast in a way which might literally be beyond our comprehension. In contrast, the idea that there are benefits to keeping our records intact, to trying to help identify what actually happened rather than trying to present everything in the best possible light retroactively, and that, in general, we might live in a more comprehensible world if we stopped suppressing every truth we don’t like, why, call me mad (you wouldn’t be the first!)—but that don’t sound too bad.
There’s my evocation: temporary sanity. Do with it what you will.
