Soon, multiple children will acausally extort me

Cursed to be boring! Cursed to be vanilla! The eye of god that so tantalizes me with magic must be repelled! So my edgy 13 year old self believed, watching his classmates drown in their mundanity.

Yeah so as a kid I got into futurism. The small plastic MP3 player I brought with me to the Comoros contained a half-hundred downloaded essays on kugelblitz black hole ships, self-replicating engines of human pansperic cum, and starlifting machines designed to make do on the false promise Star Wars made to my child-self re: “Star Destroyers”. I would see the line of the horizon on the ocean, the Zodiac bumping up and down below me as in the Zaphod Beeblebrox overture, and imagine Earth spinning through space, the vastness of the terran decisions I seemed, incredibly, to be privy to.

It seemed too good to be true. Why would I of all humans be given a choice in the great unfolding of things? Who gave me a ticket to fiddle with the legos that make up Adam Kadmon’s eventual shape? The lightcone? Tiled with a chunk of a 13 year old boy’s imagination?

Obviously reality was too absurd: rationalists take beliefs literally, and “too good to be true” is a belief as any. My True Childhood, I believed my future self believed, was too boring.

And so he simulated it again, and this time would add Dragons, stakes, ideas grand enough to blow a 13yo’s brain. I glared into the sky, then, imagining the shape of my gruff and bitter future self, absolutely PISSED that I had no say in this: the moral circle was not quite wide enough yet that consent would be an issue in the matter of simulating one’s seed-self.

My future self was cutting off my access to base reality. In simulating me just once, my odds of being in my True Childhood were down to a coin-flip. Unacceptable.

I was into authenticity, back then. I despised the idea that what I was experiencing wasn’t “true” history, that my chances at galactic importance were FLOUTED by the fact the galaxy was have been already conquered and divided in base reality, my every chance robbed from my greedy little prepubescent hands, arrived too late.

But the worst part was the shame. I would see my ordinary classmates doing ordinary child things and grimly notice my own exceptionalism as the natural center of the simulation they were—hopefully non-sentiently—thrown in, and feel a rush of embarrassment redden my cheeks; they could put up with the romance of base reality. They understood the magic of the prosaic. Whereas I needed fantasy so much I was destined to come up with elaborate bullshit about being born in pre-singularity times just to feel good about myself.

The Narnia kids fell in a wardrobe; Alice in a hole and a mirror; Percy Jackson was always magical and so was Harry Potter. I hated that my brain wanted to feel like them, wanted magic in its life desperately. I hated that my future self could very well fling me into a magical world if he so wished. I hated that of all the people who could be bitten by a radioactive spider at my middle school, I was the most likely to be.

I wanted a Dignified life. I didn’t want to be so scared of the mundane that I was fated to become the kind of human who would experience machine his past self to increase the measure of his chosen-one kink (I didn’t yet know what a kink was, my sexual fantasies hadn’t evolved much beyond the chaste kiss—but this is a directionally correct description of my perception of my pathetic future self).

But what could I do?

Several solutions were pondered:

The first, of course, being that I could engage in acausal trade with True Childhood Croissant and cripple future Croissant if he didn’t give me the mundane base conditions I wanted (if I was to experience magic, I thought, it would be magic I spun myself).

If every branch of Croissant’s childhood decide to threaten their future self into submission, if we could all come together and extort hell out of him, then we might have a chance.

The other, far more actionable one was to simply flinch away from any true magical wish. I would deliberately sit away from spiderwebs in which suspiciously plot-relevant spiders sat; ignore portal-feeling puddles after rainy days; silently scream at my future self (who was always listening, and grinning with temptation).

Finally, in order to ensure my sim would as closely as possible resemble my True Childhood, I would collect a vast amount of information from my surroundings. Every single thought, object, desire, scrap of paper, belief archived. If my future self could be successfully coerced by the acausal collective of Croissants into simulating childhoods absent of ego-affirming dragons, he’d need the right stuff to work with. By acausally racking up a fuckton of real-world data, such a sim would be possible. And so began an uneasy remainder of childhood, spent engaged in the practiced (not native…) art of appreciating the mundane, in the name of my own dignity.

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This post was written in ~30 minutes as part of Speedhaven, an initiative in a small nook of Lighthaven previously referred to as the GrovelCorner, run by Tomás Bjarturand mediated by Claude Opus 4.5.

Claude gave us this prompt, then ranked our results:

I won.