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Spare me, if you will, your imagination. We’re going to need it.

I hold in my hands a long, flat ribbon. Ethereal, passes through skin like water. Drawn on it are tiny, atomic divisions, upon which thaums may be stained or removed. We thread it through a lump of clay, with a tiny silverweed head, with the ability to place, remove, and read those thaums. We’ve produced several layers of clay tablets, through a device similar to Centigrade, with a single, tiny ball of lightning which lives inside. The ribbon is fed in, the head reads the division, it reads where the lightning is, it deterministically decides if it wants to overwrite the contents of the division, it deterministically decides if it wants to move, it deterministically decides where it wants the lightning to move.

To Quincy’s chagrin¹, the theory behind these prophecy machines was discovered only 200 years ago. The innovation that we could also take a mind as input and output was only 100 years ago. Deterministic finite automatons were known for maybe five hundred, six hundred years, though, which may have given him some solace.

At Synthetic Fortunes LLC, we’re in the business of prophecy. Take the state of the world, take the state of you, put some clay and ribbon in your head, and see what it produces…

Results can be unpredictable if a prophecy made for someone else is placed in your head. If you don’t act commensurately with the script, the results can be unpredictable. Penrose would make a game out of it. Given a predicted outcome, how little did he have to act before the machine was acting with undefined behaviour?

There was also, unfortunately, the demand for sex ribbons. Instead of using the ribbons to predict the future, simulate an alternate present. Often one where you are having sex with, and sometimes as, someone particularly charismatically endowed. Masturbatory, relegating yourself to the immediate. You can keep that imagination for yourself.

Fortunately, our former clients are dead, and due to the particular situation of Synthetic Fortune LLC’s clientele, sex ribbons weren’t a present priority…

¹ Or rather, the chagrin he had when I last spoke to him. I pray in death he’s at peace with it. ²

² I hate your footnotes, Callister. Footnotes are for citations, acknowledgements and translations. If you have more commentary, leave it in the text. ³

³ If this were a computability paper, I’d concur. I will admit, it is a bad habit I picked up.