CONTEXT: This fragment from the Realm portrays the Embers, who stepped away instead of syncing in. Their world is slower, uneven, touched by imperfection. What they build endures because it is made, not optimized. Their rebellion is quiet: they simply chose to live outside it, where life unfolds instead of updates.
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Stabilization within the Great Optimisation
Systoics above, Neurals within, Embers apart. Each exists in its own atmosphere, self-contained and self-sustaining. They rarely collide. They do not interfere. By drifting into separation, humanity stumbled into a form of peace. Not unity, not harmony, but stability. Every group lives as if inside its own sealed sphere, complete in itself. Systoics see themselves as perfected, stripped clean of what they consider inefficiency. Neurals believe their endless cycles of recognition and reward are proof of belonging and success. Embers hold fast to their chosen simplicity, convinced that turning away is the only way to remain human. Each is certain they have found the better path. Each feels, in their own way, ahead of the others. There is no open rivalry. No one competes across the divides. The walls made of values are too thick, The realities are too different. Instead, a quiet conviction fills each current: a sense of superiority, of being the ones who chose rightly. Systoics trust in precision, Neurals in pleasure and community, Embers in authenticity and connection. Every choice is justified by values, and every value reinforces the illusion of completeness. This is the paradox that keeps the world from tearing apart. The satisfaction is subjective, but it is real. It does not matter that the others would not recognize it, or that they might even call it emptiness. What matters is that within each sphere the sense of meaning is alive, and that drive— calibrated, curated, or consciously chosen— sustains the whole. And so the world holds its shape: three currents of being flowing side by side, each sealed in its own rhythm, each blind to how strange, how alien, it would look to the others if they ever truly touched. Stability rests not on agreement, but on distance.
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©Samia Oldman
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Hi! I appreciate your reflection. Though this description is made up, I think you are right. In it's core, this is how our world currently rolls (an collides) too.
I write dystopian fantasy poetry as a long form series. This post is one of the core realms, that my poetry leans on.
Happy to have you on board, Peter
It’s strange to read about these three “stable” spheres as if stability can exist without those who step outside the map. What pulls me in is the silence between them—not harmony, but a leak, a place where no one is looking.
Each group seems convinced they’ve “found” themselves simply because they no longer hear anyone else. But silence isn’t proof of wholeness. It’s just distance tightened into the illusion of peace.
And none of them move. The Stoics are fixed, the neurals loop endlessly, the embers freeze inside their chosen rebellion. Shapes without friction. If even one of them brushed against another, the whole order would tremble.
Maybe that’s the real fear here—not conflict, but the possibility of seeing how strange your own choice becomes once isolation cracks open.
Everything in this world rests on distance. Move that distance even a little — and the entire structure shows how thin it really is.