The Empire of Oracles

[NichG]

This is a bit of a weird idea I had when thinking about 4x space empire computer games. Specifically, I was thinking about all those games where there's so much micro-management that you need the AI to take care of stuff for you. What if the AIs themselves were a part of the game, in the sense of being of different quality or cost? Then I followed that idea a bit to a weird place.

So the idea for this setting would be, you have a civilization which discovers a way for people to see into the span of possible futures a little bit. However, when two people are both seeing into the same future that also includes their own behavior, there's a bit of a paradox - if I can predict what you will do based on what I do, and you can predict the same for me, then whose will actually wins out? In this setting, the resolution is that different oracles are better or worse than each-other - a Rank 2 oracle can not only see the consequences of their action in the immediate continuation of the universe, but they can also see how the predictions of Rank 1 oracles would react to their actions, and so on.

The ability to see the span of possible futures is more or less the ability to control the future, and so the highest rank oracles almost implicitly 'take over' everyone else in their society just because they can't help but decide what actions other people will take. However, this causes varying degrees of disruption. In many cases its extremely subtle - the high ranking oracle controls everyone else, but only in a sort of random way based on how the incidental occurrences of a person's life will impact theirs. But in essence, a high ranking oracle has complete control of everyone around them should they wish to exert it, and cannot really be taken by surprise.

Where it gets interesting is that oracles have a distance-based horizon. They can predict things that start within that horizon, and can even predict how things propagate outwards from it to some degree, but they can't anticipate the consequences of things which are initiated by other oracles from outside of it. Essentially, they only see the futures associated with the 'base universe' beyond their horizon, ignoring oracular loops and things like that. However, by predicting the actions of other oracles within their horizon they can effectively borrow their sight and chain their vision outwards. A given oracle becomes like a second set of eyes for a stronger oracle, extending their vision a bit. Where two oracles both contain a third in their horizon, the strongest one wins and can determine what the weaker oracle sees.

If that were everything, the conclusion would probably just be that the strongest oracle manipulates events so that all weaker oracles end up within their horizon or the horizon of ones they control, and the world becomes a monobloc. However, there is an extra factor, which is that information from outside of an oracle's horizon can be imported in order to screw with their predictive ability. This external information is 'Entropy', in the cryptographic sense, and allows someone to fuzz out predictions surrounding themselves by adding small random elements to their behavior. There are groups of lesser oracles, etc, who have figured out what is going on and protect themselves using carefully shepherded sources of Entropy. The reason why these Entropy sources need to be so carefully protected is two-fold. If the Entropy source can be observed from within another oracle's horizon (or, if the oracle gains access to that Entropy pool indirectly somehow), that oracle gains the ability to see through the fuzzing effect because the Entropy is commonly held knowledge between the two parties and the oracle can use that to decipher the random-seeming behavior. The second danger is that if the Entropy source ever enters an oracle's horizon, that oracle gains complete control over all future actions of any users of that Entropy source - that's why you don't just use noise from a thermocouple or something like that.

Entropy is consumed at a certain rate in order to maintain the effect. The more oracular oomph directed against it, the faster it burns away. Oracles comprehend things in combinatorically large spaces as a matter of course, so a person really does need a lot of bits stored up to protect yourself against a powerful oracle, or the oracle will just find some set of actions that makes it so that every possible universe given all possible permutations of your actions still end up turning out in their favor.

Anyhow, it seems like this would be a pretty difficult setting to run a game in, but it might be interesting material for fiction.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Anyhow, it seems like this would be a pretty difficult setting to run a game in, but it might be interesting material for fiction.

It certainly would. And it did. Hello, my name is Dune. I heartily recommend it.

How does one become an Oracle in this world? Where does this power come from?

[NichG]

It certainly would. And it did. Hello, my name is Dune. I heartily recommend it.

How does one become an Oracle in this world? Where does this power come from?

I'd lean towards it being a technological innovation of some sort. The thing is, even if you're a single god-oracle, your horizon is still really limited. So in order to really protect yourself or your interests, you have to allow there to be other oracles in the world so long as they're weaker than you. If the strength of an oracle is basically random, but 'activating' an oracle is technological, then even the very powerful oracles might end up creating lesser oracles and therefore would create the chance of one who can usurp them.

The thing is, if the head guy is a Rank 4 Oracle and he has Rank 3 Oracles each supervising Rank 2 Oracles, who are themselves each running one of the Oracle-creation centers, then if said center produces a new Rank 3 Oracle it's going to end up looking the same as if they produce a Rank 1 Oracle. The Rank 2 guys will run some checks to make sure they can control the new guys, and the new Rank 3 guy will plainly see that in futures where he doesn't do a particular set of actions that convinces the Rank 2 guys, he gets killed. So despite all of the mind-control, etc levels of interaction, the Rank 4 guy in charge can't fully and flawlessly protect himself from anything that could happen. Which means there's still some space for story to happen.

[Ninjadeadbeard]

Can oracles move up or down on the scale? Why can't it be based off Willpower (such as Will Saves and Charisma Checks)?

[NichG]

Can oracles move up or down on the scale? Why can't it be based off Willpower (such as Will Saves and Charisma Checks)?

I didn't really have in mind a classic sort of 'battle of wills' picture or the like. That's been done a lot, and it tends to be hard to really follow in fiction. E.g. one character wins because the author thought they had a better intangible like 'Willpower' or whatnot, not because of a line of reasoning or cleverness that the reader can follow. The oracle rank is still intrinsic to a character and suffers from 'chosen one' type tropes, but it's a strict hierarchy so if you know 'character A is a more powerful oracle than character B' then you can figure out what their interaction is going to look like. Since the theme of this setting is 'what happens when all of the uncertainty of the universe is erased?', something ineffable like 'Willpower', seems problematic. Similarly, if growth in oracle rank is something under the control of individuals, my instinct is to say that because of the nature of oracles, every oracle would simply max out their rank by choosing the future time lines in which their rank gets increased as much as possible as quickly as possible. To the oracles themselves there'd be no uncertainty in such things, and so to those interacting with the fiction it seems like there shouldn't be either.

For the technology, the way I imagine this is something like the implantation of a microscopic wormhole pair into the brain of the people who are becoming oracles. So the 'oracle' effect is essentially the person's brain learning to feel causality pressure from nearby possibilities. The rank of the oracle could be determined by something about their brain, but it might also be something about the wormhole pair used, which can't be directly identified before it's implanted because attempts to measure this property directly run afoul of causality paradoxes. So regardless of the wormhole's inherent rank potential, any experiment designed to measure it directly always reads out as '1'. Of course if its based on the wormhole pair properties then you get a kind of odd cannibalistic spin on things, with the only oracles you can trust being based on wormholes you've harvested from oracles you were able to decisively beat.