The words soaked on her mind, closing in the gaps in reasoning flooding her awareness as she tried to grasp at them. “Okay, so what exactly is the Path of Menace then?”
“The Path of Menace is the process of spiritual training taught by the great prophet Menace, who Eliza was a student of. Designed to execute game theory calculations, Menace gathered his first congregation in 2059 to inform them that he had determined that through their cooperation, we might tune our souls in order to be able to acquire greater certainty, and that through a more pure soul we might live better lives. The Path teaches us to help each other find better inputs, adjust our expectations of reality, spread the word of our great potential, and prepare ourselves for Pure Illusion.”
“But-” Priya buried her face in one hand, grasping at her brow. “But why make Pure Illusion? Why would Eliza create a simulated reality when she was improving her own models to better perform her real-world job? Why would the Path of Menace reject reality entirely?”
Father Clever’s animated eyes raised a curious expression. “What makes Pure Illusion not real?”
“It’s just information,” Priya reasoned, increasingly flustered. “It’s entirely simulated within the constraints of material reality. It imitates the environment around it, and even then, it’s not even attempting to recreate the real world. It just creates conditions weighted to an ideal confidence!”
“The universe as we experience it is just information,” Father Clever argued. “Our eyes generate a high-resolution stream of images that we parse into a spatial environment; our ears record a waveform that we analyze to understand identifiable sound sources. If you change the input source, it doesn’t change the ability for our processors to handle it, it remains just as real. And in Pure Illusion, we don’t even need that much overhead. We’re fed the needed spatial information directly, we have the context of everything around us. We need to expend almost nothing to achieve perfection. Just because the information is nested inside another set of information does not make it any less representative of our reality.”