NOVEL NEXT 133 - This Is What Comes Next
There were slight clouds outside as Archmund sat at his desk, quill pen in hand, as he started drafting a letter.
He had grand plans, an almost utopian vision of the future of Omnio society, and yet he felt a paralysis worm its way into his gut, holding him in place, paralyzing his pen in hand, his future in stasis.
These next few years would be crucial for deciding the trajectory of his future, and he didn't want to fuck it up this time. He couldn't, not again. Not like he had in his old life.
There was a meme on the website "X", more widely known as "Twitter", that you could "just do things". Instead of living a boring, unenlightened life, you could "just do things". "Do" and "thing" were nebulous and could mean whatever. You could throw a party. You could rent a yacht. You could streak naked through a cornfield.
Archmund suspected there were ultimately limits to how true "you can just do things" was.
You couldn't, ultimately, trigger a whole scientific revolution with half-remembered knowledge of another world.
Still on the bookshelf of his old home, in that life he could never return to, separated by the veil of death, that to his regret he'd never actually read but knew the sparknotes of, was Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". Scientific revolutions were almost never sparked by lone geniuses, as much as the popular consciousness would have you believe. There were doubtless great thinkers throughout philosophy, supermen who made multiple great contributions — Euler, Bachelier, Newton, Einstein — but science tended to push forward one elderly death at a time.
But calculus, the mathematical study of infinitesimal change, had been independently discovered at almost the exact same time by both Newton and Leibniz. In thousands of years since Euclid's Geometry, no one had imagined how to model the change of an output as a result of a minuscule change in the input until two geniuses arrived at similar lines of thought at once.
On Earth, there weren't pervasive beliefs about oversouls or shared minds or ideas jumping from spirit to spirit. No, it would have had to bee environmental. There was something in the water, as the idiom went, something in the environment that led two geniuses in the right place at the right time to simultaneously discover calculus.
And so Archmund was in the unfortunate position of having knowledge of a whole bunch of future innovations, but a very limited idea of which ones he could turn from potential into action. He'd had the idea of mass producing mayonnaise, which was somewhat popular in Japanese isekai works, only to run straight into the inability to do mass production.
The other idea was that the great scientists of the 16th-19th centuries tended to be men of wealth and leisure. Many of the great British scientists didn't have to work for a living. They had estates and inheritances and servants, and so they could dedicate their lives to higher pursuits, like the arts and sciences.
Thankfully, that described his life now.
If you were to put all of the citizens of Omnio on a list, he was pretty close to the top when it came to people who could "just do things". He had wealth, he had health, and he had time. As far as he was aware, as a noble he even had some legal protections against getting randomly killed for some minute breach of an obscure law.
Which meant he needed to avoid the force of the law, whether that meant having powerful lawyers or being too powerful for the law to touch.
But he didn't want to spend huge amounts of time reinventing the wheel. He wanted to build on the infrastructure Omnio already had. This world was ripe for some revolution somewhere, he was sure of it — ready for some innovation he could "discover" that would be the spark that set the flame, like Renaissance Italy or Silicon Valley.
"Gemmy," he said out loud, and the Gem-sprite popped into existence.
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"At your service!"
"Can you get me a full survey of the current technological levels of the Omnio Empire? Not just what I see here, every day, but the most current scientific innovations, the cutting edge of research, and the luxuries afforded to the upper class?"
Granavale County was the boonies. It was hicksville. It was to the heart of the Empire, presumably, as Kentucky or Krakow were to New York or London.
"No!"
"And why not?"
"Because you have no clue at all! I can give you hints, but not the whole road!"
"What are you, and why are you so useless?"
Gemmy smiled mysteriously. Archmund sighed. "Are you me?"
"Kind of! But, I should note, I have nothing to do with your ego or self-esteem issues!"
Archmund sighed. "I think I have you figured out, unfortunately. You can help me order my thoughts, and lead me towards capabilities I already have but haven't realized I have yet. You're a sentient version of the rubber duck test."
"That is correct!"
"Partially or totally?"
"Partially! But you knew that already, or you wouldn't have asked!"
Archmund nodded idly. "So, what am I missing? About how I can figure out the technological levels of the Omnio Empire?"
"Your father regularly goes to the Imperial Capital, and your cousin had gone multiple times herself. It's your personality that's made you unadventurous enough not to bother. While you're there, you can meet your other contacts. While the Imperial Capital and the University of Mages are both built around Dungeons, there are spatial links that allow easy transportation for high-ranking nobility to jump between the two, which allows for everyone to take advantage of the public parts of libraries."
Archmund nodded. "Raehel."
"Correct! Spend a week in the Imperial City, and you'll know the gap between here, there, and Earth."
…
"A week in the Imperial City?" Mary said. "You should. You should go."
"Not demanding to come along?" Archmund said.
She snorted. "I know my place. Do you need a maid to change your diapers?"
"I can take care of myself," he sniped back. "You're not that much older than me. You've never changed my diapers."
What the hell was he saying.
"I've changed more than one diaper in my time. I have cousins, you know."
What the hell were they even talking about. What the fuck. Why were they having this conversation.
"Anyways. You don't want to come along?"
Mary shook her head. "A country girl like me in the greatest city of humanity? Absolutely not. I would get eaten alive."
"But you want me to walk into that den of jackals."
Mary smiled at him.
"I am sorry, you know. I really am sorry for letting you slowly decay from the inside from a magical poison while I was trying to make magical Gems to make myself stronger—"
"I don't care about that at all, Archie," she said with a smile. "I'm closer to you than any other being alive. I can feel your thoughts. We're bonded deeper than family. What's almost dying, for that?"
This… was a little bit uncomfortable. More than a little bit, actually.
"Did I hollow our your personality and replace it with something fanatically loyal to me when I 'healed' you?"
She snorted. "You keep thinking I only like you because you're forcing me to."
"It's a valid question given that I'm richer than you, and I've meddled in your soul."
"A valid question that most nobles wouldn't think to ask about a peasant," Mary said. "It's a funny riddle, isn't it? The more you insist that nobody owes you slavish loyalty, the more you'll win it."
There was going to be someone who didn't fit that pattern eventually, Archmund thought. And when they came, he suspected he would be pleasantly surprised that they betrayed him as expected. This, he suspected, was a symptom of anxiety. Though unreasonable suspicion could also be a sign of paranoia.
"While I'm away," Archmund said. "I could use your help here."
Mary nodded. "Always scheming and planning, you are."
"I can't help myself."
He really couldn't.
"The issue, Mary, is that I have too many ideas. I want to move fast — too fast, sometimes. I want to lift people up."
"That's no good," she said. "If you lift someone up before they're ready, they'll just have further to fall."
"Exactly. That's what happened at the end of the tournament," he said. "But you, Mary? You're coming from far more humble origins than I am. You can be my eyes and ears."
She gave him a strange look. "Be serious, young master. You're destined for greatness. I'm just your maid. What could I possibly do for you in the week or two that you're away?"
"I need you to walk among the people. Find out what the complain about. Figure out what their children are still dying from. Gather everything I've overlooked, the stories they'll tell you because you're not me."
Still she seemed unconvinced. "But why? The suffering of the common people — surely it's beneath you. You're capital-bound. Once you're there, you'll see such wonders you'll never dream of coming back."
He shook his head. "I don't want to be that person," he said. "The view from the top is lonely. I don't want to stand atop those peaks, holding my hand down, trying to pull people up, when I could have lifted the world with me."
"Just because you're talented doesn't mean you have to bear the world," Mary said. "Sometimes, you just have to bear what you can."