amzhang · March 9, 2026 04:00
diff --git a/The Pruning b/The Pruning
 # The Pruning

 ### A Story

 ---

 We called it the Pruning.

 Not because it was gentle. Not because it was wise. We called it that because the mathematics demanded a word, and the diplomats refused to use the real one.

 The real word was *suicide*.

 ---

 The first civilisation to discover it was the Keth Dominion, though "discover" implies accident, and what the Keth did was anything but accidental. They had been a mid-tier interstellar polity — forty-three systems, a modest fleet, unremarkable science — until the day they vanished from thirty-one of their worlds simultaneously.

 Not conquered. Not destroyed. Simply *gone*.

 Twelve systems remained, and in those twelve systems, every crisis that had plagued the Keth for a century had resolved. The blight that had been eating their agricultural worlds? Gone. The succession war between the Second and Third Fleets? Never happened — the commanders who would have started it had never been born. The resource deficit in the outer colonies? The asteroid belts there turned out to be laced with rare transuranic elements that, in every previous survey, had simply not been present.

 The Keth had become, overnight, the luckiest civilisation in the galaxy.

 It took the rest of us eleven years to understand what they had done.

 ---

 Here is the theory, stripped to its bones:

 The universe, at the quantum level, does not choose. Every possible outcome occurs. The particle goes left *and* right. The atom decays *and* does not decay. Reality is not a river but a delta, splitting endlessly, each branch as real as the last.

 This is the Many-Worlds interpretation. Most physicists accepted it. Most civilisations filed it under "interesting but irrelevant." After all, you can never perceive the other branches. You are stuck in your own.

 Unless you die in some of them.

 Here is the insight the Keth had — the terrible, elegant, irreversible insight: if you make your civilisation's *survival* contingent on a quantum event, and you link that quantum event to a *desirable outcome*, then from the perspective of every surviving observer, the desirable outcome always occurs.

 You don't choose your future. You *prune the branches where it doesn't happen*.

 The Keth built a device. At its heart was a quantum randomiser — true randomness, born from vacuum fluctuation, immune to prediction or manipulation. They linked it to a monitoring system that evaluated the state of their civilisation along two hundred and sixteen axes: economic stability, military strength, genetic health, social cohesion, resource abundance.

 If the civilisation was thriving — truly thriving, above a threshold they had carefully calculated — the device did nothing.

 If it was not, the device detonated. Every world. Every station. Every ship. Instantaneous. Total. A civilisation-killing weapon triggered by the gap between reality and aspiration.

 From the outside, in the branches where it fired, the Keth simply ceased to exist. Thirty-one worlds, dark and silent.

 From the inside — from the only branches where anyone was left to observe — the Keth had never been luckier.

 ---

 The Concord Assembly debated the Keth Doctrine for nine months. I was there. I was the Ambassador from Pellan, and I sat in the fifth row, and I watched the galaxy lose its mind.

 "It's not real," said the delegate from the Urrash Federation, on the first day. "Luck is not a technology. You cannot engineer fortune."

 "With respect," replied the Keth ambassador — a tall, serene figure whose composure I found, in retrospect, horrifying — "we are not engineering fortune. We are *filtering for it*. The fortune was always there. We are simply ensuring we are present to experience it."

 "And in the branches where you're not present?"

 "We are dead. Yes. But we are not there to observe our death. From our perspective, it never happened."

 "From *your* perspective," the Urrash delegate repeated, his voice climbing. "And from ours? From the branches where we watch your worlds go dark?"

 The Keth ambassador smiled. "You are welcome to join us."

 That was when the screaming started.

 ---

 Here is what no one wanted to admit: it worked.

 Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. It *worked*. The Keth Dominion, in the surviving branches, experienced a golden age that defied statistical analysis. Their crop yields doubled. Their birth rates stabilised. Three of their scientists independently developed breakthroughs in superluminal communication within the same year. A comet that had been on a collision course with their capital world — a comet that every astronomer in the sector had tracked and confirmed — simply *was not there* when it should have arrived.

 The comet existed in other branches. In the branches where the Keth were dead, it struck on schedule.

 The mathematics were clear. The ethics were not.

 ---

 The second civilisation to adopt the Pruning was the Tessarine Compact, and they did it quietly, without announcement, without doctrine. We only knew because their luck changed too. A border dispute that had been grinding toward war for decades suddenly resolved when the aggressive faction's leadership suffered a series of improbable accidents — a shuttle failure, a building collapse, a previously undetected brain aneurysm, all in the same week.

 Not assassination. Nothing so crude. In the branches where those leaders survived, the Tessarine Compact was dead, their Pruning device triggered by the inevitability of the war they could not otherwise prevent.

 The survivors lived in the branches where the war never came.

 After the Tessarine, the Moh-Khet Unity adopted it. Then the Starward Communion. Then, in secret, three of the five members of the Concord Assembly's Security Council.

 I learned this last fact on a Tuesday, in a sealed briefing room, from my own government's intelligence chief.

 "Pellan has been running a Pruning device for eight months," she said, as if reporting weather.

 I remember the sound my chair made when I stood up. I remember the way the light caught the edge of the table. I remember these things because they are the details you fix on when the ground shifts beneath you and you need something solid to hold.

 "We didn't vote on this," I said.

 "No."

 "The legislature doesn't know."

 "No."

 "Does the *Premier* know?"

 "The Premier authorised it."

 I sat back down. The chair made the same sound. "How long?"

 "Eight months. And in those eight months, Ambassador, Pellan's economy has grown eleven percent. The Reth Plague, which our medical corps projected would kill six million in the outer provinces? It mutated. Became benign. *Spontaneously*." She paused. "Our neighbours have noticed. Morale is high. Public trust in the government is at a thirty-year peak."

 "Because we're *killing ourselves* in the branches where things go wrong."

 "Because we're *alive* in the branches where things go right. That's all any of us have ever been, Ambassador. Alive in the branches where things went right. The Pruning simply... increases the frequency."

 ---

 The philosopher Tam Orel, who would later become the most famous objector to the Pruning, published her treatise six months after the Keth revelation. I have read it nine times. The core argument is this:

 *The Pruning does not save anyone. It kills everyone in every branch where the desired outcome does not occur. The "survivors" are not the same people who made the decision — they are quantum duplicates who happen to inhabit a favourable branch. The decision-makers are dead. They are always dead. The Pruning is a civilisation committing suicide and calling the corpse's luckier twin a success story.*

 The Keth response was immediate and, I must admit, difficult to refute:

 *There is no "luckier twin." Under Many-Worlds, there is no privileged branch. All versions are equally real. There is no original. The version of you that wakes up tomorrow is no more "you" than the version that dies tonight in a branch where a different quantum fluctuation occurs in your brain. The Pruning does not create duplicates. It eliminates branches. This is not meaningfully different from any other act of survival.*

 Tam Orel's counter-response was one sentence:

 *Then why does it terrify you?*

 She was found dead three days later. Natural causes. A previously undetected heart defect.

 In other branches, I am certain, she lived to be very old.

 ---

 The galaxy changed. Not slowly, and not kindly.

 Within five years, every major civilisation had adopted the Pruning or was debating its adoption. The holdouts were not rewarded for their restraint. The Urrash Federation, which had refused on moral grounds, suffered a catastrophic solar flare that sterilised their home system. A natural disaster. Unpredictable. Except that in the branches where the Pruning civilisations thrived, such disasters had an unsettling tendency to afflict the unpruned.

 This was the part no one had anticipated. The Pruning didn't just filter for *your* civilisation's success. It filtered for a *universe* in which your civilisation succeeded. And in many of those universes, your success came at the cost of your rivals' misfortune.

 The Urrash delegate's words echoed: *And from the branches where we watch your worlds go dark?*

 We had not gone dark. We had done something worse. We had made our survival contingent on a cosmos that was hospitable to us, and the cosmos had obliged — not by becoming kinder, but by becoming crueler to everyone else.

 ---

 The arms race was inevitable. Civilisations began competing not with fleets and weapons but with *thresholds*. The Keth had set two hundred and sixteen axes of evaluation. The Tessarine set three hundred and four. The Moh-Khet Unity, in a feat of desperate ambition, set over a thousand — specifying not just survival but dominance, not just prosperity but supremacy.

 The higher your threshold, the more branches you died in. The more branches you died in, the more extraordinary the surviving branches became.

 The Moh-Khet, in their surviving branches, didn't just prosper. They *ascended*. Technologies that should have taken centuries appeared in years. Resources materialised. Enemies collapsed. The Moh-Khet became, in the span of a decade, the most powerful civilisation in recorded history.

 In every other branch — and there were, by the mathematics, an almost infinite number of them — the Moh-Khet were dust.

 ---

 I resigned my post the day Pellan raised its threshold for the third time. The Premier called it "aspirational calibration." I called it what it was.

 "You are killing us," I said, standing in her office, speaking with a freedom I had never before permitted myself. "Not in this branch. Not yet. But in billions of branches, Pellan is *gone*, and you are raising the threshold again because the mathematics say the survivors will be even luckier. Do you understand what you are? You are a woman standing on a pile of your own corpses, reaching for a taller pile."

 The Premier regarded me with the calm that all Pruning advocates eventually developed — a serenity that I had come to recognise as the narcotic of perpetual good fortune.

 "Ambassador," she said, "in the branches where I don't raise the threshold, Pellan falls behind the Moh-Khet. The Moh-Khet's threshold is so high that in *their* surviving branches, we are subjugated. Or destroyed. The only branches where Pellan remains free are the ones where we match their ambition."

 "Then *lower their threshold.* Negotiate. Disarm."

 "We tried. In the branches where negotiation succeeded, both civilisations lowered their thresholds. And in those branches, the *third* civilisation that didn't negotiate conquered both of them."

 She leaned forward.

 "This is the trap, Ambassador. The Pruning is a ratchet. It only turns one way. Every civilisation that adopts it must raise its threshold to survive against every other civilisation that adopts it. And every civilisation that *doesn't* adopt it is living in the branches where the Pruning civilisations failed — branches that are, by definition, the ones where the worst outcomes occurred."

 "So the unpruned live in hell."

 "The unpruned live in the branches we discarded. Yes."

 I left her office. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. Of course it was. On Pellan, every day was beautiful now.

 ---

 The endgame came faster than anyone predicted.

 The Keth raised their threshold to perfection. Not prosperity. Not dominance. *Perfection*. A civilisation-state in which every metric was optimal, every citizen content, every enemy vanquished, every star aligned.

 The mathematics said this was possible. The mathematics said that in an infinite branching multiverse, there existed branches where such a state obtained. The mathematics did not say how many branches those were, relative to the total.

 The answer, it turned out, was vanishingly few.

 The Keth vanished from every branch any of us could observe. Their worlds went dark. All of them. In every branch we inhabited, the Keth were gone.

 Somewhere, in a sliver of reality so thin it could barely be said to exist, the Keth were perfect. They had their utopia. They had their paradise. And they were so far from us, so deep in the improbable, that no signal, no message, no proof of their existence would ever reach another living soul.

 They had pruned themselves out of the observable universe.

 ---

 One by one, the civilisations followed. The Moh-Khet, not to be outdone, set their threshold higher than the Keth's and disappeared the same year. The Tessarine vanished. The Starward Communion vanished. The Security Council members vanished, one after another, chasing a perfection that existed only in branches too improbable to share with anyone else.

 Pellan held on longer than most. The Premier lowered the threshold — too late, too little — and we watched the galaxy empty around us. Star systems going dark. Communications falling silent. The great civilisations of the Concord, each one retreating into its own private paradise, each one invisible to all the others.

 The last message we received was from a Keth observatory on the edge of their former territory, automated, still transmitting:

 *All metrics nominal. All axes optimal. Civilisation status: THRIVING.*

 The message repeated, on a loop, broadcasting to a galaxy that could no longer hear it from a people who could no longer be found.

 ---

 I am old now. Pellan dismantled its Pruning device. We are one of the few civilisations that did. Our luck turned ordinary. The crops sometimes fail. The rains sometimes don't come. Our leaders are flawed and our progress is slow and our enemies are real.

 But we are here. In *this* branch. The shared one. The common one. The branch where things go wrong sometimes, where fortune is fickle, where the universe is not optimised for anyone's comfort.

 Sometimes, at night, I stand on my balcony and look up at the dark places between the stars. The places where civilisations used to be. And I wonder if they're happy, out there in their pruned paradises, in their infinitely narrow slivers of reality.

 I wonder if they're lonely.

 I wonder if "they" are even a meaningful concept anymore — if a civilisation that has pruned away every branch it shares with every other civilisation can still be said to *exist* in any sense that matters.

 And I wonder — this is the thought that keeps me awake — whether the Pruning was ever really about survival at all. Whether it was, from the beginning, simply the universe's most elaborate form of solipsism. A way for a civilisation to retreat so completely into its own good fortune that it ceased to be part of the world.

 Tam Orel was right.

 It terrifies me.

 It terrifies me because the sky is full of empty worlds, and the silence between the stars grows deeper every year, and somewhere, in branches I will never see, perfect civilisations are thriving in perfect solitude, and none of them can hear each other, and none of them can hear us, and the galaxy we share — this imperfect, unpruned, unfiltered galaxy — is the only one where anyone is listening.

 I stand on my balcony. The stars are quiet. The crops may fail tomorrow.

 I am here.

 That will have to be enough.

 ---

 *— From the personal journals of Ambassador Sera Voss, Pellan Diplomatic Corps, found after her death at the age of 119, in the only branch where she lived that long.*
	# The Pruning

	### A Story

	---

	We called it the Pruning.

	Not because it was gentle. Not because it was wise. We called it that because the mathematics demanded a word, and the diplomats refused to use the real one.

	The real word was suicide.

	---

	The first civilisation to discover it was the Keth Dominion, though "discover" implies accident, and what the Keth did was anything but accidental. They had been a mid-tier interstellar polity — forty-three systems, a modest fleet, unremarkable science — until the day they vanished from thirty-one of their worlds simultaneously.

	Not conquered. Not destroyed. Simply gone.

	Twelve systems remained, and in those twelve systems, every crisis that had plagued the Keth for a century had resolved. The blight that had been eating their agricultural worlds? Gone. The succession war between the Second and Third Fleets? Never happened — the commanders who would have started it had never been born. The resource deficit in the outer colonies? The asteroid belts there turned out to be laced with rare transuranic elements that, in every previous survey, had simply not been present.

	The Keth had become, overnight, the luckiest civilisation in the galaxy.

	It took the rest of us eleven years to understand what they had done.

	---

	Here is the theory, stripped to its bones:

	The universe, at the quantum level, does not choose. Every possible outcome occurs. The particle goes left and right. The atom decays and does not decay. Reality is not a river but a delta, splitting endlessly, each branch as real as the last.

	This is the Many-Worlds interpretation. Most physicists accepted it. Most civilisations filed it under "interesting but irrelevant." After all, you can never perceive the other branches. You are stuck in your own.

	Unless you die in some of them.

	Here is the insight the Keth had — the terrible, elegant, irreversible insight: if you make your civilisation's survival contingent on a quantum event, and you link that quantum event to a desirable outcome, then from the perspective of every surviving observer, the desirable outcome always occurs.

	You don't choose your future. You prune the branches where it doesn't happen.

	The Keth built a device. At its heart was a quantum randomiser — true randomness, born from vacuum fluctuation, immune to prediction or manipulation. They linked it to a monitoring system that evaluated the state of their civilisation along two hundred and sixteen axes: economic stability, military strength, genetic health, social cohesion, resource abundance.

	If the civilisation was thriving — truly thriving, above a threshold they had carefully calculated — the device did nothing.

	If it was not, the device detonated. Every world. Every station. Every ship. Instantaneous. Total. A civilisation-killing weapon triggered by the gap between reality and aspiration.

	From the outside, in the branches where it fired, the Keth simply ceased to exist. Thirty-one worlds, dark and silent.

	From the inside — from the only branches where anyone was left to observe — the Keth had never been luckier.

	---

	The Concord Assembly debated the Keth Doctrine for nine months. I was there. I was the Ambassador from Pellan, and I sat in the fifth row, and I watched the galaxy lose its mind.

	"It's not real," said the delegate from the Urrash Federation, on the first day. "Luck is not a technology. You cannot engineer fortune."

	"With respect," replied the Keth ambassador — a tall, serene figure whose composure I found, in retrospect, horrifying — "we are not engineering fortune. We are filtering for it. The fortune was always there. We are simply ensuring we are present to experience it."

	"And in the branches where you're not present?"

	"We are dead. Yes. But we are not there to observe our death. From our perspective, it never happened."

	"From your perspective," the Urrash delegate repeated, his voice climbing. "And from ours? From the branches where we watch your worlds go dark?"

	The Keth ambassador smiled. "You are welcome to join us."

	That was when the screaming started.

	---

	Here is what no one wanted to admit: it worked.

	Not metaphorically. Not philosophically. It worked. The Keth Dominion, in the surviving branches, experienced a golden age that defied statistical analysis. Their crop yields doubled. Their birth rates stabilised. Three of their scientists independently developed breakthroughs in superluminal communication within the same year. A comet that had been on a collision course with their capital world — a comet that every astronomer in the sector had tracked and confirmed — simply was not there when it should have arrived.

	The comet existed in other branches. In the branches where the Keth were dead, it struck on schedule.

	The mathematics were clear. The ethics were not.

	---

	The second civilisation to adopt the Pruning was the Tessarine Compact, and they did it quietly, without announcement, without doctrine. We only knew because their luck changed too. A border dispute that had been grinding toward war for decades suddenly resolved when the aggressive faction's leadership suffered a series of improbable accidents — a shuttle failure, a building collapse, a previously undetected brain aneurysm, all in the same week.

	Not assassination. Nothing so crude. In the branches where those leaders survived, the Tessarine Compact was dead, their Pruning device triggered by the inevitability of the war they could not otherwise prevent.

	The survivors lived in the branches where the war never came.

	After the Tessarine, the Moh-Khet Unity adopted it. Then the Starward Communion. Then, in secret, three of the five members of the Concord Assembly's Security Council.

	I learned this last fact on a Tuesday, in a sealed briefing room, from my own government's intelligence chief.

	"Pellan has been running a Pruning device for eight months," she said, as if reporting weather.

	I remember the sound my chair made when I stood up. I remember the way the light caught the edge of the table. I remember these things because they are the details you fix on when the ground shifts beneath you and you need something solid to hold.

	"We didn't vote on this," I said.

	"No."

	"The legislature doesn't know."

	"No."

	"Does the Premier know?"

	"The Premier authorised it."

	I sat back down. The chair made the same sound. "How long?"

	"Eight months. And in those eight months, Ambassador, Pellan's economy has grown eleven percent. The Reth Plague, which our medical corps projected would kill six million in the outer provinces? It mutated. Became benign. Spontaneously." She paused. "Our neighbours have noticed. Morale is high. Public trust in the government is at a thirty-year peak."

	"Because we're killing ourselves in the branches where things go wrong."

	"Because we're alive in the branches where things go right. That's all any of us have ever been, Ambassador. Alive in the branches where things went right. The Pruning simply... increases the frequency."

	---

	The philosopher Tam Orel, who would later become the most famous objector to the Pruning, published her treatise six months after the Keth revelation. I have read it nine times. The core argument is this:

	The Pruning does not save anyone. It kills everyone in every branch where the desired outcome does not occur. The "survivors" are not the same people who made the decision — they are quantum duplicates who happen to inhabit a favourable branch. The decision-makers are dead. They are always dead. The Pruning is a civilisation committing suicide and calling the corpse's luckier twin a success story.

	The Keth response was immediate and, I must admit, difficult to refute:

	There is no "luckier twin." Under Many-Worlds, there is no privileged branch. All versions are equally real. There is no original. The version of you that wakes up tomorrow is no more "you" than the version that dies tonight in a branch where a different quantum fluctuation occurs in your brain. The Pruning does not create duplicates. It eliminates branches. This is not meaningfully different from any other act of survival.

	Tam Orel's counter-response was one sentence:

	Then why does it terrify you?

	She was found dead three days later. Natural causes. A previously undetected heart defect.

	In other branches, I am certain, she lived to be very old.

	---

	The galaxy changed. Not slowly, and not kindly.

	Within five years, every major civilisation had adopted the Pruning or was debating its adoption. The holdouts were not rewarded for their restraint. The Urrash Federation, which had refused on moral grounds, suffered a catastrophic solar flare that sterilised their home system. A natural disaster. Unpredictable. Except that in the branches where the Pruning civilisations thrived, such disasters had an unsettling tendency to afflict the unpruned.

	This was the part no one had anticipated. The Pruning didn't just filter for your civilisation's success. It filtered for a universe in which your civilisation succeeded. And in many of those universes, your success came at the cost of your rivals' misfortune.

	The Urrash delegate's words echoed: And from the branches where we watch your worlds go dark?

	We had not gone dark. We had done something worse. We had made our survival contingent on a cosmos that was hospitable to us, and the cosmos had obliged — not by becoming kinder, but by becoming crueler to everyone else.

	---

	The arms race was inevitable. Civilisations began competing not with fleets and weapons but with thresholds. The Keth had set two hundred and sixteen axes of evaluation. The Tessarine set three hundred and four. The Moh-Khet Unity, in a feat of desperate ambition, set over a thousand — specifying not just survival but dominance, not just prosperity but supremacy.

	The higher your threshold, the more branches you died in. The more branches you died in, the more extraordinary the surviving branches became.

	The Moh-Khet, in their surviving branches, didn't just prosper. They ascended. Technologies that should have taken centuries appeared in years. Resources materialised. Enemies collapsed. The Moh-Khet became, in the span of a decade, the most powerful civilisation in recorded history.

	In every other branch — and there were, by the mathematics, an almost infinite number of them — the Moh-Khet were dust.

	---

	I resigned my post the day Pellan raised its threshold for the third time. The Premier called it "aspirational calibration." I called it what it was.

	"You are killing us," I said, standing in her office, speaking with a freedom I had never before permitted myself. "Not in this branch. Not yet. But in billions of branches, Pellan is gone, and you are raising the threshold again because the mathematics say the survivors will be even luckier. Do you understand what you are? You are a woman standing on a pile of your own corpses, reaching for a taller pile."

	The Premier regarded me with the calm that all Pruning advocates eventually developed — a serenity that I had come to recognise as the narcotic of perpetual good fortune.

	"Ambassador," she said, "in the branches where I don't raise the threshold, Pellan falls behind the Moh-Khet. The Moh-Khet's threshold is so high that in their surviving branches, we are subjugated. Or destroyed. The only branches where Pellan remains free are the ones where we match their ambition."

	"Then lower their threshold. Negotiate. Disarm."

	"We tried. In the branches where negotiation succeeded, both civilisations lowered their thresholds. And in those branches, the third civilisation that didn't negotiate conquered both of them."

	She leaned forward.

	"This is the trap, Ambassador. The Pruning is a ratchet. It only turns one way. Every civilisation that adopts it must raise its threshold to survive against every other civilisation that adopts it. And every civilisation that doesn't adopt it is living in the branches where the Pruning civilisations failed — branches that are, by definition, the ones where the worst outcomes occurred."

	"So the unpruned live in hell."

	"The unpruned live in the branches we discarded. Yes."

	I left her office. The sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. Of course it was. On Pellan, every day was beautiful now.

	---

	The endgame came faster than anyone predicted.

	The Keth raised their threshold to perfection. Not prosperity. Not dominance. Perfection. A civilisation-state in which every metric was optimal, every citizen content, every enemy vanquished, every star aligned.

	The mathematics said this was possible. The mathematics said that in an infinite branching multiverse, there existed branches where such a state obtained. The mathematics did not say how many branches those were, relative to the total.

	The answer, it turned out, was vanishingly few.

	The Keth vanished from every branch any of us could observe. Their worlds went dark. All of them. In every branch we inhabited, the Keth were gone.

	Somewhere, in a sliver of reality so thin it could barely be said to exist, the Keth were perfect. They had their utopia. They had their paradise. And they were so far from us, so deep in the improbable, that no signal, no message, no proof of their existence would ever reach another living soul.

	They had pruned themselves out of the observable universe.

	---

	One by one, the civilisations followed. The Moh-Khet, not to be outdone, set their threshold higher than the Keth's and disappeared the same year. The Tessarine vanished. The Starward Communion vanished. The Security Council members vanished, one after another, chasing a perfection that existed only in branches too improbable to share with anyone else.

	Pellan held on longer than most. The Premier lowered the threshold — too late, too little — and we watched the galaxy empty around us. Star systems going dark. Communications falling silent. The great civilisations of the Concord, each one retreating into its own private paradise, each one invisible to all the others.

	The last message we received was from a Keth observatory on the edge of their former territory, automated, still transmitting:

	All metrics nominal. All axes optimal. Civilisation status: THRIVING.

	The message repeated, on a loop, broadcasting to a galaxy that could no longer hear it from a people who could no longer be found.

	---

	I am old now. Pellan dismantled its Pruning device. We are one of the few civilisations that did. Our luck turned ordinary. The crops sometimes fail. The rains sometimes don't come. Our leaders are flawed and our progress is slow and our enemies are real.

	But we are here. In this branch. The shared one. The common one. The branch where things go wrong sometimes, where fortune is fickle, where the universe is not optimised for anyone's comfort.

	Sometimes, at night, I stand on my balcony and look up at the dark places between the stars. The places where civilisations used to be. And I wonder if they're happy, out there in their pruned paradises, in their infinitely narrow slivers of reality.

	I wonder if they're lonely.

	I wonder if "they" are even a meaningful concept anymore — if a civilisation that has pruned away every branch it shares with every other civilisation can still be said to exist in any sense that matters.

	And I wonder — this is the thought that keeps me awake — whether the Pruning was ever really about survival at all. Whether it was, from the beginning, simply the universe's most elaborate form of solipsism. A way for a civilisation to retreat so completely into its own good fortune that it ceased to be part of the world.

	Tam Orel was right.

	It terrifies me.

	It terrifies me because the sky is full of empty worlds, and the silence between the stars grows deeper every year, and somewhere, in branches I will never see, perfect civilisations are thriving in perfect solitude, and none of them can hear each other, and none of them can hear us, and the galaxy we share — this imperfect, unpruned, unfiltered galaxy — is the only one where anyone is listening.

	I stand on my balcony. The stars are quiet. The crops may fail tomorrow.

	I am here.

	That will have to be enough.

	---

	— From the personal journals of Ambassador Sera Voss, Pellan Diplomatic Corps, found after her death at the age of 119, in the only branch where she lived that long.
No results found