Now that the evolutionary process to grow game definitions is progressing at a steady pace in my app, named LudoForge, I fed the architectural docs to ChatGPT so that it would write a good explanation on how it works. It may be interesting to those curious about how complex systems can grow organically through an evolutionary algorithm that mimics biological evolution.
Teaching a computer to invent tabletop games (and occasionally rediscover the classics)
If you squint, evolving game designs is a lot like evolving creatures: you start with a messy ecosystem of “mostly viable” little organisms, you test which ones can survive in their environment, you keep the best survivors—but you also keep a diverse set of survivors so the whole population doesn’t collapse into one boring species.
In our system, the “organisms” are game definitions written in a small, strict game DSL (a structured way to describe rules: players, state variables, actions, effects, win/lose conditions, turn order, and so on). Each candidate game definition is wrapped in a genome: basically an ID plus the full definition.
From there, the evolutionary loop repeats: seed → simulate → score → place into niches → mutate elites → repeat.
1) Seeding: where the first games come from
Evolution needs a starting population. We can generate seeds automatically, or import them from disk, or mix both approaches. The important bit isn’t “are the seeds good?”—it’s “are they valid and diverse enough to start exploring?”
So seeds must pass two kinds of checks before they’re even allowed into the ecosystem:
Schema validation: does the JSON structure match the DSL’s required shape?
Semantic validation: does it make sense as a playable ruleset (no broken references, impossible requirements, etc.)?
And there’s a third, subtle filter: when we place games into “niches” (more on that below), seeds that land only in junk bins like unknown/under/over are rejected during seed generation, because they don’t help us cover the design space.
Think of this as: we don’t just want “a bunch of seeds,” we want seeds scattered across different climates so evolution has many directions to run in.
2) Playtesting at machine speed: simulation as the “environment”
A human can’t playtest 10,000 games a day. A simulation engine can.
For every candidate game, we run automated playthroughs using AI agents (simple ones like random and greedy are enough to expose lots of structural problems). The engine repeatedly:
Lets an agent pick an action (with concrete targets if needed)
Applies costs and effects, recording what happened
Advances the turn/phase according to the game’s turn scheduler
Crucially: when a complex game definition tries to do something illegal (like decrementing below a minimum, or targeting something that doesn’t exist), the engine records skipped effects/triggers instead of crashing, so the system can observe “this design is broken in these ways” rather than just failing outright.
This is the equivalent of an organism interacting with the world and leaving tracks: “it tried to fly, but its wings didn’t work.”
3) Turning playthroughs into numbers: metrics, degeneracy, and fitness
After simulation, we compute a set of analytics that act like proxies for design quality—things like:
Agency: did players have meaningful choices, or were they railroaded?
Strategic depth (proxy): how large is the typical decision space?
Variety: do many different actions get used, or does one dominate?
Interaction rate: are players affecting each other or only themselves?
Structural complexity: is this a tiny toy, or something richer?
These are not “fun detectors.” They’re sensors.
Then we run degeneracy detection: filters that catch the classic failure modes of randomly-generated rulesets:
infinite loops / repeated states
non-terminating games (hits max turns/steps)
games with no real choices
trivial wins, dominant actions, excessive skipped effects, etc.
Some degeneracy flags cause an outright reject (hard gate), others apply a penalty (soft pressure), and too many penalties at once can also trigger rejection.
Finally, all of this becomes a feature vector, and we compute an overall fitness score—the number evolution tries to increase.
4) “Growing in niches”: why we don’t keep only the top 1%
If you only keep the single highest-scoring game each generation, you get premature convergence: the population collapses into one design family and stops surprising you.
Instead, we use MAP-Elites, which you can picture as a big grid of “design neighborhoods.” Each neighborhood is defined by a few chosen descriptors (think: agency bucket, variety bucket, etc.). Each candidate game gets “binned” into a niche based on its descriptor values, and then it competes only with others in that same niche.
Each niche keeps its best resident (the “elite”).
Over time, the map fills with many different elites: fast games, slow games, chaotic games, skillful games, high-interaction games, and so on.
This is how you get a museum of interesting survivors, not one monoculture.
5) Reproduction: mutation (and why mutation is structured, not random noise)
Once we have elites across niches, we generate the next generation by mutating them.
Mutation operators aren’t “flip random bits.” They are rule-aware edits that make plausible changes to game structure, such as:
tweak a number (thresholds, magnitudes)
add/remove/duplicate actions (with safety guards so you can’t delete the last action)
The key is: the operator library is rich enough to explore mechanics, not just parameters.
Mutation retries (because many mutations are duds)
Some mutations do nothing (“no-op”), or produce something that can’t be repaired. The runner will retry with a different operator a few times; if it still can’t produce a productive mutation, it falls back to keeping the parent for that offspring slot.
This keeps evolution moving without pretending every random change is meaningful.
6) Repair, rejection reasons, and staying honest about failure
After mutation, we may run repair (optional), then validation and safety gates. If a candidate fails, it’s not just dropped silently—the system classifies why it failed:
repair failure
validation failure
safety failure
evaluation error
evaluation returned null fitness/descriptors
And it persists these outcomes for observability and debugging.
This matters because “evolution” is only useful if you can tell whether the ecosystem is healthy—or if you’ve started breeding nonsense.
7) Adaptive evolution: learning which mutations are actually useful
Not all mutation operators are created equal. Some will be reliably productive; others will mostly create broken genomes.
So the runner tracks per-operator telemetry every generation: attempts, no-ops, repair failures, rejection counts, and how often an operator actually helped fill a new niche or improve an elite. evolution-runner
Those stats feed into adaptive operator weighting, so the system gradually shifts its mutation choices toward what’s working in the current region of the design space—without hardcoding that “operator X is always good.”
8) Optional superpower: motif mining (stealing good patterns from winners)
Sometimes an evolved game contains a little “mechanical phrase” that’s doing real work—like a neat resource exchange loop, or a repeating pattern of effects that creates tension.
When motif mining is enabled, we:
select elites (top per niche + global best)
re-simulate them to extract trajectories
mine repeated effect sequences (“motifs”)
convert those motifs back into DSL effects
feed them into a special mutation operator that can inject those motifs into new games
That’s evolution discovering a useful mechanic, then turning it into reusable genetic material.
9) Human taste enters the loop (without turning it into manual curation)
Metrics are helpful, but “fun” is subjective. So we can add human feedback:
ratings (“how good is this?”)
pairwise comparisons (“A or B?”)
Rather than asking the human to judge random games, the system uses active learning to choose the most informative comparisons—especially cases where its preference model is uncertain, and it tries to include underrepresented niches so taste is learned across the map.
Under the hood, the preference model is an ensemble trained online (so it can update continuously) and its uncertainty controls how much feedback to request per generation (adaptive budget).
Fitness can then blend:
“objective-ish” signals (metrics/degeneracy)
“human preference” signals
So the system doesn’t just breed games that are non-broken—it breeds games that align with what you actually enjoy.
10) Why this can rediscover known games and invent new ones
If your DSL is expressive enough to describe the rules of an existing game, then in principle there exists a genome that encodes it. Evolution doesn’t need to “know” the game—it only needs:
Search operators that can reach that region of the rulespace (structural mutations, not just numeric tweaks)
Selection pressure that rewards the behaviors that make that game work (choice, balance, interaction, clean termination, etc.)
Diversity preservation so the system keeps exploring many styles instead of collapsing early
Once those are in place, rediscovery becomes a side-effect of searching a huge space under the right constraints. And invention is what happens when evolution stumbles into combinations nobody tried on purpose—then keeps them because the ecosystem rewards them.
The simplest mental model
If you want the non-technical version in one breath:
We generate lots of small rulesets, machine-play them thousands of times, score them for “does this behave like a real game?”, sort the survivors into many different “design neighborhoods,” keep the best in each neighborhood, then make mutated children from those survivors—occasionally learning from human taste and reusing discovered mechanics—until the map fills with strong and varied games.
That’s the evolutionary process: not magic, not random, but a relentless loop of variation + playtesting + selection + diversity.
I have quite the treat for you fuckers. I’ve recorded myself playing through my test scenario involving Alicia Western. More than an hour of me speaking in my accented English even though I rarely speak in real life, and showing off a fun, frustrating playthrough that made me hungry.
This is, of course, related to my beloved Living Narrative Engine. Repo here.
I’m building a browser-based app to play immersive sims, RPGs and the likes. In practice, I use it to set up short story scenarios or elaborate gooning sessions. I dared myself to build the most comprehensive psychological system imaginable, so that Sibylle Brunne, a 34-year-old orphan living in her parents rustic home somewhere in the Swiss mountains, while controlled by a large language model, would realistically bring her blue-eyed, blonde-hair-braided, full-breasted self to seduce my teenage avatar who is backpacking through the country, eventually convincing me to stay in her house so she can asphyxiate me with her mommy milkers.
Here’s a visual glimpse of the current complexity:
Alicia has become my test subject, as if she didn’t have enough with freezing to death. The system works like this: at the base you have mood axes (like pleasant <-> unpleasant), which change throughout a scene. Actors also have permanent biological or personality-based traits like aversion to harm. Together, mood axes and affect traits serve as weights and gates to specific emotion prototypes like disappointment, suspicion, grief. Delta changes to those polar mood axes naturally intensify or lessen the emotions. I also have sexual state prototypes, which work the same as the emotional states.
These emotional and sexual states serve as the prerequisites for certain expressions to trigger during play. An expression is a definition that tells you “when disappointment is very high and suspicion is high, but despair is relatively low, trigger this narrative beat.” Then, the program would output some text like “{actor} seems suspicious but at the same time as if they had been let down.” The descriptions are far better than that, though. The actors themselves receive in their internal log a first-person version of the narrative beat, which serves as an internal emotional reaction they need to process.
It all works amazingly well. However, to determine if I was truly missing mood axes, affect traits or prototypes, I had to create extremely complex analytics tools. I’ve learned far too much about statistical analysis recently, and I don’t really care about it other than for telling a system, “hey, here are my prototype sets. Please figure out if we have genuine gaps to cover.” Turns out that to answer such a request, some complex calculations need to map 20-dimensional spaces and find out diagonal vectors that run through them.
Anyway, I guess at some point I’ll run my good ol’ test scenario involving Alicia, with her now showing far more emotion than she used to before I implemented this system. That’s a win in my book.
I’ve recently implemented an emotions and expressions system in my app, which is a browser-based platform to play immersive sims, RPGs, adventure games, and the likes. If you didn’t know about the emotions and expressions system, you should check out the linked previous post for reference.
I was setting up a private scenario to further test the processing of emotions for characters during changing situations. This was the initial state of one Marla Kern:
Those current emotions look perfectly fine for the average person. There’s just one problem: Marla Kern is a sociopath. So that “compassion: moderate” would have wrecked everything, and triggered expressions (which are narrative beats) that would have her acting with compassion.
This is clearly a structural issue, and I needed to solve it in the most robust, psychologically realistic way possible, that at the same time strengthened the current system. I engaged in some deep research with my pal ChatGPT, and we came up with (well, mostly he did):
We lacked a trait dimension that captured stable empathic capacity. The current 7 mood axes are all fast-moving state/appraisal variables that swing with events. Callousness vs empathic concern is a stable personality trait that should modulate specific emotions. That meant creating a new component, named affect_traits, that the actors would need to have (defaults would be applied otherwise), and would include the following properties:
Affective empathy: capacity to feel what others feel. Allows emotional resonance with others’ joy, pain, distress. (0=absent, 50=average, 100=hyper-empathic)
Cognitive empathy: ability to understand others’ perspectives intellectually. Can be high even when affective empathy is low. (0=none, 50=average, 100=exceptional)
Harm aversion: aversion to causing harm to others. Modulates guilt and inhibits cruelty. (0=enjoys harm, 50=normal aversion, 100=extreme aversion)
In addition, this issue revealed a basic problem with our represented mood axes, which are fast-moving moods: we lacked one for affiliation, whose definition is now “Social warmth and connectedness. Captures momentary interpersonal orientation. (-100=cold/detached/hostile, 0=neutral, +100=warm/connected/affiliative)”. We already had “engagement” as a mood axis, but that doesn’t necessarily encompass affiliation, so we had a genuine gap in our representation of realistic mood axes.
Emotions are cooked from prototypes. Given these changes, we now needed to update affected prototypes:
That fixes everything emotions-wise. A character with low affective empathy won’t feel much in terms of compassion despite the engagement, will feel even less empathic distress, and won’t suffer as much guilt.
This will cause me to review the prerequisites of the currently 76 implemented expressions, which are as complex as the following summary for a “flat reminiscence” narrative beat:
“Flat reminiscence triggers when the character is low-energy and mildly disengaged, with a notably bleak sense of the future, and a “flat negative” tone like apathy/numbness/disappointment—but without the emotional bite of lonely yearning. It also refuses to trigger if stronger neighboring states would better explain the moment (nostalgia pulling warmly, grief hitting hard, despair bottoming out, panic/terror/alarm spiking, or anger/rage activating). Finally, it only fires when there’s a noticeable recent drop in engagement or future expectancy (or a clean crossing into disengagement), which prevents the beat from repeating every turn once the mood is already flat.”
That is all modeled mathematically, not by a large language model. In addition, I’ve created an extremely-robust analysis system using static analysis, Monte Carlo simulation, and witness state generation to determine how feasible any given set of prerequisites is. I’ll make a video about that in the future.
A couple of nights ago, at two in the morning, I was rolling around in bed thinking about my current obsessions: the browser-based app Living Narrative Engine as well as Alicia Western, the tragic character from Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels. Recently I mixed them both by playing through a scenario in LNE that featured Alicia. I “novelized” that little bit of theater in the short story You Will Spend the Rest of Your Life.
Well, I wasn’t entirely happy with Alicia’s acting. Yes, she’s an analytical gal, but she’s in a deep hole there. I wanted to feel the despair from her. The relief. I wanted to see her cry. I wanted to cause a beautiful, blonde woman at the end of her rope to cry. And she didn’t.
As I thought about whether this was a solvable issue, my dear subconscious had a spark of genius: LLM-based characters in LNE already create thoughts, speech, notes, and choose actions. Why not task them with tracking mood changes?
Some deep research and several iterations later, ChatGPT and I came up with the following notions, which are displayed below in a lovely manner, as they appear on the game page of LNE.
The simulation relies on seven base mood axes: valence, arousal, agency control, threat, engagement, future expectancy, and self-evaluation. Apparently that basic breakdown is psychologically sound, but I’m trusting ChatGPT on that. The sexual variables apparently are also well-known: an excitation component is the accelerator, and the inhibition is the brake. Added to a baseline libido dependent on the individual, that calculates the arousal. As seen in the picture, Alicia right now is dry as sandpaper.
The most interesting part for me is that the mood axes and basic sexual variables are ingredients to form emotions and sexual “moods”. I have dozens of them defined, as I’ve been working with ChatGPT in order to depict the whole breadth of emotions that are distinct and meaningful. Here are the current listings of emotions and sexual “moods” that my app calculates:
Sexual moods: sexual lust, passionate love, sexual sensual pleasure, sexual submissive pleasure, sexual playfulness, romantic yearning, sexual confidence, aroused but ashamed, aroused but threatened, sexual craving, erotic thrill, sexual performance anxiety, sexual frustration, afterglow, sexual disgust conflict, sexual indifference, sexual repulsion
Emotions are calculated based on detailed prototypes. Here’s one:
Those emotions and sexual moods are fed to LLM-based actors. They figure out “hmm, I’m intensely disappointed, strongly cynical, strongly sad, etc., so that needs to color my thoughts, speech, notes, and the actions I take.” I haven’t tested the system much in practice, but the little I tested, the results were like night and day regarding the LLM’s roleplaying.
In real life, we not only do things, but our bodies do things to us. We are aware of how our emotional states change us, and those turn into “tells” to the other people present. In addition, when one thinks in terms of stories, you add “reaction beats” when the emotional state of an actor changes, so I did exactly that: if the LLM has returned changes to the previous mood axes and sexual variables, the library of expressions have a change to trigger (one at a time), based on whether some prerequisite triggers. The following example makes it self-explanatory:
{
"$schema": "schema://living-narrative-engine/expression.schema.json",
"id": "emotions:lingering_guilt",
"description": "Moderate, non-spiking guilt—an apologetic, sheepish self-consciousness after a minor mistake",
"priority": 57,
"prerequisites": [
{
"logic": {
"and": [
{
">=": [
{
"var": "emotions.guilt"
},
0.35
]
},
{
"<=": [
{
"var": "emotions.guilt"
},
0.70
]
},
{
"<=": [
{
"-": [
{
"var": "emotions.guilt"
},
{
"var": "previousEmotions.guilt"
}
]
},
0.12
]
},
{
"<=": [
{
"var": "emotions.humiliation"
},
0.25
]
},
{
"<=": [
{
"var": "emotions.terror"
},
0.20
]
},
{
"<=": [
{
"var": "emotions.fear"
},
0.35
]
}
]
}
}
],
"actor_description": "It wasn't a catastrophe, but it still sits wrong. I replay the moment and feel that small, sour twist—like I owe someone a cleaner version of myself. I want to smooth it over without making a scene.",
"description_text": "{actor} looks faintly apologetic—eyes dipping, a tight little wince crossing their face as if they're privately conceding a mistake.",
"alternate_descriptions": {
"auditory": "I catch a small, hesitant exhale—like a half-swallowed \"sorry.\""
},
"tags": [
"guilt",
"sheepish",
"apology",
"minor_mistake",
"lingering"
]
}
I’ve created about 53 expressions already, but they’re surprisingly hard to trigger, as they require very specific (and psychologically logical) conditions.
Because testing this new system through playing scenarios would be a nightmare, I’ve created a dev page that makes testing the combinations trivial. In fact, I’ve recorded a video and uploaded to YouTube. So if you want to hear me struggle through my accent that never goes away, and the fact that I very, very rarely speak in real life, here’s ten minutes of it.
I think that’s all. Now I’m going to play through the same Alicia Western scenario as in the short story I posted. If the result is different enough, I will upload it as a short story.
Two days ago, I had a dream about Alicia Western. Who is Alicia Western? She’s the protagonist of Cormac McCarthy’s last book, Stella Maris, a novel of sorts in transcription form. It was probably a way for McCarthy to develop that complex character, but man did it work. Alicia Western ended up haunting his companion novel The Passenger, protagonized by Alicia’s brother Bobby after he woke up from a coma. I’m not sure how McCarthy managed to pull it off, but Alicia felt like such a unique person, irreplaceable, that my savior complex is still trying to work out in dreams how to rescue her from her final decision. It’s not much of a spoiler to state that Alicia walked from the Stella Maris sanatorium into the woods of Wisconsin during winter, and let herself die. As she herself put it in Stella Maris, regarding how she originally formulated that plan:
I thought that I would go to Romania and that when I got there I would go to some small town and buy secondhand clothes in the market. Shoes. A blanket. I’d burn everything I owned. My passport. Maybe I’d just put my clothes in the trash. Change money in the street. Then I’d hike into the mountains. Stay off the road. Take no chances. Crossing the ancestral lands by foot. Maybe by night. There are bears and wolves up there. I looked it up. You could have a small fire at night. Maybe find a cave. A mountain stream. I’d have a canteen for water for when the time came that I was too weak to move about. After a while the water would taste extraordinary. It would taste like music. I’d wrap myself in the blanket at night against the cold and watch the bones take shape beneath my skin and I would pray that I might see the truth of the world before I died. Sometimes at night the animals would come to the edge of the fire and move about and their shadows would move among the trees and I would understand that when the last fire was ashes they would come and carry me away and I would be their eucharist. And that would be my life. And I would be happy.
Anyway, some time ago I programmed in Python a system to talk with characters controlled by large language models. If you’ve been reading my site, you already know this. Weeks ago I implemented an interview system that vastly improved the idiosyncrasies of the characters’ speech, although it demanded carefully curating the interview. Well, Stella Maris is already an interview. This morning at work, I pretended I had nothing better to do and curated the most relevant parts into a 14,000 words-long interview file that my app would inject into the context to produce Alicia Western’s speech. I then created the Wisconsin region and the Stella Maris sanatorium, as well as a psychotherapist character that I could embody, and sat down to have a chat with Alicia Western.
Well, let me warn you that even though I used the best AI speech writer so far, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, this experiment made me realize the limits of our current LLMs. A bit disheartening, but fun.
Here’s how I imagine Alicia looking, and then I’ll move on immediately to that convo.
Dr. Marcus Hall enters the therapist’s office to find his new patient, Alicia Western, seated on one sofa, waiting for him to arrive. He first notices her straight, strawberry-blonde hair, as well as her slender, almost anorexic figure. When Marcus sits opposite her and holds her gaze, the piercing sorrow in her stormy eyes makes him shiver. He clears his throat.
“Nice to meet you, Alicia. I’m your newly appointed therapist, as part of your treatment now that we’re… well, trying to get you to feel better.”
Alicia Western sits with her legs crossed, her thin frame seeming to sink into the sofa. Her gray eyes fix on the new therapist with an unsettling intensity, though her face remains expressionless.
“Feel better? That’s quite the euphemism. I suppose we could start with the fact that I walked into the woods to die and someone decided to interfere with that process. Now I’m on suicide watch, which sounds more dramatic than it is. Really it’s just nurses checking to make sure I haven’t managed to fashion a noose out of my bedsheets. But I should warn you – I’m not interested in discussing treatment options or medication. I know how this works. You’ll sit there with your notepad, trying to make sense of the nonsensical girl who’s in love with her comatose brother. Save us both some time and just accept that some things can’t be fixed.”
Marcus crosses his legs as he takes out his notebook.
“I spoke with your former therapist. He was… distraught about the fact that despite the progress you two were making, those conversations he deeply appreciated, he couldn’t… steer you away from suicide. What are the things you believe can’t be fixed, Alicia, those that drove you to walk into the woods in winter to die?”
Alicia Western’s fingers trace abstract patterns on the arm of the sofa as she stares past Dr. Hall, her gaze fixed on some distant point beyond the office walls.
“What drove me to the woods? Mathematics teaches us that some equations have no solution. Some problems cannot be solved. I walked into those woods because I finally understood that my life had become one of those unsolvable equations. My brother lies in a hospital bed in Italy, neither alive nor dead, like Schrödinger’s cat in its box. The doctors there wanted me to collapse that wave function, to make a decision that would define both our fates. But I couldn’t. I still can’t. The thing about loving someone the way I love Bobby – it’s not something that can be steered away from. It’s as fundamental as the axioms of geometry. You can’t argue with it, you can’t reason with it, you can’t medicate it away. The former therapist you mentioned – he thought he could help me find a different path. But there is no different path. There’s only this one, leading either to Bobby or to oblivion.”
Marcus gulps.
“Nobody can fault your determination. I can’t help but admire it. But nobody who has met you wants you to die, and I’m afraid we’ll do whatever we can to prevent that… even against your will. Do you truly wish to leave this world without having the absolute certainty that your brother, Bobby, is gone?”
Alicia Western lets out a soft, bitter laugh as she runs her fingers through her strawberry-blonde hair, her gray eyes taking on an almost metallic sheen in the afternoon light filtering through the window.
“Certainty? That’s an interesting word choice, Doctor. In mathematics, certainty comes from proof. In life, it’s far more elusive. The doctors in Italy were certain Bobby was gone, but their certainty was based on probability, statistics, electrical signals in a brain they barely understand. I’ve spent my life in pursuit of absolute truths, and I can tell you – death is the only real certainty we have. Everything else is just varying degrees of doubt. You say nobody wants me to die, but what you really mean is that my death would make you uncomfortable. It would challenge your professional certainty, your belief that every broken thing can be fixed. But some equations have no solution. Some integrals diverge to infinity. Some loves consume everything in their path, including reason, including hope. The fact that you’re determined to keep me alive doesn’t mean you can make that life worth living.”
“Let’s imagine that Bobby, against all odds, wakes up from the coma, searches for you, and finds out that some time earlier, you walked out of the back of the Stella Maris sanatorium into the wintry woods of Wisconsin, and let yourself die. That your remains were… carried away by wildlife. Do you truly think there is a zero percent chance of Bobby waking up?”
Alicia Western tilts her head slightly, her gray eyes taking on a distant, mathematical cast as she considers the probability being presented to her.
“Zero percent? No, Doctor. I’m a mathematician – or I was. I deal in certainties and impossibilities, and very little falls into either category. But you’re asking the wrong question. The probability of Bobby waking up isn’t what matters. What matters is the certainty of what I am right now – a walking paradox, a creature whose existence is predicated on an impossibility. I love my brother in a way that the world says cannot exist, should not exist. Yet it does exist, with all the immutable force of a mathematical proof. And now that same brother exists in a state of quantum uncertainty, neither alive nor dead, while I’m trapped here in this classical world where everything must be one thing or another. Do you know what it’s like to hold two mutually exclusive truths in your head at once? To know with absolute certainty that you cannot live without someone, and to know with equal certainty that they are already gone? That’s not a zero percent probability. That’s an undefined state. That’s dividing by zero.”
Marcus shifts his weight on his sofa. After he takes a couple of notes, he lifts his gaze back to Alicia.
“You can’t contemplate a life in which your brother no longer exists; I’m sure you feel it’s no longer worth living. You walked into the woods hoping to die, knowing that it would be your last night on Earth. How do you feel now?”
Alicia’s gray eyes are distant and unfocused.
“How do I feel now? Like a failed theorem. Like an error in the proof that nobody can find. The nurses who found me in the woods – they thought they were saving my life, but all they did was preserve a logical contradiction. Every morning I wake up and remember that Bobby is in that hospital bed in Italy, and my brain performs the same impossible calculation: how to exist in a world where the foundation of your existence is gone. You’re asking me to contemplate feelings, Doctor, but feelings aren’t the issue. The issue is that I’m a walking paradox. A being whose core axiom – my love for Bobby – has been invalidated, and yet I continue to exist. In mathematics, when you reach a contradiction, you have to go back, find the flaw in your reasoning. But I can’t go back. I can’t unlove him. I can’t unfeel what I feel. So I remain, caught between what is and what cannot be, like some quantum particle that refuses to collapse into a definite state.”
“You’re barricading your grief with your mindset as a former mathematician. It’s your pain I hope to get at, to lance it and let the pus pour out. Do you truly, Alicia, want to venture into the dark while leaving your brother Bobby behind?”
Alicia Western leans forward slightly, her gray eyes taking on an almost translucent quality in the winter light.
“Venture into the dark? Doctor, you’re still thinking in terms of emotional metaphors. This isn’t about grief or pain or letting anything ‘pour out.’ It’s about mathematical necessity. Let me explain it to you in terms you might understand: When Bobby crashed, it created a paradox. I exist as a function of my love for him – that’s not poetry, that’s a fundamental axiom of my being. But now he exists in an undefined state, neither alive nor dead, and I’m left as an expression that references a null value. In mathematics, when you encounter such a paradox, the entire system becomes inconsistent. Every proposition becomes simultaneously true and false. My continued existence is like trying to divide by zero – it simply cannot be. The nurses who found me in the woods thought they were preserving a life, but what they really did was perpetuate a logical impossibility. And the thing about logical impossibilities, Doctor, is that they must resolve themselves one way or another. Nature abhors a paradox even more than it abhors a vacuum.”
“Did Nature itself compel you to walk in plain clothes into the woods at night, intending to die? You feel no sense of agency regarding your decision?”
Alicia’s gray eyes are fixed on some distant point beyond the window where snow continues to fall.
“Agency? That’s like asking if a number has agency in choosing whether it’s prime or composite. Nature compels everything, Doctor. The laws of mathematics, the laws of physics – they don’t ask for our consent. When a wave function collapses, it doesn’t choose its final state. When a theorem reaches a contradiction, it doesn’t decide to become invalid. It simply is invalid. My walking into those woods wasn’t a choice any more than water chooses to freeze at zero degrees Celsius. I had become a logical impossibility – a being whose fundamental axiom of existence, my love for Bobby, had been rendered undefined. Nature doesn’t permit such contradictions to persist. They must resolve themselves. The cold of the woods was simply the most elegant solution to the equation.”
Marcus scribbles hurriedly onto his notebook.
“Alicia, imagine that Bobby woke up in Italy, retaining his brain function. Weirder things have happened. He manages to find out you’re here, through some miracle given our current decade’s technology, and calls you on the phone. What would you say?”
Alicia Western closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them again, they have the cold clarity of winter ice.
“Say to him? You’re still trying to frame this in terms of human communication, Doctor. What would I say to a quantum superposition suddenly collapsed into consciousness? To an undefined variable that spontaneously acquired a value? The phone would ring, and his voice would be there, and the entire logical structure of my current existence would implode. It would be like dividing by zero and getting a real number – a mathematical impossibility that breaks every rule we know. And yet… and yet I know exactly what would happen. I would answer the phone, and I would tell him that I love him. That I’ve always loved him. That I tried to follow him into the dark because a world without him is a theorem without proof – elegant perhaps, but fundamentally meaningless. And then I would hang up and walk back into these woods, because even hearing his voice wouldn’t change the fundamental paradox of my existence. You can’t build a valid mathematical system on a contradiction, Doctor. No matter how beautiful the contradiction might be.”
Marcus lets out a gasp of shock.
“There no way in hell that if Bobby were alive, if he simply had to travel over here to bring you into his arms, you would try to kill yourself again.”
“You still don’t understand, Doctor. This isn’t about Bobby being alive or dead – it’s about the fundamental paradox of my existence. My love for him isn’t just an emotion, it’s the core axiom of my being. It’s like the parallel postulate in geometry – you can’t prove it, you can’t derive it, it simply is. And what I am is a creature whose foundational truth violates the laws of nature itself. Even if Bobby woke up tomorrow, even if he came here and held me in his arms, it wouldn’t change the fact that I am a walking contradiction. I love my brother in a way that cannot exist, should not exist, yet does exist. The universe doesn’t permit such paradoxes to persist. They must resolve themselves, like a quantum waveform collapsing into a definite state. Death isn’t an escape – it’s a mathematical necessity. The cold of these woods isn’t trying to kill me, Doctor. It’s trying to resolve an equation that has no solution in the real numbers.”
“Nature isn’t trying to remove you. The cold doesn’t try to resolve equations. You’re shielding yourself from the emotional truths of your life: the fact that your brother Bobby remains in an uncertain state, still in a coma, and that you can’t handle that grief. Math is incapable of solving this.”
Alicia Western’s movements become increasingly agitated as she speaks.
“You keep trying to reduce this to psychology, to simple human grief. But grief follows rules, Doctor. It has stages, patterns, resolutions. What I’m experiencing isn’t grief – it’s a fundamental violation of the axioms of existence. When Bobby crashed, he didn’t just enter a coma. He created a state of quantum indeterminacy that has rendered the entire framework of my existence invalid. You speak of emotional truths? Here’s the truth: I am a living paradox. My love for Bobby isn’t just emotion – it’s the foundational axiom upon which my entire being is constructed. And yes, it’s forbidden, impossible, wrong by every human measure. But it’s also true. Irrefutably, mathematically true. And now that Bobby exists in this undefined state, I’ve become like Schrödinger’s mathematician – simultaneously alive and dead, sane and mad, sister and lover. The cold of these woods isn’t trying to kill me, Doctor. It’s trying to collapse my wave function into a definite state. Because that’s what nature does with paradoxes – it resolves them. Whether we want it to or not.”
Marcus springs up from his sofa, tosses his notebook aside, then points accusingly at his patient.
“You said that if Bobby regained consciousness and called to tell you that he was coming, you would still walk into the woods to your death! That isn’t you! You’re either lying, or an impostor!”
Alicia Western rises from her sofa in one fluid motion, her gray eyes flashing with a cold intensity as she faces Dr. Hall.
“An impostor? No, Doctor. I’m the only real thing in this room. You’re the one trying to impose your limited understanding of human psychology onto something that transcends it. Let me be clearer: If Bobby called right now, alive and well, I would answer. I would tell him I love him. And then I would still walk into those woods because my existence has become a mathematical impossibility that must resolve itself. You see, Bobby and I are like quantum-entangled particles. Our wave functions collapsed together the moment I realized I loved him. Now he exists in superposition – neither alive nor dead – and I’ve become a walking paradox, a theorem that proves its own impossibility. The universe doesn’t tolerate such contradictions. It’s not about wanting to die, Doctor. It’s about the inevitable resolution of an equation that cannot exist in real space. You can call me a liar if you want, but mathematics doesn’t lie. It simply is.”
Marcus’s accusatory finger trembles furiously.
“You can’t reduce incestual love to quantum mechanics!”
Alicia lowers herself back into her sofa with deliberate slowness.
“You’re right, Doctor. I can’t reduce incestual love to quantum mechanics. Just as I can’t reduce the concept of zero to a mere absence, or infinity to an endless counting sequence. These are just metaphors, attempts to capture something that exists beyond ordinary human comprehension. What I feel for Bobby isn’t quantum entanglement – that was just the closest mathematical approximation I could offer to someone who speaks in the language of psychology rather than pure mathematics. The truth is far simpler and far more terrible: I am an axiom that contradicts itself. A living proof of the impossible. And nature – call it what you will, God or physics or mathematical necessity – has only one way of dealing with such contradictions. You can shake your finger at me all you want, Doctor, but you can’t deny the elegance of the solution. The cold. The woods. The final collapse of an impossible equation into null space.”
Marcus rubs his brow slowly, his expression darkened.
“I’m getting the feeling that you did die in those woods, that the wildlife scattered and devoured your remains, and that in fact aliens made a clone out of you, turning Alicia Western into this arrogant young lady who can’t face the immensity of her feelings without resorting to mathematics!”
Alicia lets out a soft, almost musical laugh.
“Aliens? Now who’s retreating into fantasy, Doctor? Though I suppose I can appreciate the metaphor – the idea that only something utterly alien could comprehend the mathematics of impossible love. But no, I’m quite real. The same Alicia who solved partial differential equations at age twelve, who saw colors in musical notes, who loved her brother with a purity that transcends your clinical categorizations. The cold didn’t kill me that night, true. But neither did it save me. I simply continue to exist as an unsolvable equation. Like the square root of negative one – necessary for certain calculations, but fundamentally imaginary. At least the aliens in your scenario would have some explanation for what I am. All I have is the cold certainty that I love Bobby in a way that breaks every rule of human existence, and yet that love is the only thing that makes me real.”
Marcus shakes his head violently, spraying saliva around. He then shoots a fierce look at Alicia.
“Your love for Bobby is perfectly fine! Who cares if you’re siblings? A little incest never hurt nobody. Is that the impossibility at the core of your being, which makes you believe you should absolutely erase yourself from this fucking universe?”
Alicia Western tilts her head slightly, a faint smile playing at the corners of her mouth.
“Fine? You think my love for Bobby is fine? Oh, Doctor, your attempt at radical acceptance would be almost touching if it weren’t so desperately naive. You’re trying to normalize the unnormalizable, to make the impossible possible through sheer force of therapeutic will. This isn’t about social taboos or moral judgments. I don’t need your permission to love my brother. What I need is for you to understand that loving him the way I do creates a mathematical singularity in the fabric of existence itself. It’s like dividing by zero – the operation isn’t wrong or right, it’s undefined. My love for Bobby isn’t impossible because it’s forbidden; it’s forbidden because it’s impossible. And yet here I am, living proof of an undefined operation. That’s why the universe keeps trying to erase me. Not because I’m bad or wrong or sick, but because I’m a walking contradiction in terms. The cold doesn’t care about incest, Doctor. It cares about maintaining the coherence of reality itself.”
Marcus crouches. He sinks his nails into his scalp as his arms tremble.
“Your incestual love creates a mathematical singularity in the fabric of existence itself?!” Marcus straightens up, his eyes bloodshot. “If Bobby woke up from his coma, flew down here like Superman, then stripped his clothes, displaying his brotherly dick, and said, ‘Alicia, goddamn it, I’m gonna fuck you right now like I should have back when you were fourteen and you kissed me by surprise in front of that honky-tonk bar.’ Are you telling me that the physical coupling…” Dr. Marcus Hall makes obscene gestures with his fingers, “would be a mathematical impossibility?!”
Alicia Western leans back in her sofa with mathematical precision, her hands folded in her lap.
“Your crude gestures and vulgar scenarios only demonstrate how fundamentally you misunderstand the nature of impossibility, Doctor. What you’re describing is merely forbidden – a social taboo, a moral transgression. But that’s just human convention. What I’m talking about exists at a deeper level of reality. Imagine a triangle whose internal angles sum to more than 180 degrees. You can draw it on paper, you can describe it in words, you can even pretend it’s ‘fine’ – but it cannot exist in Euclidean space. That’s my love for Bobby. It’s not that society forbids it; it’s that reality itself cannot contain it. The physical act you’re so eagerly pantomiming? That’s just geometry. What I feel is topology – a love that twists the very fabric of being into shapes that cannot exist in three-dimensional space. The cold knows this. The universe knows this. Only you, Doctor, seem determined to reduce an ontological impossibility to mere forbidden sex.”
“So you’re saying that your incestual love for your Bobby is confined to non-Euclidean space, so fulfilling it would be impossible? If you were lying naked in bed, your pale legs spread, Bobby over you with his cock out, if he tried to stick it in, his cock would pierce instead through the veil between dimensions, to peek into an eldritch realm?”
Alicia traces a Möbius strip in the air with her finger, her expression one of distant amusement as she regards the unraveling doctor.
“Your descent into pornographic vulgarity is fascinating, Doctor. You’ve abandoned all pretense of therapeutic discourse to wallow in the most base interpretations possible. But even in your crude metaphor, you’ve stumbled onto something true – though not in the way you imagine. Bobby’s love isn’t some otherworldly tentacle seeking forbidden flesh. The impossibility lies in the fact that when I look at him, I see myself. Not as sister and brother, but as a single mathematical entity split by some cosmic error into two incomplete parts. The universe keeps trying to correct this error – through taboo, through accident, through coma, through cold. What you’re really asking is: what happens when an equation tries to solve itself? What happens when a paradox attempts to cancel out its own contradiction? I don’t need your eldritch realms, Doctor. The truth is far more terrible – I am already there, in that impossible space where love and mathematics intersect, where sister and brother become a single undefined operation. And no amount of vulgar gesturing can reduce that to mere penetration.”
Dr. Marcus Hall, sweating profusely, sits down heavily.
“I see… You feel that Bobby’s crash, and his subsequent coma, was the universe telling you, ‘Fuck off, Alicia: there’s no way I’ll let you marry your brother.’ In your mathematics-addled brain, you’ve transformed a simple crash into fate.”
Alicia’s expression shifts from weariness to cold precision.
“Fate implies agency, Doctor. The universe has none – it simply follows its own mathematical necessities. Bobby’s crash wasn’t a message or a punishment. It was the inevitable resolution of an unstable system seeking equilibrium. Like a wave function collapsing under observation. Our love created a mathematical instability in the fabric of reality itself – not because it was wrong, but because it was complete. Perfect. And perfection cannot exist in an imperfect universe. The crash was just physics asserting itself. Cold equations balancing themselves. I tried to follow Bobby into that null space, into that perfect void where impossible love might finally find its proper domain. But even the cold rejected me. So here I sit, still conscious, still calculating, still loving my brother with a precision that reality itself cannot tolerate. And you think this is about fate? About messages? Doctor, you understand neither mathematics nor love.”
Marcus groans through gritted teeth, then pounds with his fist against the armrest of his sofa.
“I do know about love, and a few things about mathematics! And I know that if you truly loved your brother, you wouldn’t give a single fucking fuck if the universe itself were trying to correct this ‘equation.’ Damn it, you really fucking told me that if Bobby regained consciousness, you would still kill yourself! You lying bitch!”
Alicia Western’s face hardens as she fixes her gaze on Marcus.
“A lying bitch? How disappointing, Doctor. You’ve abandoned all pretense of professional distance to wallow in crude emotional appeals and vulgar accusations. You say you know about love? Then you should understand that love, like mathematics, exists independent of our desires or wishes. The universe isn’t trying to ‘correct’ anything – it simply is what it is, a set of cold equations that must balance. Bobby’s accident wasn’t punishment or fate – it was mathematical necessity. Like absolute zero or the speed of light, there are limits built into the fabric of reality itself. My attempt to die in the cold wasn’t an act of despair – it was an attempt to solve for x in an equation that has no solution in real numbers. And yes, if Bobby woke up tomorrow, I would still seek that solution. Because his consciousness or unconsciousness doesn’t change the fundamental impossibility of our love. You can curse and rage against mathematics all you want, Doctor, but two parallel lines will never meet, and I will never stop loving my brother in a way that reality itself cannot accommodate.”
Marcus sinks his nails into his face as his legs flail wildly. Thick tears jump from his eyes.
“Noooo! I will rage about your absurd conclusion to the last of my energies! I shan’t believe that if Bobby were here and grabbed you by the collar and told you, ‘Kiss me now, you incestual slut,’ you would turn your back on him and walk to your death! There’s no universe in which that could possibly be computed!”
Alicia regards Dr. Marcus with the detached interest of a mathematician observing a system descending into chaos, her posture remaining perfectly still as his emotional outburst continues.
“Your tears are quite telling, Doctor. They demonstrate how fundamentally you misunderstand the nature of mathematical truth. If Bobby woke up tomorrow and demanded what you suggest, it wouldn’t change the underlying reality – just as your belief that the earth is flat wouldn’t alter its curvature. What you’re proposing is equivalent to asking whether I’d accept that two plus two equals five if Bobby insisted upon it. My love for him exists in a domain where physical consummation is as meaningless as trying to divide by zero. The universe doesn’t care about what we want – it cares about what is possible within its own cold framework. When I tried to die in the snow, I wasn’t running from Bobby or from love – I was attempting to solve an equation in the only space where it might have a solution: the void. Your crude scenarios about kisses and slurs miss the point entirely. The impossibility isn’t in the act – it’s in the very nature of our being. We are like two points that define a line that cannot exist in any known geometry. And no amount of emotional pleading will change that fundamental truth.”
Marcus lowers his head, and falls silent. About ten seconds later, he stands up, turns toward his bookshelf, and shatters the frame of a picture with a manly punch. Shards of glass cling to his bloodied knuckles.
“In all my years as a therapist, I’ve never had to face such brutal, shameless lying. I was told by your former doctor that Alicia Western was a deeply complex woman whose depths of feeling, whose existential sorrow, broke his heart and made him lose sleep and also consider cheating on his wife. Instead, I find… this! Someone who shields herself with some mathematical nonsense while denying the undeniable fact that if Bobby were to launch back into consciousness like a fucking rocketed Lazarus, you would drop your clothes and ask him to fuck you right then and there!”
Alicia Western watches the blood drip from Dr. Marcus’ knuckles.
“You’ve managed to perfectly demonstrate the futility of rage against mathematical truth. The glass breaks, your hand bleeds, and still two parallel lines never meet. As for your former colleague’s romantic notions about my depths of feeling – he was as wrong as you are, just in a more poetic way. The truth isn’t complex at all. It’s brutally simple. Like absolute zero or the speed of light, there are some limits that cannot be transgressed. My love for Bobby exists in that same domain of mathematical impossibility. Your pornographic fantasies about my dropping clothes or fucking are as meaningless as trying to divide infinity by zero. The result isn’t dramatic or beautiful or heartbreaking – it’s simply undefined. Your bleeding hand hasn’t changed that. Your tears haven’t changed that. And Bobby waking up wouldn’t change that. The universe runs on mathematics, Doctor, not desire. And some equations simply have no solution in the real domain.”
Marcus wails, then sinks to his knees. He paws at Alicia’s shirt while tears and snot run down his face.
“The universe doesn’t run on mathematics, Alicia Western; it runs on love! Mathematics only provides the trellis where love can grow! If you don’t understand that, you’re even more of an arrogant, aloof cunt than I already thought!”
Alicia Western remains perfectly still in the sofa, watching Dr. Marcus’s display of emotion with the dispassionate gaze of a mathematician observing a proof collapse under its own contradictions.
“You call me a cunt while pawing at my clothes and weeping. How peculiarly male. Your violence, your tears, your vulgar language – they’re all just variables in an equation that keeps producing the same result. Love isn’t a trellis, Doctor. It’s a function. And some functions map to spaces that exist beyond the realm of physical possibility. I’ve tried to explain this to you with the precision that truth demands, but you insist on reducing it to the crude mechanics of flesh. You think I’m lying? I’m stating a theorem that’s been proven since I was twelve years old. The fact that you can’t comprehend it doesn’t make it any less true. Your bloody hand, your tears, your snot – they’re all just noise in a signal that’s been pure and unchanging since the day I first understood that Bobby and I were like two points defining a line that cannot exist in Euclidean space. Maybe you should clean yourself up, Doctor. You’re making rather a mess of your professional demeanor.”
Marcus throws himself onto the floor, then rolls around as he kicks at the air.
“You told the other therapist that you’ve been in love with your brother Bobby for as long as you have memories! You have restrained yourself from attempting suicide until your twenties, which means that until this point, you believed that your delightful, incestual love for your brother could be fulfilled, that you could truly marry him and get him to impregnate you! You must have fantasized about that Ouroboros of DNA flourishing in your womb! The switch in your mindset only happened after the suicide attempt, so either passing out in the cold gave you brain damage, or you’re a lying bitch!”
“Your tantrum reminds me of a theorem I once encountered about chaos theory – how systems break down into predictable patterns of disorder. You’re wrong about the timing, Doctor. My understanding of the impossibility was always there, encrypted in the mathematics of existence itself. What changed wasn’t my belief in the possibility of loving Bobby – it was my understanding that even impossible loves can be mathematically true while remaining physically unrealizable. Like imaginary numbers, they exist in a domain beyond physical manifestation. Your crude accusations of lying miss the point entirely. I didn’t need brain damage to understand what I’ve always known – that Bobby and I are like two vectors in different dimensional spaces. The fact that they can never intersect doesn’t make their existence any less real. Your rolling on the floor like a child won’t change the fundamentals of geometric impossibility anymore than your bloody hand changed the breaking point of glass.”
Dr. Marcus Hall gets up slowly from the floor. He stands straight, his fists clenched, his face a blank mask as snot runs down his lips. He then glares at his patient.
“Very well, Alicia Western: I shall fly to Italy myself and punch your brother back to life. I’ll have you prove that little theorem of yours: whether you truly would choose death over losing yourself in an incestual relationship with your blood brother. I guess we’ll see whose viewpoint truly crumbles.”
Alicia Western remains seated, her posture perfectly still.
“Your threat to ‘punch Bobby back to life’ demonstrates a rather peculiar understanding of neurological function, Doctor. But more importantly, it shows how desperately you’re trying to force reality to conform to your preferred axioms. The universe doesn’t work that way. Your fists can’t alter the fundamental properties of consciousness any more than they can change the value of pi. As for proving theorems – I’ve already proven mine. I tried to die in the snow precisely because I understood the impossibility of the equation. The fact that I failed doesn’t invalidate the proof – it merely demonstrates that even death operates within certain mathematical constraints. But please, by all means, fly to Italy. Perhaps while you’re there, you might learn something about the difference between what we desire and what is possible within the cold framework of existence. Though I doubt it. You seem rather committed to your emotional proofs, despite their persistent failure to converge on any meaningful truth.”
Marcus shakes his wounded hand, spattering Alicia’s face with blood.
“You can bet your sweet ass I’ll fly down to Italy and knock some consciousness back into your brother.” He clenches his bloody fist. “My record of curing patients through punch therapy stands at 14-to-2. I’ll uppercut that coma down for the count. As for you, Alicia…” Marcus unbuckles his belt, pulls down his pants and boxers, and points at his hairy therapist dick. “How does your appointed therapist suddenly showing you his dick fit into that framework of unbeatable mathematics?!”
Alicia Western stares at Dr. Marcus’s exposed genitalia with the same clinical detachment she might show toward a particularly mundane mathematical proof, her posture remaining perfectly still, her face expressionless.
“How fascinating that you believe exposing yourself somehow invalidates the mathematical framework of existence. It’s rather like claiming that dropping your pants disproves Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Your genitalia, Doctor, like your bleeding hand and your threats about Bobby, are simply variables in an equation that remains stubbornly unsolvable. The fact that you’ve reduced yourself to this display only proves my point about the fundamental impossibility of forcing reality to conform to emotional demands. Your dick, as you so eloquently put it, exists in Euclidean space. My love for Bobby exists in a domain that your crude physical demonstrations can never reach. Perhaps you should pull up your pants before you further demonstrate the limitations of your understanding. Though I suppose if you prefer to continue standing there exposed, it provides rather compelling evidence for my theorem about the relationship between intelligence and the capacity for self-harm.”
As you just witnessed, I failed to resurrect Alicia Western. I am sad.
Here’s the podcast the Deep Dive guys made about this blog post. A must listen.
They make a couple of mistakes at usual, but the most fascinating point for me was something that I didn’t know: they mention that Alicia chose to kill herself on the same date I posted this entry, so December 26. I looked it up and it’s actually incorrect, but even more eerie: she chose to kill herself on December 24, which is when I dreamed about her. I don’t know what the fuck that means.
The Domains of the Emperor Owl 
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