2025-06-06 Journal Entry

This is basically just a brain dump for some changes I want to make to the novel draft. I don’t yet know how this is going to go, so here we are. The change I think I want to make is that the oracles should in some way operate like the mushi-shi — a kind of underground connection of people. And instead of being worshipped, they’re almost like anti-historians — futurists or something, just not in our conventional usage of the term. But the thing about seeing the future is that it cannot be changed, I suppose much like the past. All time is all time. They’re not, it should also be mentioned, entirely like the aliens from Slaughterhouse Five. They’re fully human, with fully human failings: they can see only small bits, operate in ways that they have capacity for. They are not gods. That is still the tragedy of the Wayfarer, that he must see and know and operate his role in the cosmic drama. It’s in some ways about the feebleness of the human condition, that we cannot change what we are doomed to end. The oracles also don’t know when and where and how things happen. They can trade stories, do their best to pin things together, but they do not have a full view of the world.

And on the other side, the hatred for oracles is in a way a hatred of man. The oracles know because they know the hearts of men. Or do they? Is what the oracles see actually true?

Anyways. So there’s this underground whisper network of oracles. We don’t want to know our futures, we want to know the futures we want. False oracles abound. And how does one know a false oracle from true? They wait.

The subplot of the boy and the girl is likely that the girl needs to save his family, however the boy’s father forbids the intervention of oracles, so she does so in secret. The boy sees her work and knows. What is the family’s dilemma? Something where a binary choice is made — either the father or the family, and the oracle is the angel of death.