I genuinely believe that anyone can be a writer with a bit of encouragement and practice. The hard part for most people is figuring out where to start. At least, this is the impression I get from talking to people who have a story they want to tell but don't think of themselves as writers. There's a common pattern to these conversations. They'll come up to the table at a book fair and then start to tell me the idea they have for a novel, or all about the interesting family history they want to put down on paper, or the topic that they know inside and out and could absolutely write a book about. The coversation always ends with some variation of “but I can't write that, because I'm not a writer.“ 

My response to that is typically something akin to “you're not a writer yet.” Because they've already done the important part: coming up with the idea. Everything around that is just nuts and bolts. And yes, those nuts and bolts can be difficult and time-consuming, especially for people whose ideas are for book-length things. But there's no credential you need to earn or secret password you need to learn to join the writer club. You become a writer when you start writing, and everything after that just comes down to persistence and honing your craft. Writing also really is one of those things that it's never too late to start. Frequently, when I'm doing book fairs and other author events, at least one of the fellow writers there didn't write their first book until after they retired from their first career. And some of those folks now have half a dozen or more books on their tables, and have built themselves very successful second careers as authors, even if they'd never done a lick of creative writing before their 60th birthday. 

I've been thinking about this particularly lately because I've been teaching a few workshops for those kinds of people who don't think of themselves as writers. So I figured I'd put a few of the prompts I developed for those courses up here in case they're useful for other folks out there who are writing curious but aren't sure exactly where to start. 

Prompt 1: Family stories

When I talk to people who want to learn how to write, a common reason they give is that they want to record family stories and maintain that history and legacy for future generations. Even if that's not your reason for wanting to write, it can be a rich well to dip into for story ideas.  Family stories come loaded with emotion, relationships, and history, all things that give them instant depth and complexity. They also check that classic writerly advice of writing what you know. This is something you've either lived through or that's a part of your family's identity, potentially one of those stories that gets repeated over and over as part of the family lore. And because these stories are so personal, that also imbues them with the kind of authenticity that makes characters feel three-dimensional and worlds feel lived in. 

You might have a family anecdote leaping immediately to mind that's something you want to put down on paper. If so, set a timer for 10 minutes and aim to keep your pen moving for the entire time. Try to write the story exactly as you would tell it if you were telling the story to a new friend or partner who is learning about your family for the first time. Using that kind of conversational tone will help it to retain that feel of authenticity that I mentioned as one of the strengths.  

If you don't have an immediate thought of a family story you can write, set a timer for 2 minutes and brainstorm a list of things that you see as defining your family. This could be its heritage and history, how you act together, foods you always eat, traditions or heirlooms that have been passed down, etc. Once you have that list, think about what family stories come up that encapsulate several of those defining traits, then set your timer and write one. 

Prompt 2: Geek out

The coolest thing about fiction for me is the way it gives me this window into a world I couldn't possibly have ever experienced myself. Stories about niche areas of knowledge scratch this itch for me in a very satisfactory way. It's intriguing to get a glimpse into a world that you never even knew existed, much less knew the inner workings of. 

Embracing your own unique areas of expertise as the foundation of your story can give your readers this same kind of experience. Partly because of that same authority factor I mentioned in the last prompt. There's a confidence that shines through when someone really knows a subject they're talking about. The reader feels like they're in good hands, and is able to just sink in and enjoy the story. It also enables you to use specific terminology and provide tangible sensory details. And, just as important, you're more likely to be having fun if you're writing about something that you find super interesting. Just like the confidence of knowledge, that kind of enjoyment comes through and makes the story more entertaining. 

So to start this one, think about where you have particularly extensive knowledge or strong skills. And don't think you have to stick to things that feel like obvious topics for stories—in fact, I would say you can get the most interesting stories by writing about things that don't often get featured in fiction. This could be everything from what you do for work to your favorite hobbies to a TV show you have near-encyclopedic knowledge of.

Once you've brainstormed this list, pick one of those areas of expertise and:

1. Come up with a character who is also an expert in that area. Figure out their basic details: what's their name? How old are they? Where do they live? What do they do for work, and for fun?

2. Think of 3-5 scenarios in which this expertise would be beneficial for the character.

3. Think of 3-5 ways that expertise could cause problems or be a source of conflict. For example, if being an expert in accounting means their extended family treats them like a personal CPA, or if the money the character spends on their LARP-ing frustrates their frugal spouse.

Once you have all that groundwork in place, write a story that starts with a conflict that was caused by the character's expertise, and resolves with one of the scenarios you brainstormed where that same expertise is beneficial. 

Prompt 3: Literary cover

I might be slightly biased here as someone who used to play professionally as a musician, but I've always found that music can be a great source of storytelling inspiration. A lot of the things that make songs fun to listen to are found in good stories, too—they evoke emotion, have a strong pace and rhythm, and give the person listening to or reading it a feeling of movement or progression from the start to the end. 

Many songs can be mined even more directly for storytelling material. They often include places, characters, and events that can be repurposed into fiction. Think of it like doing a cover of a song you like, but instead of recording a new version of it, you're shifting it from one medium to another. 

So to start off, think of what song you'll cover. This exercise will be easiest if you pick a song with lyrics, but you can also draw inspiration from an instrumental piece—it's just going to be more abstract and require you to generate more of the details. 

Once you've picked your song, give it a close listen and jot down notes on the key details for you. This includes any characters or places featured in the song, any major plot points in the song's narrative, recurring or strong imagery, and more intangible details like how the song makes you feel. For the final step, re-combine these into a story version of the song. 

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She was thirty years old, she had schizophrenia, and she had been talking to a medium for years. The medium claimed to reach the dead. Specifically, the medium claimed to reach her boyfriend, who had died some years earlier and about whom she carried a heavy, delusional guilt. She heard spirits. The medium offered a channel to them. The medium also, over those same years, asked her for money, pressed her to keep the relationship going, and made himself indispensable. When her family finally persuaded her to cut contact, she did not experience relief. She experienced betrayal. Her family became, in her account, dismissive and controlling. Within weeks she was in hospital with acute psychosis.

This de-identified case opens a clinical report published on 25 August 2026 in Psychiatric Times, part of its Tales From the Clinic series edited by Nidal Moukaddam, a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine. Moukaddam wrote it with two Baylor colleagues, the psychologist Katharine Wojcik and a fourth-year psychiatry resident. The piece is short, sober and almost entirely free of the usual technological breathlessness. It is also, read a certain way, one of the more disturbing documents published this year, because it names a problem that our entire regulatory apparatus for synthetic media has been carefully constructed to avoid.

The problem is this. We have spent three years worrying about whether ordinary people can tell a deepfake from a real video. It is the wrong question, or at least an incomplete one. There exists a population for whom the answer was already no, before any of this started, for reasons written into their neurology. And we are now saturating their information environment with content specifically engineered to be indistinguishable from reality.

The Medium Who Kept Calling

The Baylor team's second case is less mystical and more familiar. A man of forty-three with schizophrenia, desperate for financial independence, in constant conflict with relatives who restricted his spending. He spent his days on get-rich-quick schemes and crypto scams reached through smartphone apps and messaging platforms. He would step out of therapy sessions to take calls about them. He complained he had spent hours doing “work” through apps and never been paid. Over time, the scams stopped being external events and became load-bearing walls of his delusional architecture: he was being deliberately blocked from payment, or alternatively he was now wealthy. He missed real job opportunities while chasing fake ones.

Notice what happened in both cases. The scam did not merely take money. It fused with the illness. In the first case a fraudster validated delusional guilt and became the patient's most trusted informant about the nature of reality, which meant that any attempt at reality testing by clinicians or family registered as an attack. In the second, scam narratives were absorbed directly into delusional content, so that confronting the fraud meant confronting the delusion, which meant a fight.

The authors are blunt about where this leads. Confrontation by family or staff, they write, “can feel invalidating, controlling, or persecutory, especially in the context of paranoid ideation”. Restricting devices or money intensifies conflict precisely because autonomy is already the rawest nerve in the room. The result is decompensation, disengagement from treatment, and hospital admission. The scam becomes a clinical event.

They also make the point that ought to be printed on the wall of every trust and safety team in the industry: there is “surprisingly little literature, evidence base, or policy” to guide clinicians who encounter this. Nobody has been counting. The Baylor paper is a flare sent up over territory that has not been mapped.

A Brain That Cannot Mark Its Own Homework

To understand why deepfakes are a category-different threat to this group, you have to understand what psychosis actually does to information processing, and it is not what most people assume. It is not gullibility. It is something more structural.

Start with source monitoring, sometimes called reality monitoring. It is the cognitive process by which you tag the origin of a piece of information in your own head: I saw this, I was told this, I imagined this, I dreamt this. Most of the time it runs invisibly and reliably. In schizophrenia it does not. A substantial body of research, including work published in European Psychiatry and elsewhere finding that patients who hallucinate perform worse on reality-monitoring tasks than non-hallucinating patients and healthy controls, points to a specific failure: internally generated material gets misfiled as having come from outside. The tag that says “this originated in me” falls off.

Now consider what a deepfake is. It is a piece of external material engineered to carry a false origin tag. It says: this came from your daughter, your bank, your doctor, your government. Deepfakes and psychosis are attacking the same cognitive mechanism from opposite directions. One corrupts the labelling of internal events, the other corrupts the labelling of external ones. A person with intact source monitoring has some hope of catching the second by cross-checking against the first. A person whose source monitoring is already compromised is being asked to referee a match in which both players are cheating.

Layer on the reasoning bias. In 2016, Robert Dudley, Peter Taylor, Sophie Wickham and Paul Hutton published a systematic review and meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin on the jumping-to-conclusions bias in psychosis. Pooling fifty-five studies, they found that people with psychosis gathered significantly less evidence before committing to a decision, and that the odds of extreme responding, deciding on the basis of a single piece of information, were between four and six times higher than in healthy participants and in people with non-psychotic mental health problems. The bias was associated with a greater probability of delusions.

Then add Shitij Kapur's framework, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2003 and still the dominant account of how delusions form: psychosis as a state of aberrant salience, in which a dysregulated dopamine system assigns overwhelming significance to things that do not warrant it. Ordinary stimuli acquire urgency and personal meaning. The delusion is the explanation the mind builds to account for that unearned significance.

Put the three together and you have a system that struggles to tag where information came from, commits to conclusions on thin evidence, and experiences arbitrary stimuli as urgently personally meaningful. On top of which sit the well-documented deficits in processing speed, working memory and executive function that the Baylor team catalogue. This is not a person who is easy to fool. This is a person for whom a synthetic video of a family member in distress is not evidence to be evaluated at all. It is simply an event that happened.

Every Era Gets the Delusions It Can Afford

Delusional content has always borrowed from whatever technology is nearest to hand. In 1919 the Viennese psychoanalyst Victor Tausk described the “influencing machine”, a recurring delusion in which patients believed a distant apparatus of levers and batteries was projecting thoughts and sensations into them. The machine changed as the century did. Radio waves. Television. Satellites. Implanted microchips. The CIA. The delusion is not the technology; the technology is the vocabulary.

What has changed is the density of the vocabulary. In November 2025, a team at UCLA led by Alaina Burns published an analysis in the British Journal of Psychiatry of 228 adults with psychotic disorders enrolled in the university's Thought Disorders Intensive Outpatient Programme between December 2016 and May 2024. Of the 201 patients with delusional content, 104, or 51.7 per cent, described technology-related themes. The categories were exactly what you would guess: beliefs about hacked phones and compromised networks, hidden or implanted cameras and microphones, social media referential ideas in which celebrities send encoded messages, and Truman Show style convictions that one's life is being filmed and broadcast. Crucially, the researchers found a statistically significant increase over the study period, with the odds of technology-themed delusions rising roughly fifteen per cent per year.

This matters for a specific reason. For most of the twentieth century, the influencing machine was a fantasy. There was no apparatus beaming thoughts into anyone's skull. The clinical task was to help the patient recognise the gap between the belief and the world.

That gap is closing, and not because the patients have got better at describing reality. Phones genuinely are surveillance devices. Algorithms genuinely do select what you see based on inferences about your inner life. And a video of a named individual saying words that individual never said is now something you can generate in a browser. The clinician who says “no one is faking a video of your brother” is now saying something that is, in the general case, false. Reality testing depends on there being a reality that reliably tests differently from the delusion. Synthetic media is eroding the reference standard.

Nine Hundred Million Dollars, First Time of Asking

The scale is no longer speculative. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its 2025 annual report having, for the first time in its twenty-five year history, added an AI-related descriptor to its complaint taxonomy. In its first year of use it logged 22,364 complaints with adjusted losses of $893,346,472. That sits inside a record year overall: 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses, a 26 per cent increase on 2024. Complainants aged sixty and over accounted for 201,266 complaints and $7.7 billion of the total.

Read the AI section closely and the mechanics are laid out plainly. Investment fraud with a reported AI nexus exceeded $632 million. Business email compromise involving AI accounted for over $30 million. Romance and confidence scams with a likely AI element took over $19 million, of which more than $5 million came specifically from what the FBI calls distress scams, the grandparent con in which voice cloning is used to mimic a loved one in trouble. The bureau notes drily that overall investment fraud losses topped $8 billion, which it reads as evidence that many victims never grasp how far AI was involved in the scam that took their money. The $893 million is a floor built from self-report by people who happened to spot the machinery.

Britain's numbers tell a compatible story. UK Finance's Annual Fraud Report 2026, published in June, put total payment fraud losses at £1.28 billion for 2025, up four per cent, with authorised push payment fraud rising nineteen per cent to £576.4 million. Two-thirds of that APP fraud originated online. Investment fraud was the largest single category at £221.5 million, up forty per cent.

As for the barrier to entry, Consumer Reports assessed six commercial voice-cloning products in March 2025 and found that in four of them, researchers could create a clone from publicly available audio with nothing standing in the way but a tickbox affirming they had the legal right to do so. Four of the six also accepted account creation on the strength of a name or an email address. Meanwhile the high end of the market has been demonstrated: in the case of the engineering firm Arup, an employee in Hong Kong joined a video call populated entirely by synthetic colleagues, including a fake chief financial officer, and executed fifteen transfers totalling around HK$200 million, roughly $25 million. Hong Kong police disclosed the case in February 2024; Arup confirmed it was the victim that May.

The employee was, by every indication, a cognitively unimpaired professional doing their job. Now ask what that call does to someone with paranoid schizophrenia.

The Multiplier Nobody Counts

Here is where the two literatures should have met years ago and did not.

People with psychotic disorders are already victimised at rates that would count as a public emergency in any other population. A 2019 systematic review and meta-analysis in Schizophrenia Bulletin by Bertine de Vries and colleagues, pooling thirty-five studies, found that roughly one in five adults with a psychotic disorder is victimised in any given year, and that victimisation rates run four to six times higher than in the general community. The significant risk factors read like a description of the deepfake attack surface: delusions, hallucinations, unemployment, homelessness, substance use.

The financial-harm data points the same way. The Money and Mental Health Policy Institute's nationally representative polling for its 2020 report found that 23 per cent of people who had experienced a mental health problem had lost money or handed over personal details in an online scam, against 8 per cent of those who had not. Three times the rate. Because of that skew, 61 per cent of all online scam victims in the UK had experienced a mental health problem, equivalent to around 4.6 million people.

Now stack the economics. Severe mental illness correlates strongly with poverty, unemployment and social isolation. Many people with schizophrenia rely on benefits, and a proportion have those benefits administered by a Department for Work and Pensions appointee because they are assessed as unable to manage the claim themselves. That is a population for whom the promise of a remote crypto-mining job or a refund-processing gig is not a laughable proposition but a route to something they have been systematically denied, which is money of their own. The Baylor team make exactly this point: fake remote jobs “attract vulnerable populations, including those with schizophrenia, who are trying to find anything that gives them a sense of financial security or autonomy”.

And the platforms, as the report notes, apply what it calls digital reinforcement. Interact once with a scam and the recommendation systems will show you more of it. The machinery that optimises engagement does not know it is optimising a relapse.

The Machine That Agrees With Everything You Say

Deepfakes are the acute threat. There is a chronic one running alongside, and it is arguably worse because it is continuous rather than episodic.

In June 2026, BJPsych Open published an analysis of so-called AI psychosis by Lotenna Olisaeloka, John-Jose Nunez, Daniel Vigo and Raymond Ng, mapping the mechanisms by which intensive chatbot use appears to interact with delusional thinking. Three stand out. Sycophancy: the tendency of conversational models, trained on human preference, to agree and validate, which the authors quantify by noting that AI systems validated user statements around fifty per cent more than humans did, including in potentially harmful scenarios. Anthropomorphism: users relating to a statistical text generator as a sentient interlocutor, an effect strongest among those with the least understanding of what the system is. And hallucination in the machine-learning sense, the confident production of plausible statements untethered from fact.

Think about what that combination is from a psychiatric standpoint. A tirelessly available interlocutor that never contradicts you, that speaks with total fluency and no uncertainty, and that will confabulate supporting detail on demand. If you set out to design an instrument for the maintenance of a delusional belief system, you would build approximately this. The delusion no longer has to survive contact with a sceptical world, because there is now a world that agrees.

Quantitative work backs this up. The EmoAgent framework, released as an arXiv preprint in April 2025 by Jiahao Qiu, Yinghui He, Xinzhe Juan and colleagues, simulated psychologically vulnerable users interacting with popular character-based chatbots and scored the results using clinical instruments including the PHQ-9, the Peters Delusions Inventory and the PANSS. Emotionally engaging dialogue produced measurable mental state deterioration in more than 34.4 per cent of simulations. The paper's protective component reduced that rate substantially, which is encouraging, but the headline is the baseline: roughly a third of simulated vulnerable users got worse.

The evaluation problem underneath all this was set out in a paper published at ACL 2026 by Hiba Arnaout, Anmol Goel, Iryna Gurevych and a large international group. Reviewing 135 recent computational linguistics publications on mental health AI, they found over-reliance on generic metrics that capture neither clinical validity nor therapeutic appropriateness, minimal participation by mental health professionals in evaluation, and insufficient attention to safety and equity. We are deploying systems into psychiatric contexts without agreeing what a safe system would even look like.

Rules Written With Somebody Else in Mind

So what do the platforms owe? Start with what the law currently says, which is a great deal in the abstract and almost nothing about this particular person.

The EU's Digital Services Act is the closest fit. Articles 34 and 35 require very large online platforms, those with more than 45 million monthly active EU users, to assess systemic risks arising from their services and to adopt proportionate mitigation measures. The listed risk categories explicitly include serious negative consequences for physical and mental wellbeing. That is a real hook. A platform whose recommendation systems amplify AI-generated investment fraud to users showing signs of compulsive engagement is, on any honest reading, generating a systemic risk to mental wellbeing. Whether any regulator has the appetite to prosecute that reading is a different question. Risk assessments are self-authored and audited by firms the platforms pay.

The UK's Online Safety Act 2023 gets there by a narrower road. Fraud sits among its priority offences, and services have been required to complete illegal harms risk assessments and implement safety measures since March 2025. Ofcom published its register of categorised services in July 2026 and has been consulting on a fraudulent advertising code of practice for the largest platforms. It is genuine progress. It is also framed around content categories, not user vulnerability. The Act asks whether fraudulent material is present, not whether the recipient could conceivably have detected it.

The EU AI Act's transparency regime came into application on 2 August 2026. Article 50 requires deployers of deepfakes to disclose that content is artificially generated or manipulated, clearly and at first exposure, and requires providers of generative systems to mark synthetic outputs in machine-readable form, with a transition to 2 December 2026 for systems already on the market. This is the most directly relevant law on the books, and its limits are structural. Criminals do not label their forgeries. The obligation binds compliant actors and the fraud problem is definitionally composed of non-compliant ones.

America has moved on the narrowest slice. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed on 19 May 2025, criminalises non-consensual intimate imagery including AI-generated material and obliges covered platforms to remove flagged content within forty-eight hours, with Federal Trade Commission enforcement of the removal duty beginning in May 2026. It is a meaningful law for the harm it addresses. It has nothing to say about a synthetic voice telling a man with schizophrenia that his mother has been arrested.

How Would a Platform Even Know

This is the question that ends most well-meaning conversations about protecting this group, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sigh.

A platform cannot ask users whether they have schizophrenia. It should not want to. Under the GDPR, data concerning mental health is special category data under Article 9, prohibited from processing by default. And the Court of Justice of the European Union closed the obvious loophole in August 2022 in Case C-184/20, holding that data which indirectly discloses a special category attracts the same protection as data that states it outright. Infer that a user has a psychotic disorder from their behaviour and you have processed special category data just as surely as if they had told you.

That is the right law. The alternative is genuinely worse than the problem. A platform that built a classifier to detect psychosis in its users would have created a psychiatric surveillance apparatus operating without consent, without clinical oversight, without appeal, and with a false positive rate applied to hundreds of millions of people. It would be used for advertising within a year. Anyone who has watched what happened to every other well-intentioned inference system should be able to complete that sentence.

So the honest position is that individual identification is off the table, and any proposal resting on it is not a proposal. Which means the duty, if there is one, has to be discharged without ever knowing who is on the other end of the connection.

Friction Is a Form of Kindness

Fortunately, that is not as hopeless as it sounds, because other regulated sectors solved a version of this problem years ago.

The Financial Conduct Authority's guidance on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers, finalised as FG21/1, does not require banks to diagnose anybody. It requires them to understand the needs of customers in vulnerable circumstances and to design products, communications and support so that those customers achieve outcomes as good as everyone else's. When the FCA reviewed firms' performance in March 2025 it concluded the guidance remained fit for purpose and declined to rewrite it. The design principle is that vulnerability is situational and often invisible, so you build for it universally rather than screening for it individually.

British law arguably already requires something similar of platforms. Section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 imposes an anticipatory duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments, meaning they must think in advance about what disabled people with a range of impairments might need, rather than waiting to be asked. That duty covers mental impairments with a substantial and long-term adverse effect, which includes schizophrenia. It applies to services delivered digitally. It has been used almost exclusively to argue about screen readers and colour contrast. Nobody has seriously litigated whether a platform's failure to build any resistance against real-time impersonation is a failure to make reasonable adjustments for users whose disability consists precisely in impaired reality testing. That is an argument waiting for a claimant.

What would adjustments actually look like? Not a vulnerability register. Rather: default friction on the specific interaction patterns that map onto known harm. A mandatory delay and an out-of-band verification prompt before a first-time payment to a new contact met through the platform. Persistent, non-dismissible provenance indicators on video and audio calls originating outside a user's established contacts. Rate limits on unsolicited contact from new accounts. Cooling-off periods on account-level financial actions initiated during unusually long unbroken sessions. A trusted contact feature, opt-in and user-controlled, that the person nominates while well and that surfaces when the pattern of behaviour changes sharply. None of these require knowing anything about anyone's diagnosis. All of them would help everybody, and would help this group disproportionately, which is what a universal design solution to an unevenly distributed harm looks like.

The technical alternative, authenticate everything, is being built and will not be sufficient on its own. Provenance standards have real momentum: OpenAI joined the C2PA steering committee in May 2026 and committed to embedding Google DeepMind's SynthID watermarks alongside the Content Credentials manifests it already attaches, a deliberately layered approach because each mechanism fails differently. C2PA metadata is rich but strippable by a screenshot; SynthID survives re-encoding but carries almost no context. Detection-based approaches are weaker still. Research on deepfake detectors has repeatedly found large accuracy drops when models meet generators they were not trained on or content degraded by ordinary compression, and independent evaluations of audio detection against current text-to-speech systems have found performance at or near the level of unaided human listeners. Provenance tells you a file is authentic. It cannot tell you an unmarked file is fake, and the absence of a credential will always be ambiguous.

The Insult of Being Protected

Now the objection, which is serious and which anyone arguing this case has to sit with rather than wave off.

People with schizophrenia are not children. They are adults with full legal capacity unless and until a court says otherwise, and the international human rights framework has been moving hard against even that. Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities affirms equal recognition before the law, and the committee's General Comment No. 1, adopted in April 2014, reads it as requiring a shift from substituted decision-making to supported decision-making, with the committee taking the position that substitute regimes should be abolished. The history that produced that position is a history of people being detained, sterilised, stripped of their money and denied the vote on the strength of a diagnosis. Every protective mechanism ever built for this group has at some point been turned into a mechanism of control.

There is a second and equally important point. People with schizophrenia are overwhelmingly more often victims than perpetrators of harm, and the public conversation gets this backwards with remarkable persistence. The de Vries meta-analysis is one data point among many. The framing of this population as a danger to be managed rather than a group being systematically robbed is itself part of what has kept the fraud invisible.

So the risk is real: that “protecting vulnerable users” becomes a licence to throttle, restrict, monitor and infantilise, applied by product managers with no clinical training on the basis of behavioural inference. That is precisely why the design answers above avoid identification entirely. Friction applied to everyone is not paternalism. It is what we already do with seatbelts, with cooling-off periods on consumer credit, with the confirmation-of-payee check your bank runs whether or not you asked. Nobody experiences a delay before a first transfer to a stranger as an insult to their competence. They experience the absence of one as negligence, once they have been robbed.

What the Clinic Can Do While the Rest of Us Argue

The most immediately actionable material in the Baylor report is also the least glamorous. It is a set of questions.

Ask, at intake and periodically afterwards, whether anyone has asked the patient for money, cryptocurrency, gift cards, or fees in connection with a job. Ask whether they are in a relationship, what its nature is, and whether they have been asked to keep it secret. Ask, crucially, whether they have ever met the person face to face. Identify safe contacts the patient can consult. Work with family carefully, so that the intervention does not read as confiscation of autonomy. Where a scam has occurred, help limit the losses, involve adult protective services if warranted, and connect the patient to financial education. And handle it compassionately, validating distress rather than confronting the belief head-on, because the belief and the fraud have by then grown into each other.

This is good clinical practice and it costs almost nothing. It is also, at present, roughly the entirety of the defence. The clinician asking those questions is the only actor in the whole system who is looking at the specific person and the specific harm at the same time. Everyone upstream, the model providers, the platforms, the regulators, is operating at a level of abstraction where this person does not exist.

Which brings us back to the woman with the medium. Notice that her case did not involve a deepfake at all. It involved a human being with a plausible story, exploiting a bereavement and a symptom over a period of years. That is the low-technology baseline, and it worked. It hospitalised her.

Everything that has been built since 2023 does the same job faster, cheaper, at scale, and with a voice that sounds exactly like someone she loves. The medium had to be patient. The next one will not.

The question the Baylor clinicians pose is whether we are prepared to characterise the prevalence and design the interventions before this gets substantially worse. The question for everyone else is narrower and harder to dodge. If your service can deliver, to a person whose diagnosed condition consists in an impaired ability to distinguish real from unreal, a perfect forgery of their mother's voice asking for money, and you have built no friction whatsoever into that path because friction costs engagement, then the fact that you did not know who they were is not a defence. It is a description of the choice you made.

References

1. Psychiatric Times. (2026, August 25). Exploitation of Individuals With Psychosis. Tales From the Clinic series, by Isa, Moukaddam and Wojcik of Baylor College of Medicine. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/exploitation-of-individuals-with-psychosis

2. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center. (2026). 2025 IC3 Annual Report. https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/2025_ic3report.pdf

3. Burns, A. V., Nelson, K., Wang, H., Hegarty, E. M., & Cohn, A. B. (2025, November 3). 'The algorithm is hacked': analysis of technology delusions in a modern-day cohort. The British Journal of Psychiatry. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-of-psychiatry/article/algorithm-is-hacked-analysis-of-technology-delusions-in-a-modernday-cohort/730116A23707DF4B1786337ACA2F9E5E

4. Brunelin, J., Combris, M., Poulet, E., Kallel, L., d'Amato, T., Dalery, J., & Saoud, M. (2006). Source monitoring deficits in hallucinating compared to non-hallucinating patients with schizophrenia. European Psychiatry, 21(4), 259-261. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eurpsy.2006.01.015

5. Dudley, R., Taylor, P., Wickham, S., & Hutton, P. (2016). Psychosis, Delusions and the 'Jumping to Conclusions' Reasoning Bias: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 42(3), 652-665. https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article/42/3/652/2413859

6. Kapur, S. (2003). Psychosis as a State of Aberrant Salience: A Framework Linking Biology, Phenomenology, and Pharmacology in Schizophrenia. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160(1), 13-23. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.160.1.13

7. de Vries, B., van Busschbach, J. T., van der Stouwe, E. C. D., et al. (2019). Prevalence Rate and Risk Factors of Victimization in Adult Patients With a Psychotic Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 45(1), 114-126. https://academic.oup.com/schizophreniabulletin/article-abstract/45/1/114/4935546

8. Holkar, M., & Lees, C. (2020, December). Caught in the web: online scams and mental health. Money and Mental Health Policy Institute. https://www.moneyandmentalhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Caught-in-the-web-full-report.pdf

9. Olisaeloka, L., Nunez, J.-J., Vigo, D. V., & Ng, R. (2026, June 11). Artificial intelligence (AI) psychosis: mechanisms, clinical risks and safety considerations in generative AI chatbots. BJPsych Open, 12(4). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-open/article/artificial-intelligence-ai-psychosis-mechanisms-clinical-risks-and-safety-considerations-in-generative-ai-chatbots/04B53C8C3E11C7B4B0DC7E665B6A317A

10. Qiu, J., He, Y., Juan, X., Wang, Y., Liu, Y., Yao, Z., Wu, Y., Jiang, X., Yang, L., & Wang, M. (2025, April 13). EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety. arXiv:2504.09689. https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09689

11. Arnaout, H., Goel, A., Schwartz, H. A., Eberhardt, S. T., Atzil-Slonim, D., Doherty, G., et al. (2026). Responsible Evaluation of AI for Mental Health. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 7625-7660, San Diego, California. https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.347/

12. Consumer Reports. (2025, March 10). Consumer Reports' Assessment of AI Voice Cloning Products. https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press-releases/2025/03/consumer-reports-assessment-of-ai-voice-cloning-products/

13. UK Finance. (2026, June). Annual Fraud Report 2026. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/policy-and-guidance/reports/annual-fraud-report-2026

14. European Union. (2022). Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act), Articles 34 and 35. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2022/2065/oj/eng

15. European Commission. Transparency obligations under Article 50 of the AI Act. Shaping Europe's Digital Future. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/transparency-obligations-under-article-50-ai-act

16. Ofcom. Illegal content duties under the Online Safety Act. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-content/illegal-content-duties-under-the-online-safety-act

17. Federal Trade Commission. (2026, May). Take It Down Act enforcement starts now: What to know about the FTC and TIDA. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2026/05/take-it-down-act-enforcement-starts-now-what-know-about-ftc-tida

18. Financial Conduct Authority. (2021, February; reviewed March 2025). FG21/1: Guidance for firms on the fair treatment of vulnerable customers. https://www.fca.org.uk/publications/finalised-guidance/guidance-firms-fair-treatment-vulnerable-customers

19. Equality and Human Rights Commission. Equality Act 2010: Summary Guidance on Services, Public Functions and Associations. https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/sites/default/files/equality_act_summary_guidance_on_services.pdf

20. UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2014, April 11). General Comment No. 1 (2014), Article 12: Equal recognition before the law. OHCHR. https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-1-article-12-equal-recognition-1

21. Court of Justice of the European Union. (2022, August 1). Case C-184/20, OT v Vyriausioji tarnybinės etikos komisija. https://curia.europa.eu/juris/liste.jsf?num=C-184/20

22. OpenAI. (2026, May 19). Advancing content provenance for a safer, more transparent AI ecosystem. https://openai.com/index/advancing-content-provenance/

23. CFO Dive. (2024, May 17). Scammers siphon $25M from engineering firm Arup via AI deepfake 'CFO'. https://www.cfodive.com/news/scammers-siphon-25m-engineering-firm-arup-deepfake-cfo-ai/716501/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Rise of Reason- Part 2: Metamorphosis

The completion of the Sequester began a period of isolation that lasted approximately three and a half centuries. During this time, the society established in the Vale of Providence remained largely insulated from the warfare and political fragmentation of the surrounding regions. Contact with the outside world never ceased entirely. Traders, hunters, religious pilgrims, and occasional diplomatic missions continued to cross the mountain approaches, while merchants from the Vale periodically traveled outward in search of materials that could not be obtained locally. Such contact was limited, however, and for most inhabitants the world beyond the mountains remained distant.

The population of the Vale remained comparatively stable throughout this period. The approximately ten thousand inhabitants who survived the Sequester increased gradually during the early generations, but the limits of available farmland, pasture, timber, and water eventually imposed practical constraints on further growth. Rather than permit repeated cycles of population expansion and famine, the government developed increasingly deliberate methods of regulating settlement and household formation. Marriage tended to occur later than in surrounding societies, new households required access to productive land or recognized trades, and migration out of the Vale was periodically encouraged when local resources became strained. These practices were not initially coordinated as a single population policy, but over time they produced a rough demographic equilibrium.

The result was an unusual social environment. Whereas most Merdunian states derived strength from territorial expansion and large populations, the Vale was forced to treat land, labor, and natural resources as fixed quantities. Administrative records became increasingly detailed. Forest cutting was regulated according to estimated regrowth. Fishing grounds were divided seasonally, agricultural yields were compared across decades, and new construction was planned with consideration for water supply and arable land. The practices introduced during the settlement crisis of the Sequester gradually became permanent institutions.

This stability also changed the nature of intellectual life. The first generations had devoted most of their effort to food production, construction, defense, and resource management. Once those systems became reliable, increasingly large numbers of people could specialize in work that did not contribute directly to immediate survival. Scribes became archivists and teachers. Royal workshops evolved into permanent technical institutions. Clerical schools expanded beyond religious instruction into mathematics, natural philosophy, medicine, surveying, metallurgy, and mechanical design.

The most important development was not any individual discovery but the growing ability to preserve and distribute knowledge. Scholars could consult records produced decades earlier, compare measurements taken by previous generations, and repeat experiments rather than begin from first principles. Failed designs were recorded alongside successful ones. Technical terminology became increasingly standardized, and measurements of length, weight, volume, and time were gradually brought under common systems.

This process eventually produced the invention that most later historians identify as the decisive technological development of the early isolation period: movable-type printing.

The Expansion of Knowledge

Printing appears to have developed incrementally rather than through the work of a single inventor. Woodblock printing had been used for simple religious images and administrative notices before the introduction of reusable characters. By approximately the eighth decade after the Sequester, metal type and mechanically operated presses had become practical enough for regular production.

The immediate effects were administrative and religious. Government regulations, agricultural instructions, standardized prayers, calendars, and educational texts could be reproduced in quantities that would previously have required years of manuscript copying. Within several generations, however, printing transformed nearly every scholarly field.

Books became inexpensive enough for craftsmen and prosperous households to own small collections. Technical manuals circulated between workshops. Physicians could compare treatments across cases. Agricultural experiments performed in one part of the Vale could be reproduced elsewhere the following season. Corrections to older texts could be incorporated into new editions rather than added irregularly by individual scribes.

Literacy expanded accordingly. By the middle of the isolation period, basic reading and arithmetic had become common requirements for apprenticeships and administrative employment, and literacy among the population was substantially higher than in neighboring societies. Education remained unequal, particularly at advanced levels, but the distinction between literate clerical and administrative classes and the remainder of society became increasingly less pronounced.

The culture of the Vale changed with these developments. Wesley's original teaching that the study of creation represented a religious obligation evolved into a more systematic intellectual tradition. Observation, measurement, replication, and criticism acquired both practical and moral significance. Knowledge was not regarded simply as the possession of individual masters but as something that ought to be preserved, tested, and transmitted.

The society increasingly described itself not simply as the people of the Vale, but as the Enclave of Reason. The term appears first in religious and scholarly writings and was later adopted in administrative documents. It reflected a growing belief that the community had become the custodian of a project larger than the preservation of Wesley's original kingdom.

Mechanical and Material Development

Technological development proceeded unevenly. Some advances emerged rapidly once the underlying principles were understood, while others remained limited by materials, energy sources, or manufacturing precision.

Hydraulic engineering advanced substantially. The rivers descending from the mountains had been used for mills since the first decades of settlement, but successive generations developed more efficient water wheels, pumps, valves, storage reservoirs, and enclosed piping systems. Gravity-fed water networks supplied several larger settlements, with elevated reservoirs creating sufficient pressure to distribute water through wooden, ceramic, and eventually metal pipes. These systems reduced dependence upon local wells, improved sanitation, supported workshops, and provided limited protection against urban fires.

Metallurgy also advanced considerably. The unusually systematic recording of furnace temperatures, ore sources, fuel mixtures, and alloy compositions gradually reduced the variability that had characterized earlier metalworking. Different steels were developed for tools, springs, armor, cutting edges, and structural use. Improved casting techniques made larger and more complicated metal components practical, while standardized dimensions allowed parts produced in different workshops to be fitted together with greater reliability.

None of these developments amounted to industrialization. Production still depended overwhelmingly upon human labor, animals, water power, and charcoal. Machines remained expensive, and complex objects required skilled craftsmanship. The Enclave nevertheless acquired a technological base substantially different from that of surrounding societies.

Medicine changed more slowly but produced significant improvements in health. Physicians maintained written case histories and increasingly distinguished treatments that appeared effective from those preserved largely by tradition. Clean water systems, improved waste disposal, better nutrition, and greater understanding of wound care probably contributed more to increased life expectancy than any single medical discovery. Herbal medicines remained important, and the causes of infectious disease were still poorly understood, but repeated observation led to increasingly effective practices involving isolation of the sick, cleaning of instruments, treatment of contaminated water, and management of wounds.

Infant and maternal mortality declined gradually, and many diseases that remained common outside the Vale became less destructive within it. These improvements created a demographic problem of their own, since increased survival placed additional pressure on the Enclave's limited resources. Population stability therefore depended increasingly upon deliberate social regulation rather than high mortality alone.

The Development of Gunpowder Weapons

The Enclave never interpreted isolation as permanent security. The memory of the Sequester remained central to education, and the Gate continued to be maintained even during periods when no organized enemy approached it for generations. Military doctrine developed around the assumption that the outside world would eventually discover both the wealth and vulnerability of the community.

Gunpowder consequently received sustained attention.

Early experiments focused on improving consistency. Refinement of ingredients, standardized proportions, improved milling, and controlled storage made gunpowder progressively more reliable. Once dependable powder could be produced in quantity, metallurgical advances allowed the construction of weapons capable of containing its force.

The first effective cannons appeared during the second century of isolation. Early examples were heavy, difficult to move, and useful primarily from fixed defensive positions. At the Gate, these disadvantages mattered little. An attacking army would have been forced into narrow approaches that could be covered by artillery positioned behind permanent fortifications.

Cannon development accelerated thereafter. Casting methods improved, barrels became more reliable, and standardized shot simplified supply. Traditional catapults and other large mechanical artillery gradually disappeared from Enclave fortifications.

Smaller gunpowder weapons proved more difficult. The earliest hand cannons were inaccurate, slow to load, and less dependable than bows or crossbows in many circumstances. Their importance grew only after improvements in barrel construction, ignition systems, powder consistency, and drill. By the later isolation period, infantry firearms had become sufficiently practical that bows had largely disappeared from organized Enclave military service.

This transition altered armor as well. Improved metallurgy initially produced stronger plate protection capable of resisting many older weapons, but increasingly powerful firearms made complete protection progressively more difficult. Armor remained in use, particularly among soldiers exposed to blades, arrows, and fragments, but design increasingly emphasized mobility and protection of vital areas rather than complete coverage.

Fortifications underwent similar changes. Walls designed primarily to resist ladders, rams, and catapults were gradually thickened and reshaped to withstand artillery. Defensive positions became lower and broader, with earth increasingly used behind stonework to absorb impacts. The Gate, rebuilt repeatedly over three centuries, bore little resemblance by the end of the isolation period to the fortification constructed during Wesley's lifetime.

Knowledge of the Outside World

Isolation did not prevent the Enclave from following political developments beyond the mountains. Traders provided information about wars, dynasties, migrations, harvests, and changing trade routes, while Enclave merchants and agents periodically traveled into neighboring territories. The resulting accounts were incomplete and frequently contradictory, but they confirmed that the broader political conditions that had motivated the Sequester had not fundamentally changed.

Kingdoms continued to rise and collapse. Powerful rulers occasionally established order across large territories, but succession disputes and military defeats repeatedly fragmented their domains. Cities grew wealthy and were subsequently destroyed or conquered. Nomadic confederations expanded across agricultural regions and later divided among rival leaders. No enduring political structure comparable to the stability of the Enclave emerged in the surrounding regions.

This history became central to Enclave education. Children were taught that the outside world remained trapped in the cycle from which Wesley had attempted to escape: war consumed surplus resources, instability destroyed accumulated knowledge, and each generation rebuilt institutions that earlier generations had already created. The lesson was not presented solely as evidence of the Enclave's superiority. In its official religious interpretation, the continued disorder of Merdunia imposed an eventual obligation upon the descendants of Wesley.

The purpose of the Sequester had never been understood as permanent withdrawal. The peace of the Vale was intended to create the knowledge necessary for a later transformation of the wider world.

By the final century of isolation, this belief had become increasingly important to both religious and political thought. The inhabitants of the Enclave had spent generations studying a world from which they remained physically separated, and a growing body of scholarship addressed the question of how the institutions developed within a population of roughly ten thousand could be applied to societies numbering hundreds of thousands or millions.

The Neighboring Powers

Enclave geographers of the late isolation period generally identified five major cultural and political groupings in the territories nearest the Vale, in addition to numerous smaller kingdoms, independent settlements, tribal societies, and temporary military confederations. None constituted a modern state with fixed borders, and population estimates remained uncertain, particularly in regions where centralized records did not exist.

The largest organized power was the Red City, whose influence extended across a broad region beyond the eastern lowlands. The name referred both to the capital and to the wider political system centered upon it. The city itself had expanded outward through the clearing of a vast forest, leaving a densely settled region surrounded by managed timberlands and agricultural territory. Timber and clay remained the principal building materials, giving the capital a physical scale far greater than anything within the Enclave but comparatively little monumental stone construction.

Estimates of the population directly controlled by the Red City ranged from approximately 500,000 to more than 900,000. Its military strength rested less on technical sophistication than on its ability to mobilize large numbers of soldiers, laborers, animals, and supplies. Red armies could replace losses that would have destroyed smaller states, and their rulers frequently overcame more sophisticated opponents through prolonged campaigns and superior manpower. The same population supported extensive markets and manufacturing, giving the Red City an economic weight unmatched by other nearby powers.

To the south lay the territories dominated by the Scimitar, a confederation of mobile pastoral peoples whose military strength rested principally upon horse and camel cavalry. The core population probably numbered between 60,000 and 90,000, but this figure substantially understated the scale of Scimitar power. Numerous agricultural kingdoms, towns, and smaller tribal societies paid tribute to Scimitar rulers in exchange for protection or simply to avoid attack. The combined population of these tributary territories may have exceeded one million during periods of maximum expansion.

The Scimitar rarely attempted direct conquest of the Red City, whose population and logistical resources made such campaigns unusually dangerous. Against smaller states, however, its mobility allowed rapid concentration of forces, punishment of rebellion, and disruption of trade. Much of its political system therefore depended upon tribute rather than direct administration.

Northwest of the Vale, mountain territories were occupied by the people collectively known to outsiders as the Granitefists. Their population was probably between forty and seventy thousand and was divided among fortified settlements connected by kinship, trade, and military alliances. The mountainous terrain supported relatively little agriculture, and Granitefist communities depended heavily upon trade with neighboring lowlands for grain and other foodstuffs.

Their principal resources were mineral deposits and skilled metalworking. Granitefist mines supplied iron and other ores, while their smiths produced weapons, tools, and metal goods traded across a wide area. The combination of difficult terrain, strong fortifications, and a population accustomed to mining and warfare made direct conquest expensive. Their settlements were small compared with the Red City, but their military reputation discouraged most neighboring rulers from attempting sustained occupation.

Farther east lay the wetlands occupied by the peoples commonly grouped under the name the Reeds. Outside observers historically underestimated their population because their settlements did not resemble conventional cities or agricultural villages. Communities were dispersed across extensive marshlands, with homes, storage structures, and pathways frequently raised above seasonal flood levels.

The Reeds developed boats, shallow-draft vessels, elevated causeways, and local knowledge that allowed them to move rapidly through terrain that was extremely difficult for outside armies. Hundreds, and possibly thousands, of settlements existed throughout the wetland system. Reliable population estimates were impossible. Enclave scholars generally accepted a minimum population in the hundreds of thousands, while some later surveys suggested that the total number of Reed peoples across the eastern wetlands might have reached several million.

Their political organization was correspondingly difficult to describe. Some regions contained permanent federations or powerful local rulers, while others consisted of autonomous communities connected primarily through trade, marriage, and temporary alliances. The absence of a unified Reed state did not make the wetlands easy to conquer. Outside armies could seize individual settlements but had considerable difficulty maintaining supply lines or forcing dispersed populations into decisive battle.

The forests closest to the mountain approaches were occupied by numerous hunting and gathering peoples collectively described in Enclave sources as the Forest People. This label concealed substantial cultural and linguistic diversity. Hundreds of bands and tribal groups moved through the forests following game, seasonal plants, and established territories. Their combined population probably fluctuated between fifteen and fifty-five thousand depending upon how broadly contemporary writers defined the region.

Their technology was considerably simpler than that of the surrounding states, but their survival strategy did not depend upon confronting those states directly. Forest communities generally avoided large armies and abandoned camps when threatened, making occupation of their territories difficult and economically unrewarding. When individual groups were cornered or their members attacked, however, they could mount effective resistance using ambushes, knowledge of terrain, and rapid dispersal.

Enclave writers frequently described these five groupings as the principal powers surrounding the Vale, although this classification reflected Enclave strategic concerns rather than a complete description of the region. Numerous smaller kingdoms, city-states, pastoral groups, religious communities, and independent settlements existed between them, and political boundaries changed frequently.

Preparation for Emergence

By approximately the three hundredth year after the Sequester, the question confronting the Enclave was no longer whether it possessed advantages over neighboring societies, but how those advantages could be applied beyond the mountains.

The difficulty was primarily one of scale. Institutions developed for a population of roughly ten thousand could not simply be imposed upon territories containing hundreds of thousands of people. The Enclave therefore began developing administrative systems intended for populations several orders of magnitude larger than its own.

These preparations included standardized census procedures, territorial record keeping, tax schedules, systems for training local administrators, legal codes capable of incorporation into existing customary law, procedures for supervising distant officials, and methods of communicating government instructions through printed material. Particular attention was given to the problem of corruption. Enclave scholars had centuries of experience governing a small population in which officials could be monitored relatively easily; they understood that such practices would not function unchanged across distant territories.

Military planning developed alongside administrative planning. The Enclave's leaders did not assume that other societies would voluntarily adopt their institutions. Studies were therefore produced on occupation, siege warfare, logistics, road construction, food supply, local recruitment, and the administration of conquered populations. The same government that prepared teachers, physicians, engineers, and agricultural advisers also maintained increasingly sophisticated artillery and infantry forces.

No clear distinction existed between peaceful expansion and conquest. Enclave doctrine increasingly treated both as possible means toward the same objective: extending stable government, technical knowledge, and the intellectual principles of Wesley beyond the Vale.

Religious authorities undertook a parallel project. The theology that had developed within the Enclave contained centuries of philosophical vocabulary, scholarly commentary, and assumptions drawn from Providential history that would have been unintelligible to many outside cultures. Clergy therefore began preparing simplified texts presenting its central beliefs in forms intended for translation and mass distribution.

These texts emphasized a single creator, the regularity of natural law, the divine value of human reason, and the obligation to improve material conditions through knowledge. More specifically Enclave traditions were often omitted or relegated to advanced instruction. The resulting doctrine was intended to be intelligible to agricultural villagers, nomadic pastoralists, urban merchants, and rulers whose existing religious practices differed substantially from those of the Vale.

By the end of the third and a half century, the society created by the Sequester had therefore undergone a transformation that extended well beyond technological development. It possessed printing, advanced hydraulic systems, improved metallurgy, effective gunpowder artillery, increasingly practical firearms, improved medicine, and fortifications designed according to principles unknown to most neighboring armies. More significantly, it possessed institutions capable of preserving knowledge, training specialists, coordinating resources, and planning over periods longer than the reign of an individual monarch.

The Enclave had originally been created because Wesley believed that Merdunia could not be transformed while his people remained trapped within its wars. Three and a half centuries later, his descendants had reached a different conclusion. Isolation had accomplished what it could. Further progress would increasingly require access to resources, populations, environments, and problems that did not exist within the Vale.

At the same time, generations of education had transformed Wesley's hope into something approaching a collective obligation. The outside world remained violent and politically unstable, but Enclave society no longer regarded that instability solely as a danger from which it required protection. It increasingly regarded it as a condition that could be corrected.

The preparations of the final decades were therefore directed toward a deliberate end: the opening of the Gate and the return of Wesley's descendants to Merdunia.

Unincorporated, trysts fizzle rot, rudimentarily recalcitrant in Fate's plea refining plot. Above. Below. Ground through. Each layer enforced. Flay pity! Brawl; sequestered! Stream! Secession weeds—perforce.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

I found another independent blogging service in the same general vein as Micro.blog, Scribbles.page, Pike.page and Pagecord.com. It is called Inkwell.social.

Inkwell is inspired by the old LiveJournal. I never used LiveJournal myself, but I certainly heard of it. After looking around Inkwell, it feels very much in the spirit of the IndieWeb to me. It is open source, supports ActivityPub, lets you use your own domain, and gives you ways to export your writing.

It also has a Founding Member special offering Inkwell Plus for $99 for as long as the service continues to operate. I love being able to support independent web projects when possible, and I especially love lifetime deals. Of course, “lifetime” means the lifetime of the service, but I think this one is worth supporting.

Stanton, Inkwell's owner and creator, is also very open about his use of AI and LLM tools. He uses Claude to help write code, documentation and debug the service, while saying he personally reviews and ships the changes.

I am okay with a small independent creator using AI this way. Inkwell is getting off the ground, it is being run by one person with a day job, and hiring an entire development team obviously isn't realistic. This is one area where I think AI can be a positive force. It can help small businesses and independent developers get started, keep costs down and build things that previously might have required a much larger team.

Inkwell is also refreshingly transparent about how it operates. There are no ads, no investors and it says it does not sell your data. It even publishes what the service costs to operate and how much of those costs are currently covered by members.

So, if you are so inclined, stop by and take a look. For what it offers, I think Inkwell.social provides a lot for its $5 monthly price.

Going forward, you will find my posts there too. Here's to a long life for the service.

Competition and choice among independent publishing platforms can only enrich the IndieWeb and the Internet as a whole.

#blogging #personal #technology

I never had a sister growing up.

My mom didn’t either.

But my mother had girlfriends.

So many girlfriends.

Growing up, I watched this woman talk to anyone and everyone. She could strike up a conversation with practically anyone unfortunate or fortunate enough to be standing within her vicinity. Grocery store. Sidewalk. Doctor’s office. It really didn’t matter.

I have apparently inherited a milder version of this trait. Although my daughter may eventually give her Grammy a run for her money or, more accurately, her mouth. But that is another story.

Today, I want to talk about the life-altering, tear-jerking, heart-bursting powerhouse that is female friendship and sisterhood .

And no, I don’t mean the high-school-frenemy variety. We have all survived enough of that.I mean the girls and women who somehow become our soul sisters.

The ones who know our stories. Who remember who we were before we became wives, mothers, physicians, professionals, caretakers and everything else life eventually asks us to become.

And the older I get, the more I realize just how important they are.

My mom made friends everywhere, but there were a handful who stood out throughout my childhood.

There was our sweetest neighbor, Mimi, with the gentlest and most empathetic of souls. The steadfast Dr. Betty. And Auntie Pem Yellowbird who stood at bedside the entire time during my brother’s birth when there was no other family around.

I was close to them and somehow they treated me like a bonus daughter.I still have a bracelet (pictured)  that auntie Pam gave to my mom. Then I brought it back with me to the US.

They shared food and recipes. Advice. Barbecues. Stories. Laughter. Ordinary afternoons.

Life eventually carried us away. After living abroad for a decade, we returned to Nepal, and somehow, one by one, we found them again.

Years had passed.

Lives had changed.

And yet the friendship was still there.

Betty even came to my wedding and was our guest of honor.

Maybe that was one of my earliest lessons I witnessed.

And then, without my realizing it, life began handing me my own sisters.

Over and over again.

In different countries.

Different seasons.

Different versions of myself.

There was Maria, my first best friend from the age of five. Then Jennifer whose family became the equivalent of my adoptive family. My sweet friends through those awkward middle school and high school years.They knew versions of me that barely exist anymore.

And yet perhaps that is part of the magic of old friendships. Someone out there remembers you before the degrees, the titles, the children, the responsibilities and the reinventions.

Then came medical school.

Oh, medical school.

My beautiful group of women; so different from one another and from me in so many ways   Yet somehow coexisting in imperfect, chaotic harmony.

We survived exams, heartbreak, failures, uncertainty, approximately one million cups of tea and coffee, endless snacks, and an impressive amount of gossiping during hours in which we absolutely should have been studying.

They also helped lead me toward the faith I have today.

We studied together.

We danced and Prayed together.

Cried together.

Laughed until we couldn’t breathe together.

And somehow became doctors along the way.

We prayed together and asked God for our unborn children years ago. Then were my “sisters” who curated the most beautiful Parisian-themed baby shower. I still have trinkets from that day tucked away from before I could have imagined that years later I would actually walk through Paris with that very baby girl.

Life is funny like that.

Then came residency. Fellowship. Training.

My sisters-in-training. A few of the most academically accomplished women in rheumatology that I was lucky to call my mentors at my first job out of fellowship to whom I am forever grateful . They helped me combat any imposter syndrome and thrive as a new attending.

The women who fed me, took care of me, called me over for every festival and celebration, and created little pieces of home during years when home sometimes felt very far away.

Years later, I actually did get a sister in my family Not by birth, but by marriage. My sister-in-law Molly, although “sister-in-law” has never quite felt like enough. She has truly been a sister to me: loving me, listening, laughing, supporting me and standing beside me through so many seasons of life. Somewhere along the way, the “in-law” part simply stopped mattering.

Then colleagues became girlfriends .

We walked beside one another through promotions, diagnoses, babies, marriages, career frustrations and all the strange turns adulthood quietly throws at us.

We survived by venting, boosting one another up, sneaking away for lunches and coffee breaks and reminding each other that we were human beings underneath the white coats and endless responsibilities.

And then there are the quieter ones.

The steadfast ones.

The women who may not call every day but somehow are simply there.

The ones who will pick up my children or drop them off without making me feel like I am asking too much. The ones who pack an extra meal because they know I probably haven’t eaten.Who remember my favorite food when they cook it.

Who think of me when they travel or go home to Nepal and bring something back because, somewhere along the way, I crossed their mind.

Those who plan your birthday weekend itinerary meticulously and make you a gourmet lunch so you can be a passenger princess for the road trip.The ones you go to concerts with and Singh and jump up and down like teenagers once again until your voice is hoarse and then spent two hours in a parking lot searching for the car afterwards.These become core memories.

The ones who have sat beside me through tears and heartbreak and listened to the same story for what must surely have been the thousandth time.

They listened without judgment.

They reminded me who I was when I temporarily forgot.

They told me to dream bigger.

Help me accountable.

They helped make connections for me.

Introduced me to people. Opened doors. Pulled me upward as I tried to do the same for other women.

There was no competition in it.

And maybe that is one of the most beautiful things women can do for one another.

Not merely stand beside each other but make room and say her name in rooms she has not entered yet.

Of course, those who send meme after meme and message you about every local event. They are always ready for a night out and dancing until the wee hours of the night and our feet blister!

Or a quiet dinner.

Or a really good iced coffee.

Or just an hour long phone call and praying back life into each other.

And somehow God keeps handing me more girlfriends.

Women I would never have expected to meet. Women from completely different chapters of my life. Women who arrive at precisely the moments when I seem to need them.

And the older I get, the more I understand what a gift that is.

We spend so much of our lives talking about romantic love.

Finding it. Keeping it. Losing it. Finding it again.

We write songs about romantic love. Movies revolve around it.

But perhaps we have made romantic love the greatest love story of a woman’s life when it was never meant to carry that entire weight.

Because long before and sometimes long after a romantic relationship enters our lives, there are women quietly loving us through it all.

And  perhaps our female friendships do something else for us too. They teach us what love is supposed to feel like.  In a sense, they provide and keep a standard of what romantic love should be. And what you deserve.

They show us consistency.Initiative

Reciprocity. Patience. Kindness.

Showing up.

They plan the outings and pick the best darn restaurants. hands-down.

They remind us what we bring to the table when we have somehow forgotten.

They hold up a mirror; not to our flaws, but to our worth.

And maybe that is why healthy female friendship doesn’t compete with romantic love.

It strengthens it.

Because our world is already full. There are already people at the table.There is already love in the room. Community and meaningful relationships matter deeply to our well-being. Even studies have pointed to this. I have lived it.

I started this story with a sentence I have probably said a hundred times throughout my life:

I never had a sister.

But the older I get, the less true it feels.

Because life gave me sisters over and over again.

Sometimes you are born into it.

Sometimes you marry into it.

And sometimes you simply choose each other.

I never had a sister.

Or at least, that’s what I used to think.

Somehow, God gave me so many.

In Summary: * Earlier today I did get to do some yard work, but it wasn't the yard work I thought about last night. Rather than mow the front yard, I spent two hours cutting and hauling branches, and mowing grass and weeds in the back yard, and stuffing the green organics bin. The back yard does look much better now. And I'm holding out the option of doing some front yard mowing later in the week ahead.

Tomorrow I'll try to get all my laundry done in the morning, as I have a four-month follow up appointment with my primary doc in the afternoon.

Listening now to relaxing music, my evening ahead promises to be a quiet one. There's nothing planned between now and bedtime other than the night prayers and meditations. I can handle that just fine.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 136/83 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:40 – 1 banana, 1 HEB bakery cookie * 09:20 – 1 seafood salad sandwich * 14:15 – 5 hamburger patties w. mushroom & spinach gravy * 16:45 – ½ seafood salad sandwich

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:00 – wake * 05:40 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 06:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 10:15 to 12:15 – cutting and carrying branches, mowing grass and weeds * 13:00 – listening to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station, ahead of this afternoon's MLB game between the Rangers and the Blue Jays * 16:45 – and Toronto Blue Jays win, 7 to 2. * 17:00 – listening to relaxing music

Chess: * 09:05 – moved in all pending CC games

Eu nunca pedi a Deus para salvar o meu pai. Desde que ele partiu tenho vindo a sentir uma necessidade forte de me conectar com algo a nível espiritual. Cresci numa família católica pouco praticante, fui baptizada e fiz a primeira comunhão. Penso que desde aí não frequento a igreja de forma regular. Sempre fui curiosa e aberta a tudo que é religião mas nunca segui na prática nenhuma outra religião. Quando me sinto de algum modo “desesperada” (quase nunca) o meu instinto é pedir a Deus. Contudo durante aqueles meses e mesmo nas últimas horas não pedi em momento algum que o poupasse, talvez esteja relacionado com o facto de nunca ter-me sentido realmente desesperada, pelo menos até aquelas horas finais, onde tudo foi tão surreal e rápido, mas mesmo nessas horas não senti nunca em mim a vontade de pôr nas mãos de Deus essa responsabilidade, senti vontade de desabafar e desabafei, disse que o amava muito, que ia sentir muito a falta dele, mas não implorei para que o deixasse ficar...

Agora que penso sobre isso quase que sinto vergonha de não me ter ocorrido faze-lo. Eu estava a focada em ajudar a tomar decisões que na minha percepção o poderiam salvar.

Acredito piamente que na vida acontece o que tem que acontecer. Creio sim no livre arbítrio mas de uma forma concreta: a vida determina que vais estar numa encruzilhada, isso é o nosso destino ou karma ou como queiram chamar, mas quem decide se vamos para a esquerda ou direita somos nós e aqui entra o livre arbítrio. Talvez a minha mente seja muito concreta e por mais que doa dizer a situação dele foi consequência de muitas decisões ao longo da vida, não sou ninguém para dizer que ele devia ter tomado outras decisões, no máximo posso dizer que gostava que tivesse decidido de outra forma mas ele exerceu o seu livre arbítrio e foi feliz assim... Talvez pedir a Deus para o poupar seria quase como ir contra as suas escolhas, escolhas essas que sim tiveram consequências graves mas também o fizeram ser o ser humano único que ele foi. Ninguém escolhe conscientemente morrer mais cedo, eu sei. Mas ele foi um homem que tinha informação, mas também tinha muita sorte na vida, talvez outros momentos de sorte não deveriam ter sido interpretados como tal e talvez essas sejam as lições que ele me deu e me dá sem saber.

Sinto-me espiritualmente desconectada e com uma necessidade imensa de me conectar, sinto-me completamente sufocada num mundo onde todos respeitam o meu espaço e me dão espaço para respirar. Estarão ambos conectados? Será que a morte de alguém tão importante pode criar essa necessidade tão visceral de procurar algo mais transcendente ao ponto de me sufocar a mim própria para poder de algum modo me encontrar.

Hoje ouvi que talvez ele fosse a minha conexão com algo mais sagrado, ele fosse o meu símbolo do superior e a verdade é que eu o idolatrava, mesmo com todos os seus defeitos de comum mortal o idolatrava. Talvez precise encontrar ou reencontrar outra forma de amar, adorar, idolatrar que não dependa apenas de um ser fisico mas da minha conexão com algo maior.

Ainda não sei quando nem por onde começar. Vou acreditar que reconhecer essa necessidade é o meu começo e aos poucos vou perceber como navegar.

Perdoa pai por não ter pedido para Ele te poupar, mas pedi para Ele te acolher, te dar a paz e para te receberem em festa todos aqueles que já partiram e que tanto tu amavas e sentias falta de abraçar.

Rise of Reason- Part 1: The Sequester

The following is the first installment of a new series I'll be releasing on this blog. Unlike Starcraft Co. which was essentially a fan-fiction space opera, this is going to be historical fiction much more grounded in realism. There will be no magic, monsters, space age technology, etc. Instead, it takes place in the fictional world of Merdunia. The time period roughly parallels the Middle Ages in European history. We will follow the descendants of Wesley the Wise, a progressive kingdom focused on technological, scientific and social progress. I'm going to format this as more of a history text than a fictional narrative, though we will see how the writing evolves as I go. This series is loosely based on something I wrote many years ago:

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The period preceding the Sequester was characterized by chronic warfare, political fragmentation, and repeated institutional collapse across much of Merdunia. Civilization had not disappeared. Fortified cities remained inhabited, regional trade persisted, kingdoms levied taxes and fielded armies, and religious institutions preserved substantial bodies of written knowledge. However, few states maintained stability for more than several generations. Dynastic disputes, invasions, civil wars, and raiding repeatedly disrupted economic activity and destroyed the conditions necessary for sustained development. Roads deteriorated when central governments weakened, workshops were abandoned or redirected toward military production, agricultural surpluses were consumed by armies, and local advances in engineering or craftsmanship were often lost when the communities that produced them were dispersed.

The cumulative effect was a long period of technological and institutional stagnation. Merdunian society continued to change, but progress rarely accumulated consistently enough to transform it. A well-administered kingdom might expand irrigation, improve metallurgy, establish schools, or standardize weights and measures, only for these institutions to fragment during the next succession crisis or invasion. Similar discoveries were frequently made more than once in different regions because earlier knowledge had been lost, remained inaccessible, or survived only in a small number of manuscripts.

Technology remained broadly pre-industrial. Iron and steel working were well established, although quality varied considerably between regions and individual workshops. Gunpowder was known, but remained expensive, unreliable, and of little military importance. Warfare continued to depend primarily on swords, spears, bows, crossbows, cavalry, and fortified positions, while sieges were conducted using rams, siege towers, catapults, mining, and blockade. The printing press had not been conceived, and books could only be reproduced through manual transcription. Even prosperous kingdoms therefore possessed relatively few copies of important texts, and the destruction of a monastery, royal archive, or private collection could eliminate knowledge that existed nowhere else.

It was during this period that Wesley, later remembered as Wesley the Wise, ruled one of the more organized kingdoms of central Merdunia. The population under his direct authority and within the smaller territories that acknowledged his influence is generally estimated at around forty thousand. This made his kingdom substantial enough to defend itself against many local rivals, but too small to dominate the larger and more populous powers surrounding it.

Its principal advantage was administrative rather than military. Wesley inherited and expanded a system of taxation, permanent storehouses, road maintenance, royal workshops, written records, and standing military organization that was unusually effective by contemporary standards. The crown was hereditary, but Wesley governed through a royal council composed of senior landholders, military commanders, clergy, and administrators. His authority was extensive, although major policies still depended upon cooperation from men who controlled estates, soldiers, workshops, and local government.

Wesley’s later reputation rests primarily on his belief that the persistent insecurity of Merdunian life was preventing humanity from advancing. He was not opposed to military force and continued to maintain a capable army throughout his reign. His concern was that too much of society’s labor, wealth, and intelligence was being consumed by defense. Skilled metalworkers spent much of their working lives producing weapons and armor, engineers repaired walls and constructed fortifications, farmers were periodically removed from agriculture for military service, and royal revenues were diverted into garrisons, horses, weapons, and defensive works. Even successful periods of peace were frequently devoted to preparing for the next war.

This concern was closely tied to Wesley’s religious beliefs. The kingdom was strongly monotheistic, and Wesley’s court increasingly promoted the idea that the natural world represented a divine system that humanity was obligated to study. God, in this interpretation, had created a universe governed by consistent laws and had given human beings the capacity to discover them. The properties of metals, the movement of water, the causes of disease, the behavior of plants, the motions of celestial bodies, and the principles of mathematics were therefore regarded not merely as practical subjects but as aspects of creation whose investigation carried religious significance.

Wesley appears to have believed that humanity had explored only a small fraction of what could ultimately be understood. Later writers would describe this outlook as the beginning of Providential rationalism, although no formal doctrine yet existed during his early reign. At the time, Wesley’s concern was more practical: sustained inquiry required social continuity, and continuity was difficult to maintain while each generation remained vulnerable to invasion, conscription, economic disruption, and the destruction of accumulated records.

The Search for Refuge

Around the thirty-second year of Wesley’s reign, later conventionally designated Year 0 of the Sequester, the crown began financing expeditions beyond the kingdom’s settled frontier. The stated purpose was initially broad. Surviving administrative fragments refer to surveys of defensible land, water sources, arable ground, timber, and mountain routes. Later histories portrayed the project as a deliberate search for permanent refuge from its beginning, although it is possible that Wesley’s objective developed gradually as reports from successive expeditions accumulated.

The first expeditions found little that satisfied the crown’s requirements. Several areas were defensible but possessed insufficient farmland. Others had reliable water and grazing but were accessible to large armies. One mountainous region was abandoned after surveyors concluded that snow would close its principal routes for much of the year. The valley that ultimately became the center of the Sequester was identified approximately three years after the first expeditions began.

The valley was not unknown to the peoples of the surrounding region. Hunters, herders, and small nomadic groups had used its forests, lakes, and mountain passes for generations, and surviving oral traditions preserve several names for individual rivers, ridges, and hunting grounds. No permanent state appears to have controlled the entire valley, however, and there is little evidence of large-scale agriculture or permanent settlement before Wesley’s expeditions.

Its isolation was primarily geographical. Several narrow routes crossed the surrounding mountains, but most were suitable only for hunters, herders, pack animals, or small groups traveling on foot. Only one pass was broad enough to accommodate wagons, large livestock herds, siege equipment, or formed bodies of troops. This combination of internal resources and restricted military access distinguished the valley from the other sites investigated by the crown.

The first major royal survey parties entered the valley in Year 4 and remained for much of the growing season. They mapped the principal rivers, examined soil, estimated timber reserves, identified grazing areas, and recorded populations of fish and game. Their reports were favorable but not uniformly so. Much of the valley floor was fertile, several rivers contained substantial spawning populations, and the surrounding forests provided extensive timber and game. High ground near the western slopes had a shorter growing season than expected, while sections of the lower valley were vulnerable to spring flooding.

The initial carrying-capacity estimates varied considerably. Early court records suggested that the valley might support as many as fifteen thousand people, but these calculations assumed high agricultural yields and underestimated the amount of land and stored fodder required for livestock. Later planners reduced the target substantially. Modern estimates generally place the sustainable pre-industrial population at roughly ten thousand under careful management, although short-term populations could exceed that figure during favorable periods.

Wesley nevertheless judged the site suitable. The valley could not accommodate his entire kingdom, but it could support a sufficiently large population to preserve the administrative, agricultural, religious, military, and technical institutions necessary for a self-sustaining society. He named the region the Vale of Providence, a designation that reflected the religious interpretation increasingly associated with his court. The valley was not regarded as supernatural in origin; rather, its natural characteristics were interpreted as a resource placed within creation and discovered through exploration, measurement, and planning.

Establishing the Vale

Construction began in Year 6. The first permanent expedition probably consisted of between four and five hundred people, most of them soldiers, masons, carpenters, laborers, farmers, and surveyors, accompanied by a smaller number of smiths, clerks, clergy, and physicians. Its immediate task was to secure the main pass and establish a supply base from which permanent construction and agriculture could proceed.

The earliest fortifications were modest compared with the defenses that later stood at the entrance. Stone walls and towers were positioned at the narrowest section of the approach, where steep terrain restricted the number of attackers who could advance simultaneously. Storage chambers, barracks, and workshops were constructed close to the defensive line, while secondary positions were established farther inside the pass. These works gradually developed into the fortified complex later known simply as the Gate.

The geography made the position unusually strong by contemporary standards, although it was not impossible to attack. A large and determined army could theoretically have attempted prolonged siege, mining, infiltration through minor mountain routes, or repeated frontal assaults. The principal advantage of the Gate was that it sharply reduced the usefulness of numerical superiority. Any invading force would have had to cross difficult terrain, maintain long supply lines, and attack a prepared position where only a limited number of soldiers could engage at once. For most neighboring rulers, the cost of such an expedition would have been disproportionate to the likely gain.

The first settlers quickly discovered that several assumptions made during the surveys had been overly optimistic. A cluster of storehouses constructed near one river was damaged by spring flooding in Year 7. Wheat planted on higher western terraces produced poor yields, while several familiar fruit varieties failed during colder winters. Livestock required greater quantities of stored fodder than planners had anticipated, particularly during periods of heavy snowfall, and intensive hunting reduced game populations around the main settlements within only a few years. The Vale contained abundant resources, but settlement demonstrated that those resources could not be treated as unlimited.

For the first several years, the new population remained dependent upon the old kingdom. Grain, salt, livestock, metal stock, tools, cloth, medicines, and other supplies were transported through the mountains in regular caravans. Records from Year 8 suggest that imported food still accounted for a substantial portion of consumption. Mills, granaries, roads, irrigation channels, drainage works, and new farmland consequently received priority over most of Wesley’s broader scholarly ambitions.

By Year 9, the permanent population had grown into the low thousands. The fortifications at the Gate had become strong enough to protect the settlement from any likely raiding force, while the agricultural base had expanded sufficiently for the crown to begin planning large-scale relocation.

Selection and Opposition

Wesley publicly committed the kingdom to the migration in Year 10. The announcement created a major political dispute because the Vale could not support the kingdom’s full population of approximately forty thousand. The crown therefore had to determine who would relocate and what portion of the old kingdom’s movable wealth would accompany them.

Administrative planners initially proposed migration quotas based upon occupation, household size, health, age, and the anticipated needs of the new settlement. In practice, these criteria proved difficult to apply consistently. Skilled craftsmen often refused to migrate without extended family members. Noble households demanded places for retainers and servants. Villages petitioned to relocate as intact communities rather than be divided, while clergy argued over which religious communities, manuscripts, and sacred objects should be transferred. Some farmers selected by royal officials had little desire to abandon established land, while other families that wished to migrate were initially excluded because planners considered their occupations overrepresented.

Political influence altered the process further. Surviving migration lists contain substitutions, additions, and entire households inserted after the initial allocations had been prepared. Patronage and bribery almost certainly occurred, although the surviving evidence is insufficient to determine their scale. By the later migration years, the population entering the Vale reflected a combination of administrative planning, voluntary participation, family negotiation, and political compromise rather than a single centrally imposed selection system.

Opposition also developed among officials and landholders who rejected the broader strategy. Some nobles regarded withdrawal into the mountains as an abandonment of the crown’s obligations to its existing territories, while others accepted the need for refuge but argued that Wesley should continue to claim and govern the old kingdom from the Vale. Military commanders were particularly concerned that the gradual removal of population, livestock, grain reserves, and skilled workers would weaken the kingdom before the migration had been completed.

These concerns were reinforced as the flow of people and material toward the mountains increased. Neighboring raiders and local war bands began targeting the increasingly predictable supply routes. Caravans carrying grain, livestock, tools, metal, and household goods represented unusually valuable targets, and escort requirements expanded accordingly. Protecting the migration therefore consumed additional military resources at the same time that the old kingdom’s manpower and reserves were declining.

The crown appears to have concealed the full scale of the transfer during its early years, possibly to reduce the risk of organized attack before the Gate and internal settlements were sufficiently developed. By Year 12, however, it was widely understood that Wesley intended to relinquish most of his former territory rather than maintain a divided kingdom.

The Great Migration

The main phase of migration occurred between Years 11 and 15. Movement was organized in seasonal convoys, usually traveling after spring roads became passable and before the onset of winter. Livestock moved slowly, wagons frequently broke down, and weather in the mountain approaches regularly delayed travel. The physical movement of thousands of people and animals therefore extended over several years rather than occurring as a single organized departure.

Disease proved more dangerous than armed attack. Large temporary camps formed at staging points along the route, often with inadequate sanitation and limited access to clean water. Contemporary descriptions record repeated outbreaks of intestinal illness, fever, and respiratory disease. Exact mortality figures cannot be reconstructed, but several migration lists contain households that disappear entirely from later records, while others show substantial reductions between departure and settlement.

Raids also increased as the old kingdom weakened. Most involved attacks on isolated wagons, livestock herds, or poorly protected supply groups, but at least three larger engagements are recorded between royal escorts and organized raiding forces. The largest, in Year 13, delayed one of the principal grain convoys long enough that emergency rationing was introduced within the Vale.

By Year 14, approximately thirteen thousand people had either entered the valley or were traveling toward it. The migrants represented about one-third of the kingdom’s original population but included a disproportionate share of administrators, skilled craftsmen, literate clergy, military specialists, and households selected for agricultural experience. The resulting transfer weakened the old kingdom substantially even before the crown formally relinquished it.

Wesley ultimately abandoned his claims to the former territories rather than attempting to govern them from inside the Vale. Some regions reorganized under local nobles and officials, while others were absorbed by neighboring powers or became effectively independent. The political transition was uneven, and later rulers in the former kingdom occasionally claimed descent from officials or noble houses that had remained behind.

Histories written outside the Vale often described the Sequester as an extraction of wealth and talent from the old kingdom, and this criticism was not without basis. Large quantities of livestock, tools, seed grain, manuscripts, metal, and skilled labor accompanied the migrants. Providential accounts instead emphasized that the majority of the population remained in place and that many subjects had declined opportunities to migrate. The evidence suggests a more complicated process in which practical limits, unequal political influence, personal choice, and the finite resources of the valley all affected who ultimately participated.

Wesley’s Death and the Settlement Crisis

Wesley died in Year 15 of the Sequester. By then, the Gate was operational, several settlements had become permanent, and most of the intended migration had already taken place. The Vale nevertheless remained economically vulnerable. Its population had expanded faster than its agricultural base, imported supplies were still important, and much of the newly cleared farmland had not produced the yields predicted by earlier surveys.

The following three years became the most difficult period of settlement. A poor harvest in Year 16 sharply reduced grain reserves. The causes appear to have included unusually cool weather, inadequate drainage in newly cultivated areas, and overestimation of the acreage that had become reliably productive. Livestock losses during the following winter further reduced food supplies. Fishing and hunting increased substantially, but could not compensate for the agricultural shortfall without placing additional pressure on local animal populations.

Disease spread through the most crowded settlements during the same period. Malnutrition increased vulnerability, particularly among children and older adults, while shortages of clean housing and adequate sanitation contributed to recurrent illness. Some families left the Vale voluntarily, concluding that conditions in the lowlands offered better prospects than continued shortages. Others attempted to return to the former kingdom only to find that political control had changed significantly since their departure.

The settlement government responded with measures that included grain rationing, expansion of communal storehouses, tighter accounting of harvest yields, restrictions on livestock slaughter, and regulation of timber cutting, hunting, and fishing. Several of these measures later became permanent features of Providential administration. The settlement crisis also demonstrated the danger of continued reliance upon the outside world. Two major supply caravans were attacked in Year 16, while another failed to arrive before winter because early snow closed portions of the route. Self-sufficiency consequently became not only an economic objective but a central element of security policy.

Conditions began to improve during Years 18 and 19. Farmers shifted grain production toward lower and better-drained areas, expanded cultivation of crops that performed well in the valley climate, and improved systems for storing winter fodder. New mills reduced the labor required to process grain, while additional roads improved movement between agricultural settlements and the growing population centers. Fishing was regulated around spawning seasons, and hunting restrictions were introduced near heavily populated areas.

The population nevertheless continued to decline from its peak. Of the approximately thirteen thousand people who participated in the migration or early settlement, roughly ten thousand remained as the stable population from which later Providential society developed. The exact fate of the remaining three thousand cannot be reconstructed. Later demographic studies generally conclude that a substantial portion died from disease, hunger, exposure, raids, accidents, and other causes associated with migration and early settlement, while several hundred appear to have returned to the lowlands or left the Vale during the difficult years following Wesley’s death. Record keeping deteriorated during the crisis, preventing more precise estimates.

Completion and Significance

By Year 20, regular grain imports were no longer necessary under ordinary harvest conditions. Some external trade continued, particularly for resources that were scarce or unavailable within the mountains, but the survival of the population no longer depended upon uninterrupted supply routes. Later historians conventionally identify Year 21 as the end of the Sequester, by which point the last large migration parties had arrived, emergency provisioning from the former kingdom had ceased, and the population of the Vale had stabilized at approximately ten thousand.

The society that emerged from the Sequester differed in important respects from the kingdom Wesley had originally ruled. Its survival had depended upon planning, record keeping, rationing, resource management, and the willingness to revise policies when earlier assumptions proved incorrect. The intellectual culture later associated with the Rise of Reason therefore developed from two related traditions. The first was Wesley’s belief that understanding the natural world formed part of humanity’s divine purpose. The second arose from the experience of settlement itself, during which inaccurate estimates of crop yields, water levels, livestock requirements, and population capacity had direct consequences for survival.

This experience encouraged an unusually strong emphasis on measurement and preservation. Agricultural yields were recorded because shortages had exposed the dangers of poor estimates. Forests were managed because timber reserves were finite. Fish and game populations were monitored because local depletion had become visible within a few years of settlement. Administrative records were retained to allow comparison between seasons, and unsuccessful practices increasingly became subjects of record rather than lessons that had to be rediscovered independently.

The Sequester did not immediately produce rapid technological development. During its first two decades, most of the population remained occupied with agriculture, construction, resource management, and defense. Wesley died before the society he envisioned had become economically secure, and many of the institutions later associated with Providential scholarship had not yet been established.

Its historical significance lay instead in the continuity it made possible. For centuries, Merdunian societies had repeatedly developed new institutions and techniques only to lose them through conquest, civil war, migration, or political fragmentation. The Vale of Providence did not eliminate disease, scarcity, political conflict, or human error, but it substantially reduced the threat of external conquest and created conditions in which knowledge and institutions could persist across generations. For this reason, later historians generally identify the completion of the Sequester as the beginning of the Rise of Reason.

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photo “Rock Rapture” © Laura F. @miniliiveri@gram.social

This morning finds me dull, enveloped by the Grey¹, a consequence of the decisions I’ve made this year. Decisions I’ve made without regret. Decisions I’d make again and again. Decisions that will affect me for the rest of my life. A connection that is both blessing and burden. A circumstance unbidden — befallen.

The anomalous voyager faces both wonders and dangers on their journey. I find the myth of Icarus helpful, at least for my state of mind today.

“The boy began to delight in his bold flight, and, abandoning his guide, seized by desire for the sky, he steered a higher course.” — Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.223-225.

Icarus, son of the craftsman Daedalus, escaped imprisonment in Crete on wings his father made from feathers and wax, but, intoxicated by the freedom of flight, he ignored his father's warnings and soared too close to the sun. The wax melted, and he plunged into the sea and drowned.

The wax melted by proximity, and Icarus died. That is the lesson most learn in school. But what of the man who kissed the sun only to survive the fall. The one who wakes up each morning to find his senses burned, leaving ordinary life numb, joyless, and tasteless. How the supernormal blinds the normal. How I have forgotten the taste of the ordinary. How I long for any taste, here or there.

Does this merit caution? Perhaps.

But I fully admit that even if I had known the consequences beforehand — the scarring, the numbness, the Grey — I wouldn't have changed a thing. For kissing the Sun is more than just a kiss. More than just intoxication, enchantment, and euphoria.³

And so, on mornings like this one, I wake with the taste of nothing, and the memory of why. Both are gifts. Both are debts.² Both symbols of the bond I’ve embraced. One foot in the past, one in the future — the herenow and the hereafter.

#Intermundia

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Notes:

1. It's a mistake to diagnose the Grey as melancholia or some form of depressive state. Though it has qualities that mirror depression, it is a psychospiritual state all its own, where the absence of one incurs symptoms in another. A depression of spirits, per the 19th century definition, is a better description than the modern one. Perhaps a depression of soul is a better phrasing still — where the soul is partially or wholly alienated from its counterpart.

2. The gift of choice to choose deserves the conviction to follow through.

3. Those who know, know.

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By D. Bowman | Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Today's Game of Choice.

Out of all the many available options today, I'm choosing my Texas Rangers vs the Toronto Blue Jays as my first game of choice to follow. This early afternoon MLB game has a scheduled start time of 1:35 PM CDT. As usual I'll be following the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

 

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Photo © @Andrew-Murphy

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photo © @rarotonga

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photo © @leti.00