A World Without Consequence

The Rise of the Dilutionist Era

Set three decades before The Quiet Below

The final official Tethering nearly ended in death.

High Councillor Marik collapsed mid-session during the Convocation, blood running from his nose, his spine contorted by the full brunt of a zoning decision he had authorised half a cycle earlier—one that deprived the Outer Districts of essential surge reserves so the Core’s infrastructure could be fortified in advance of predicted load spikes.

Selix Arra sat quietly in the upper gallery, half-shielded by the tinted latticework that separated observers from the governing floor. She watched without flinching as aides rushed to Marik’s side, his Tether aglow with sickly orange light—evidence of recent strain, a resonance echoing the cost of his directive. The doctrine had always held that consequence ensured wisdom. But as Selix surveyed the council floor littered with overburdened bodies and hushed panic, another possibility began to surface: perhaps suffering was not the foundation of justice, but its decay.

That evening, in a climate-sealed planning chamber used for off-ledger policy experimentation, Selix presented her thesis. It was not long. But it was dangerous.

“The flaw is not in failure,” she began, her voice calm, “but in the singularity of its cost. We’ve engineered a feedback system so tightly wound, so intensely personal, that the result is paralysis. Collapse is not a sign of accountability. It is a sign of inefficiency.”

Twelve members of the High Assembly sat across from her, each marked by the glowing seal of the Tether—visible beneath their formal robes, embedded just under the clavicle or along the spine. These were the most burdened minds of their time. Each had passed through the ancient rite and bore its consequence with solemn dignity. They were heroes of an era that equated suffering with sincerity.

Selix, by contrast, wore no such mark. Too young when the last true Tethering had occurred, she had studied under Compact Scholars, not burden-bearers. She was a theorist of cost, not a survivor of it. But she carried something the Council was running short of: a system-level vision.

“Pain instructs,” she allowed, “but only if the instructor survives. What if we reimagine consequence not as a lance but as a lattice? Not a blow, but a current, flowing outward and thinning across the many?”

Marik, pale and recovering behind a nutrient mist veil, gave a tired wave to proceed.

“We conflate gravity with clarity,” Selix continued. “But clarity can emerge from repetition, from pattern, from relational feedback. Not from collapse.”

SELIX ARRA - Architect of the Dilutionists

She activated the central holo. It unfurled like a scroll of light. The model showed concentric rings radiating from a central act of governance—distributing its consequence along weighted paths: proximity, civic exposure, historical resonance, even genetic empathy potential. Consequence, in this model, became a dispersed field. Survivable. Continuous.

“Let a zoning failure not shatter one vertebra,” she said, voice firmer now. “Let it instead draw tension across a hundred spines—each enough to instruct, none enough to destroy.”

The room held stillness like a held breath.

Finally, Marik spoke. “You would turn the sacred into haze. The Tether into vapor.”

“Not vapor,” Selix corrected. “A network. We don't erase burden. We embed it—everywhere.”

Another Councilor, Elin Voss, narrowed his eyes. “And who allocates these ripples? Who determines the path of pain?”

“The system,” Selix said, “augmented by recursive modelling. Predictive empathy simulations. Policy-induced consequence maps tied to behavioural response datasets. The Compact’s spirit remains intact—we simply update its medium.”

The ensuing debate lasted hours, then days. The idea drew fire from the old guard and cautious intrigue from the aspirants. Some called it dilution. Others called it evolution.

Within one cycle, the Compact was amended. Not torn down, not replaced—just softened. The Rite of Tethering was demoted to ceremony. Then to myth. Eventually, it became a footnote in Governance History modules.

In schools, children recited new catechisms:

“All hands together share the weather, the waves, the weight.”

The old passage—once glowing when read aloud with conviction—dimmed. It stopped responding to voices trained in abstraction rather than belief.

Selix rose. From Architect of Equilibrium to Minister of Continuity, to Chair of the Council.

Her Doctrine was canonised. Her model implemented. Her success measured in the silence of consequence.

And for a while, it worked.

Convocations grew shorter. No more seizures at the pulpit. No more frantic med teams or Tether reactivations. The burden, once traceable and sharp, became diffuse and ambient. It no longer taught through agony, but through subtle discomfort—a bureaucratic ache, an emotional dullness, a societal fatigue no one could quite name.

Selix had not erased pain. She had anonymised it. She had unhooked consequence from visibility and called the result equilibrium.

And in the dim hours of waking, long before her schedule resumed, she sometimes wondered if she'd mistaken mercy for anaesthesia.

INTRODUCING MY FIRST BOOK. The Quiet Below

You place your hand on a scorching hotplate. But instead of you feeling the burn, the pain is spread out — a hundred strangers each feel a faint sting.

Not enough to scream. Just enough to flinch.

But you?

You feel nothing.

So you leave your hand there.

That’s the world I wrote about in The Quiet Below — a speculative novella about what happens when the people who make decisions no longer feel their consequences, and the pain is quietly offloaded to everyone else.

Available now on Amazon