Элиезер Юдковски - Three Worlds Collide

"It could be worse," observed the Lord Pilot. "You could not hurt."

"For myself," the Kiritsugu said quietly, "I had already visualized and accepted this, and then it was just a question of watching it play out." He sighed. "The most dangerous truth a Confessor knows is that the rules of society are just consensual hallucinations. Choosing to wake up from the dream means choosing to end your life. I knew that when I stunned Akon, even apart from the supernova."

"Okay, look," said the Master of Fandom, "call me a gloomy moomy, but does anyone have something uplifting to say?"

The Lord Pilot jerked a thumb at the expanding supernova blast front, a hundred seconds away. "What, about that? "

"Yeah," the Master of Fandom said. "I'd like to end my life on an up note."

"We saved the human species," offered the Lord Pilot. "Man, that's the sort of thing you could just repeat to yourself over and over and over again -"

"Besides that."

"Besides WHAT? "

The Master managed to hold a straight face for a few seconds, and then had to laugh.

"You know," the Kiritsugu said, "I don't think there's anyone in modern-day humanity, who would regard my past self as anything but a poor, abused victim. I'm pretty sure my mother drank during pregnancy, which, back then, would give your child something called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I was poor, uneducated, and in an environment so entrepreneurially hostile you can't even imagine it -"

"This is not sounding uplifting, " the Master said.

"But somehow," the Kiritsugu said, "all those wonderful excuses - I could never quite believe in them myself , afterward. Maybe because I'd also thought of some of the same excuses before . It's the part about not doing anything that got to me. Others fought the war to save the world, far over my head.

Lightning flickering in the clouds high above me, while I hid in the basement and suffered out the storm. And by the time I was rescued and healed and educated, in any shape to help others - the battle was essentially over. Knowing that I'd been a victim for someone else to save, one more point in someone else's high score - that just stuck in my craw, all those years..."

"...anyway," the Kiritsugu said, and there was a small, slight smile on that ancient face, "I feel better now."

"So does that mean," asked the Master, "that now your life is finally complete, and you can die without any regrets?"

The Kiritsugu looked startled for a moment. Then he threw back his head and laughed. True, pure, honest laughter. The others began to laugh as well, and their shared hilarity echoed across the room, as the supernova blast front approached at almost exactly the speed of light.

Finally the Kiritsugu stopped laughing, and said:

"Don't be ridicu-"

FIN