Chapter 18: Adjudicating
“Well, this is interesting.” A tall, mediocre-looking man walked from behind Tulland, who found himself in a near-duplicate of his own briar-fortress. The man was holding a similarly detailed copy of his over-powered briar, turning it over in his hands and gazing at it in interest “I haven’t had to do an active judgment in… well, in a while. What did you say your name was again?”
“I…” Tulland gulped. This guy was weirdly casual in a way that, for some reason, screamed danger. “I didn’t. I don’t think.”
“Oh, right.” The man made a mock motion of slapping his forehead. “I didn’t need to ask. Let me just check. Oh, I see. Tulland Lowstreet. The same one who made the wager the other day, right? I kind of expected you to be dead by now.”
“Are you…”
“Yes. Well, part of him, anyway.”
“Part of us.” A woman’s voice rang out. Tulland turned to see a middle-aged lady sitting in a wooden chair that simply hadn’t been there before. “I’m going to need you to stop applying him to our chorus like it covers all of us. It doesn’t.”
“And when she whines about it, I have to listen to it.” A surly looking teenager walked up to one of the briars and flicked it. “And I don’t get to see whatever’s going on that much these days. Good job, by the way. It’s rare we see anything new.”
“Oh. Thanks.” Tulland scratched his head. “So all of you are The Infinite’s System?”
“Kind of, yes, sorta, no, and of course,” the unimpressive man said. “We’ve found that trying to explain exactly how this works to humans doesn’t really take, no matter how we do it. The best approximation I can give is that multiple beings give better advice, on average, than individual beings. And I’m supposed to do a good job, so there are a lot of me.”