Pa'an

It took several “kisses” to understand the Pa’an concept of a p-Web. Aura thought of the thousands of decisions and actions needed to do anything useful, even for ordinary survival. In any plan there were just so many opportunities to make a mistake. But it took just a few bad choices to create a perambulating disaster. Aura admitted those were bad odds, but they seemed to be built into the nature of this universe. We had to accept them. Even on Earth, so much more benign than Gara’un, odds for success in any complex venture were bad. More businesses failed than succeeded. More people lived in poverty than in plenty.

We are, everyone of us, enmeshed in a confounding web of cause-and-effect chains. That is the p-Web. Some of those chains extend all the way back to the beginnings of the universe. The p-Web is chance, choice, fate and luck. Often enough, these chains converge at a node. Nodes are hard to avoid. Often enough a node is an inflection point where things start to go bad. The Pa’an call this a “ne” point. Through their advanced science of the p-Web, the Pa’an had determined that humans were approaching a “ne” point. But what was it?

Aura could breeze through chains of actions and consequences, but no particular scenario stood out.

Aura had another big question. How did the Pa’an know that their p-Gate would lead to a better place, a place where the ratio of success to failure was really better? Faith, they said. Faith meant something else to the Pa’an. It seemed that from time to time, against all odds, miracles happened. The Pa’an understood them to be leakage from another metaverse. They tracked that leakage to its source. That metaverse was not a matter of faith to them. The Pa’an put their faith in their ability to build a Gateway.