Ruling Arcadia is a lot like a computer program. Every person here is a simple number in a complex program that needs constant supervision and improvement.

Add a zero in life to make controlling the populi easier. Take one individual out that threatens to ruin everything. Take a zero out that adds nothing to Arcadia. Add someone who can boost spirits and production.

For most people, they accept the status quo and simply try to improve their lives without changing the dynamic. As long as the system provides them just enough to consume, they will become complacent and their internal code will work exactly as designed.

However, if there’s one thing I’ve learned in OSW, there is always someone trying to throw a spanner into the works. Usually it’s something simple like revenge or trauma that changes a zero into a one and vice versa but sometimes it is something much more insidious than that.

Consider Ezekiel Graves, his upbringing while strict and religious isn’t anything outside of the ordinary and it usually produces a zero. It breeds compliance and a strict adherence to tradition. It’s perfect for society as it adds production and order and reduces chaos.

Usually is the key word here, unfortunately when someone is bred for order, they’re not made to handle trauma at an early age. The chaos slides off someone like me but transmogrifies someone who isn’t ready. The zero who was made to be productive turned into one broken man.

Trauma breaking someone fully usually takes care of itself. The broken one soon joins those he lost or rebounds and becomes either his old self or a better version of it. It seemed like the world was ready to put you in the former but like every religious person, inching towards death meant running to God and believing it was divine intervention rather than using Occam’s razor and accepting you were just lucky.

That’s where the usually passive side of religion gives way to fervor and a simple code for obedience transforms into a virus for conversion. A zero turning into a one can be rectified but that one converting once unique individuals into members of his church, all collectively becoming zeros in the process is the sort of virus that ruins entire systems.

You surviving that near-fatal accident was dumb luck. In retrospect, letting you survive that was not divine intervention, it was an oversight on our part. I thought it was the boost you needed to return to normalcy, instead it created this, someone who thinks he’s creating justice yet just destroying those who follow him and those who don’t simultaneously.

You don’t see the incoming issue do you? If you make all your members zeros and destroy any one that might change that dynamic, your church and all those influenced by it will crash and cease to function. A virus without a system to infect will perish with it. As someone who oversees a much larger system than you do, you need to learn to make yourself not the only one who matters. If not, you’ll be the only one you can rely on… again.