I finished reading Oracle Night yesterday, a story essentially about how one random event can drastically change a life. The main character in the story is a writer, and in the story he writes a story, so it becomes a story within a story for a portion of the story. I mention this because of a couple of remarkable coincidences between Oracle Night and the D&D gameplay here. In Oracle Night, there’s a somewhat mysterious old asian guy with poor English who at one point gives Sid, the writer, a single karate chop that incapacitates him during an altercation. The same thing happens in the D&D gameplay, and it happens before I read it in the book. I might simply chalk this up to common cultural stereotypes but, as the title suggests, a prophetic quality is embedded within the Oracle Night story.

I have two theories to account for the coincidences. The first theory, which echos the theory in Oracle Night, is that when someone writes a story they can become a kind of conduit or oracle, if you will, unconsciously piecing together disparate bits of experience to formulate a prediction that is ordinary thought to be merely a fictional story. This seems plausible because the mind is largely nothing more than a prediction machine, some believe. Oracle Night is the fourth Auster book that I’ve read in a row and so my Auster intuition may have developed to the point of having prophetic power.

The other theory is that when someone writes a story they can become a different sort of conduit. They can, for example, become a conduit of life or death in the case of Schrödinger's cat, collapsing the wave function and determining its fate. It could be that this D&D gameplay shifted all of us to an alternate universe where Oracle Night features an old asian guy similar to Master Zeo. Because this theory could be true, I suggest excluding non-deterministic spacetime anomalies from any further gameplay. With the virus/economy things are bad enough as it is.