Oh, it's the chicken and the egg problem again!

We label prophecy as the trivial result, that often is mistaken as surprising, of having self-generated a certain given reality, contrasted to an organic reality. Prophecy is best explained via the dual slit experiment in physics where it has been determined that observing an experiment, even without any sort of intervention, counter-intuitively induces changes in the observed experiment. This leads to a certain level of confusion on whether the result, as well as the act of observation itself is organic in nature. We generally attribute prophecy as a result of architectural invariants, along the lines of "what is, can only be" and definitely the result of a spiral.

Even though prophecy can be debated at length, namely in terms of quantification, certain practical applications can be mentioned that suffer from the paradox of prophecy. One such example can be drawn from legistics, with numerous applications, such as the polygraph test, sting operations or, at large, a fundamental flaw of espionage. Put plainly, the validity of the former in terms of justice is questionable, given that there is a doubt on how much an observation changes a situation. Sting operations, for example, include things such as placing cars that seem abandoned in populated places, inserting key-components into a case at opportune moments such as weapons, such that the act itself manages to change the context of a given subject. If you accept that people are connected to their environment, as well as relying on it, then seems rather trivial to deduce that a different resolution would have been met if the context would not have been changed. In legal terms, this leads to seeing the law as a suicide pact, which is in itself, a concept that has been deemed to defeat the purpose of justice. It is from this perspective, given as far as the human knowledge extends to date, that any effect of any observation, even if not pervasive, is to be blamed on the cause, and iff. the cause includes an observer, lest the intervention of an observer, then the observer themselves carry part or whole of the blame. The former is also indicative of why such constructs are labelled "suicidal", in that being the observer generates self-damaging consequences. In practice, all the mentioned artifacts above (polygraph, sting operations, etc.) are in a state of meta-acceptance by most juridical systems given that the underlying ethical problems are tough to solve.

Outside of legistics, the impact of prophecy can also be observed at large, pertaining to the perception of individuals on certain issues, such that behavioral patterns that might change according to the act of observation as a natural and organic response. For example, social media usage patterns, shopping patterns and similar might all change due to just the knowledge of pervasive surveillance. In principle, a long slippery slope lies forth, starting from benign matters like shopping patterns, followed by bank runs and leading up to civil war where the question is always on which one of the cause or the effect preceded the other. One interesting on-going engine to track, is the Axon camera phenomenon where all the possible acts of violence are being constantly documented by a lens, as well as made available to the public, along with all the possible tertiary impact.

The level of detail of a problem sometimes matters if one would like to perceive all the details of an image. In order to illustrate the former, the following video uses an image and then changes the zoom level on the computer screen. Then, you can judge for yourself at which point the image becomes sufficiently detailed in order to be able to tell all the details apart.

When zooming out, some of the information is missing because the pixels will end up blending together, such that the information contained within the image is destroyed. When zooming in, all the pixels are displayed but regardless of the fact that the entire contextual details pertaining to the image are provided, the image is still not clearly determinate. The process of zooming out adds a little more context progressively, however, the context that is added does not seem to clearly contribute directly to what the indeterminate image is that was zoomed-in upon.

As it turns out, for this experiment, even with all the possible information pertaining to the detail that is to be determined, one does not know what the image truly contains.

Places that accumulate infamy of fame, or to summarize, interest, are prone to carry around that interest as if it were a material property. In turn, that material property due to its interest tends to radiate in time. Similar to twisted realities, albeit the object itself being virtual and invisible in this case, the place itself geographically becomes discordant with the rest of the environment that becomes just a carrier shell. The geographical place then generates ripples through time due to being out of phase with the rest of the reality. Attention sometimes generates a spiral that amplifies or maintains the point of power in time. Over time larger periods of time, the place might lose some of its power, yet after a certain event horizon, the place will always generate ripples that will still be perceived by people as distinctive.

Internally, at Wizardry and Steamworks, we have been using the Carthesian coordinate system with only , as the longitude and attitude without factoring in the altitude due to the mapping systems being mainly focused on a 2D representation, but after a while we decided to factor in time as the third coordinate to the system, as , and due to the mapping systems frequently containing snapshots of the same coordinate at different points in time. We realized that time is going to play an important role in our discovery section, such that all exponents are marked with a three coordinate system.

As an exercise, the album "Abbey Road" by the Beatles depicts a pedestrian crossing on its cover as per the following image.

The question is, how likely is it that the point in space (note that time is just a free variable), would generate something that is out of phase with the rest of its shell? We would wager that according to the former, the place should generate something distinctive, and for the sake of the exercise, a shimmer of reality that is very easy to tell apart, due to the fame of the Beatles album, as well as the "conspiracy" around the record that will definitely generate a point of power.

Fortunately due to technology, it is easy to find out, and the following image gallery are snapshots with the exact same point in space with time being a variable using Google street view. Let's take a look.

Quite pedestrian, however, as can be observed, in most images in time crowds of tourists can be observed that gather around to photograph the crossing, just gather around to take a look or entire tourist expeditions are there with guides explaining the history of the crossing. Some people are even seen crossing, and trying to mimic the Beatles as well. As you can tell, the point of power is already generating some ripples, drawing unusual attention to the area and yet, let's focus more on the point of power with this part of missing context:

"A white Volkswagen Beetle is to the left of the picture, parked next to the zebra crossing, which belonged to one of the people living in the block of flats across from the recording studio. -Wikipedia

Going back to the set of images, there is one image dating back to August 2022, that contains something "similar" parked there that shares the same time-frame as the Volkswagen, namely, a Trabant 1601.

with the following snippet about the Trabant 601 from Wikipedia:

"In hindsight, the Trabant 601 can be considered East Germany's answer to West Germany's "People's Car", the VW Beetle." - Wikipedia

Which seems to denote subtle intent given that the joke is based on the Trabant 601 being considered the symmetric equivalent of the Volkswagen Beetle. Interestingly, the color is not quite exact, in fact, the original Volkswagen is said to be a white car, whilst the Trabant is a creme-like color or beige. However, the Beatles cover is often presented with a vintage effect, like Sepia, that turns the Volkswagen into the creme-like color that would correspond symmetrically to the Trabant 601.

Furthermore, rotating the camera around, it seems that there are more elements of the scene to be spotted, namely the famous "bystander" (person on the right in blue jeans) and the black car, a bit further apart than the original but still part of the scene.

Big fame, big magic, isn't it? The exercise is complete. It is important to remember that points of power exist and may influence the surroundings in various ways. In other words, haunted places and haunts do exist, yet they are interpreted too literally as well as too graphically by mixing in "imagination" where it is not welcome nor fitting. However haunted places draw their haunting from real incidents that radiate their history over time such that ulterior frames at the same point in space but with a different time mark might end up giving rise to manifestations that might have different repercussions. As a trivial observation that right about every real estate agent knows, it should be observed that unless extremely sociable, buyers should not purchase property next to a point of power, in this case, if only for the concerns that such a place attracts too many tourists with the ort having a higher-than-usual noise footprint.

Note that architectural invariants add encodings only in the generation of events in this case but they are not responsible for the haunt itself - as a minor attempt to a solution, the story has it that the Beatles album was late and that the band quickly had to create a cover whilst given only 10 minutes outside while the traffic was halted, which also incidentally happened outside the record studio, such that the incidental spatial disposition with the added context restrained the options to an image being taken in this place.

A summarizing image is also to be found in the explore earth section.