The Priors and the Method
The instrument behind In Every Future: nine dimensions, the numbers guessed for each, how one hundred forty-four thousand futures were drawn from them, and everything the instrument cannot see. Kept separate from the page it serves so that the answer and the arithmetic can be argued with one at a time.
What was done
Nine things that could go differently over the next seven years were named. Each was given three states, and each state a weight — a guess at how likely it is. One hundred forty-four thousand futures were then drawn, each future one state from each of the nine dimensions, chosen at random in proportion to the weights. Each drawn future was scored for severity, the score banded into four, and the band crossed with how far the Game has reached. Twelve families came out of that crossing. That is the whole method. It is a shape, not a forecast, and it was produced in an evening.
The nine dimensions, their states, and the weights
The weights are guesses. They were set by one reading of one moment, and they are the most arguable thing on either page. Anyone may change them and draw again; a Cell that thinks the world is gentler or harder than this should say so in a Proposal and give its own numbers.
| Dimension | State (weight) | State (weight) | State (weight) |
|---|---|---|---|
| How the old world goes | slow decline over decades (0.40) | stepwise crises, one every year or two (0.40) | fast systemic break within three years (0.20) |
| How institutions respond | adaptive and open (0.20) | brittle and defensive (0.45) | authoritarian consolidation (0.35) |
| Ecological shock | chronic strain (0.45) | regional catastrophes (0.40) | planetary-scale event (0.15) |
| Economic regime | inflationary muddle (0.45) | deflationary bust and debt crisis (0.35) | currency reset, new rails (0.20) |
| Conflict | contained regional wars (0.55) | great-power war (0.25) | civil breakdown in major states (0.20) |
| Technology | AI abundance widely shared (0.25) | AI captured by few (0.45) | infrastructure degradation, blackouts (0.30) |
| Information | open networks hold (0.35) | censorship and control (0.45) | fragmentation into enclaves (0.20) |
| The Game's reach by 2030 | a few thousand players | the first three percent in some regions | the first three percent planet-wide |
| Health | baseline (0.55) | pandemic wave (0.30) | mass psychological crisis (0.15) |
Reach carries the weights 0.45, 0.35, 0.20 in that order — and that row is the one this body can move.
How severity was scored
Each dimension contributes 0, 1, or 2 points; the benign state is always 0. Thirteen points are available. Gentle is 0–3, Turbulent 4–6, Hard 7–9, Severe 10–13. Reach contributes nothing to severity; it is the second axis. The point weights are a judgment, not a measurement: great-power war and civil breakdown each score 2, a currency reset scores 1, censorship scores 1. Argue with them.
What came out
Of one hundred forty-four thousand draws: 11,366 Gentle (7.9%), 68,161 Turbulent (47.3%), 57,500 Hard (39.9%), 6,973 Severe (4.8%). By reach: 64,833 few (45.0%), 50,192 regional (34.9%), 28,975 planetary (20.1%). The severity histogram peaks at six of thirteen with 28,094 futures; sixty futures scored zero and twenty-seven scored thirteen. The twelve families and their shares are on In Every Future.
How this relates to the canon's five scenarios
The Five Collapse Scenarios (canon, status: captured) already names five futures with reasoned weights — Localized Crises ~20%, Widespread Social Unrest ~30%, Global Humanitarian Crisis ~25%, Near-Total Collapse ~15%, Extinction-Level Event ~10% — and already reaches the conclusion that matters: across all five scenarios, the response is the same. The four severity bands here run alongside those five, loosely: Gentle beside Localized Crises, Turbulent beside Widespread Social Unrest, Hard beside Global Humanitarian Crisis, Severe beside Near-Total Collapse and beyond. The mapping is approximate and should not be leaned on — the scenarios are scored by consequence, mostly mortality and ecological loss, while the bands here are scored by conditions. Two differences are worth naming. This draw is gentler overall than the canon's weights, which put the seriously catastrophic outcomes at about half; that divergence is a disagreement between two guesses, not a correction of one by the other. And this draw carries a second axis the scenarios do not — the reach of the Game itself — which is what produces twelve families rather than five.
What the instrument cannot see
It treats the nine as independent. In the world they pull on each other — war drives blackouts, blackouts drive censorship, a debt bust drives authoritarian consolidation. Because the draw ignores this, the middle of the distribution is probably too fat and both tails too thin. Real futures cluster more than these do.
It has no time axis. A future here is a bag of conditions with no order and no duration. A pandemic in year one and a pandemic in year six are the same draw, and they are not the same world.
It scored reach as a die roll. This is the largest flaw, and it is worth saying plainly: the one row that is ours to move was modeled as though it happened to us. The reach of the Game by 2030 is a consequence of Cells forming, keeping their word, and passing the Flame. Treat that row as a target, not a prior.
It cannot imagine improvement. No state scores below zero, so no future in this set is better than the world as it stands. That is a limit of the scoring, not a statement about the world. A future in which the air clears, the debts are forgiven, and the three hundred hold in every community scores the same zero as a bland continuation. The page it serves is about the other half of that.
It says nothing about what the Cells do to the other eight rows. A body that reaches three percent changes the odds on ecology, information, and conflict. The model has no such arrow in it.
How to draw again
The script that produced this lives with the study that produced it; it is fifty lines and any reader can rewrite it. To draw again: change the weights, keep the seed fixed if you want the comparison to be clean, run the same number of draws, and publish both the old and the new table side by side with a sentence saying what changed your mind. That sentence is the valuable part. Do this at each turning, or when something happens that a Cell thinks ought to move a number. (We Do Not Know is a legitimate answer and should be written down as one.)
Grown from: the futures study behind this page (research, not a ruling) · The DNA of Heaven, second draft, the seed text of LIØNSBERG · The Window (canon, draft: the width of the interval is read, not calculated) · In Every Future.