3. Choices make us
Evelyn handed Cane his bowl of cereal. After the first spoonful of milky sugary crunch, Cane's silent internal clockwork nudged "cereal" further up the preferences list. It was this same gradual mechanism that cemented Evelyn's morning routines and affinity for sunrises.
The sun shone brightly on a clear blue sky, just as forecasted, as they walked to Cane's kindergarten. Cane's got a full day of choices to make, to shape him up further into ... whichever direction he was headed currently. That's what makes predicting other people even more difficult than forecasting the weather: you need to aggregate all the choices that they have made so far in their lifetime, micro and macro, because each one nudges them into a certain direction in the personality embedding space.
After the drop off, Evelyn turned into the Bliss Reserve Library just next door.
She could be found here most days, because there was free WiFi and comfortable heating. She enjoyed poring over any number of volumes she could find, about different topics that made her curious. Currently it was all about birds. She had been meaning to join Aiden in his bird-watching hikes, and what better ways to start a new hobby than to scoop up the distilled wisdom from the pages? She could not understand how Aiden would rather jump right in and spend all his precious time rediscovering old knowledge.
Ever since her first nervous venture into this unassuming building, she occupied the same seat near a corner, hidden by the bookshelves. That first time, she chose it just because of its vacancy; but by now even the librarians referred to the area as the "Eve corner." She decided to reinforce that today.
One of the reason she liked this spot was that she could steal a glance into the room labelled "Strictly for Staff Only". There were shelves just like the ones out here, but those books seemed so much more enriching, even though she didn't even know their titles. She had asked the staff before about them, but only got polite replies paraphrasing "they will be available soon." Still, there were no restrictions in looking into the room, so every time a staff member entered or left, she would pause her reading, look up and try to make out the titles and names on the covers. Each glimpse nudged a variable inside her a little bit.
A new book in hand, she walked to the same chair. Then she noticed that the door was open. Her "restricted area curiosity" needle was unfortunately way past the trigger threshold. The decision was made the second she saw the open door. In fact, it was a forgone decision a few weeks back, when her short glimpses failed yet again to tell her what she was missing. She waited for a minute. Then she stood up with a show of confidence and strode in as if she knew exactly which call number to go to.
That metaphorical clockwork cranked again, and Evelyn was set on a new, darker direction.
:::draft hello world this should come :::