Chapter 2
by 
paulthemazing
Which Power First?
The Glasses of Reality
The Glasses of Reality are not mere spectacles but an omnipotent interface layered atop the fabric of existence. Slip them on and the world decomposes into transparent grids, color-coded data strings, and floating icons—like peering behind the curtain of a cosmic game engine. Every person, object, or event acquires editable tags: health, mood, allegiance, history, probability. With a silent mental command you can cycle “filters,” isolating lies, hidden motives, arcane energies, structural weak points—whatever facet of truth you seek. Knowledge ceases to be discovered; it is rendered on-screen.
Power escalates when observation shifts to interaction. Hover your gaze over a variable—say, a locked door’s “state: closed”—and a contextual menu appears. Pause it in time, slide the value to “open,” or delete the hinge entirely. A friend’s heartbreak can be muted like background music; an approaching storm can be dragged off the timeline. Because the edits occur at the perceptual layer, reality obeys instantly, rewriting itself to match the new parameters you’ve set, as if the universe were patching live code.
Yet editing is never free. Each alteration costs cognitive bandwidth: a growing tax on focus, empathy, and emotional color. The longer you wear the glasses, the more your brain reroutes sensory input through this god-mode interface. Raw experience dulls; sunsets flatten into RGB values, laughter into waveform graphs. Other people blur into pop-up windows of stats and threat levels. The glasses condition you to treat life as modifiable software rather than a tapestry of shared feeling, making detachment feel natural and authenticity irrelevant.
Reality, too, resists wholesale manipulation. The deeper the edit—erasing a crime from collective memory, rewriting planetary climate—the more “debug errors” emerge: timeline glitches, déjà vu outbreaks, NPC-like behavior in formerly vibrant individuals. Left unaddressed, these anomalies coalesce into reality lag, a stutter in the continuum that can desynchronize you from causality. In **** cases the HUD itself fractures, drowning your vision in overlapping UI until you can’t tell which layer is original—a soft-lock of perception where no further edits register.
Ultimately, the Glasses of Reality present a seduction of omniscient control at the cost of human connection. Mastery requires disciplined restraint: knowing when to adjust a single variable and when to let entropy run its organic course. Fail, and you become a ghostly sysadmin—omnipotent, unemotional, and forever peering through panes of data you once called life.
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