An Ordinary Wish

Humanity relied on its own memories—on the knowledge recorded within them that described the natural, objective world.

The basis for acquiring such knowledge was induction: when something had happened many times under certain conditions, there was reason to believe it would continue happening in the future.

The sun rose in the east and set in the west, a planet's gravity bound people to the ground, solid ground would not suddenly collapse, warm beds would not turn into cold, dark abysses, and familiar family and friends would not become unrecognizable monsters one morning.

These familiar things were the foundation of human survival, allowing human memories to serve as reliable evidence for describing the world.

Free will arose from uncertain randomness, and randomness arose from unknown information.

The randomness of Quantum Mechanics and chaotic phenomena was just right. They were random, but not too random—just enough to meet the survival needs of finite humans.

The universe was not like a mechanical clock, operating with absolute precision at every step, nor were humans like precise gears within a clock, stripped of the will to choose freely.

Yet this randomness was not so great that the world lost all patterns that could be summarized and induced, leaving humanity completely unable to predict the future.

Even primitive rituals, astrology, divination, and other methods of predicting the future required people to draw upon events from history and extract a few simple, fundamental patterns.

Ziwei Star was regarded as the Emperor Star in ancient astrology, and its trajectory could supposedly predict the fate of nations and emperors.

Whether or not that theory was reliable, what causal relationship could the fate of a nation or emperor possibly have with a star 434 light-years away from Earth?

At the very least, Ziwei Star was an objectively existing object that