Fragments of chronology spun, floated, and collided around me, like a scrambled kaleidoscope. I "existed" in a sensory vacuum, with only the notebook remaining as the sole unchanging singularity in that warped spacetime, the coordinate anchoring this wisp of pure will that was me. Water privatization-this malignant growth feeding on civilization's lifeblood-had to be excised.
The target: Clear Spring Capital, a corporate leviathan with a name steeped in irony. By acquiring endangered water sources around the globe, manipulating water-rights trading, and monopolizing purification technology, they had turned life's most basic resource into a tool for extracting outsized profits.
My will, that beam of higher-dimensional laser light, focused on the notebook once more. The pen tip-an extension of a concept-descended, weaving a "script" that involved a deeper distortion of causality. I set the final outcomes for Clear Spring Capital's three key controllers and bound them to a global revolution in water purification technology that would erupt "by chance": at the heart of their respective heavily guarded private water reserves, the possessions they took the greatest pride in, they would go utterly mad from "water-resonant psychological disintegration"-manifesting as an extreme fear of water and an uncontrollable compulsion to sign documents relinquishing all water rights and disclosing every monopolized technology-and ultimately drown in the private lakes or swimming pools that symbolized their wealth and power. At the same time, a blueprint for low-cost, highly efficient distributed water purification technology, which they had suppressed for years, would be transmitted instantly to thousands of open-source technology communities worldwide through the documents they signed before their collapse.
The burden descended. This time, it was no longer stripping something away, but... replacing it.
The price paid was-"spatial orientation."
My awareness of my own position in space disintegrated completely. "Up," "down," "left," "right," "here," "there"... these concepts collapsed