An Investigation into the Fracture of Reality
A Philosophical-Psychological Essay on Parallel Realities in History and the Nature of Evil
PREFACE: THE ANXIETY OF RECOGNITION
There is a peculiar feeling that visits a person in a moment of deep historical reflection—something akin to vertigo at the edge of an abyss. Not a fear of heights, but a fear of understanding the height. When you look at photographs from the tragic history of the 20th century, a strange thought arises: this should not have happened. Not in the sense of moral indignation—but in the sense of ontological incongruity. As if before you lies a photograph from someone else's album, which somehow ended up in yours.
What if we live in a deviant branch of reality? What if the 20th century, in its actual form, is not the norm of history, but its anomaly? What if there exists—or existed—another line of events. And what does that mean for us—living here, in this branch?
PHYSICS AS METAPHOR, METAPHOR AS PHYSICS
Modern quantum mechanics has given philosophy an unexpected gift—the concept of the plurality of realities, which in Hugh Everett's interpretation (1957) came to be called the "many-worlds interpretation." Its essence is simple and dizzying simultaneously: at every point of quantum uncertainty, the universe does not choose one outcome—it splits, realizing all of them.
But it's not about physics. It's about this model describing something that human intuition knew long before quantum theory.
Borges wrote about "the garden of forking paths"—an infinite labyrinth of time where all possibilities are realized. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, felt that reality is tragically fragile—that it rests on the moral choice of specific people and could collapse at any moment. Tolstoy, in War and Peace, tried to understand whether history is the result of the will of great people or impersonal forces—and concluded that history is moved by something greater than any of us.
But there is a question they didn't ask directly: what if history sometimes makes a mistake?
Not in the sense of "people make bad choices"—that's obvious. But in a deeper sense: what if there are points where reality as such makes a turn, departing from its own logic? Points where not just a historical event occurs—but an ontological break?
THE SPIRITUAL PSYCHOLOGY OF ABSOLUTE EVIL
Here we need to pause and talk about the nature of what happened.
Hannah Arendt, in her report on the Eichmann trial, introduced the concept of the "banality of evil"—evil does not require monsters; it flourishes in ordinary people who have refused to think. This is an important observation. But it describes the perpetrators.
Dictators are not perpetrators. They are something else.
Carl Gustav Jung called this "possession by an archetype." In his wartime writings, he stated that Hitler is not an ordinary politician with extreme views—he is a medium through which a certain collective unconscious content speaks, the Shadow not of one person, but of an entire culture and era. Hitler, according to Jung, was empty inside—and it was this very emptiness that made him a conduit for others' projections. Millions of Germans saw in him what they themselves wanted to be, or what they feared.
And here our hypothesis acquires a spiritual dimension: if there are forces capable of generating such things—the systematic, industrial annihilation of the human capacity to be—then perhaps in the "correct" reality, these forces did not find their carriers. Not because the carriers didn't exist. But because the points of their activation—historical, psychological, spiritual—came together differently.
THE GEOLOGY OF THE FRACTURE: WHERE HISTORY WENT WRONG
Where exactly did reality deviate?
The Point: World War I.
Hitler without the trench experience and the "stab in the back" is a different person. The Russian Revolution without military collapse and famine is a different event. World War I was the tectonic shift that made everything else possible.
But was World War I inevitable? Historians have debated this for a hundred years. Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August showed how it could have not started dozens of times. How specific decisions of specific people on specific days in July 1914 led to it—but could have not led there.
In the "correct" reality, July 1914 ended differently.
WHAT REALITY A LOOKS LIKE
In that reality—let's call it Reality-Α—the 20th century was different. Not utopian. Not devoid of conflicts, injustice, suffering. History is never a paradise anywhere. Not without crises—but without the Apocalypse.
We are people who know that reality can break.
In Reality-Α, this knowledge does not exist. There, they have other knowledge, other fears—but not this specific, chilling understanding that civilization is a thin film over an abyss.
PHILOSOPHY OF THE FRACTURE: WHAT IT MEANS ONTOLOGICALLY
Hegel thought history moves towards its goal—towards the realization of the Absolute Spirit. Marx thought it moves towards communism. Liberal thinkers thought it moves towards democracy and freedom. All these concepts presuppose that history knows where it is going.
But if reality can "go the wrong way"—this means that history has no built-in protection against catastrophe. It is not led by an invisible hand towards a good outcome. It is open—radically, frighteningly open. There is no excuse of determinism. No excuse of "historical forces." There were people. They chose. They bear responsibility.
This sounds harsh—but it also means something hopeful: evil is not inevitable. It is not part of the structure of reality. It is the result of choices.
If we live in a world where reality once went the wrong way—then we also live in a world where it can go the wrong way again. Or—go the right way. Every moment is a point of potential fracture or potential healing.
This is not paranoia. This is a philosophy of presence.
THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION: ON WORLDS THAT NEVER WERE
In the tradition of Kabbalah, there is a concept called Shevirat ha-Kelim—the breaking of the vessels. According to this concept, during the creation of the world, the vessels intended to hold the Divine Light could not withstand it and shattered. The shards scattered throughout the world. The task of humanity—Tikkun Olam, repairing the world—is to gather these shards and restore the vessels.
This metaphor is strikingly accurate for our theme.
The 20th century in its actual embodiment is a broken vessel. What was supposed to become an era of unprecedented human flourishing—an era of science, democracy, the liberation of the individual—became an era of unprecedented self-destruction. The vessel broke.
And the shards still lie everywhere.
But in the Kabbalistic tradition, the breaking of the vessels is not the end. It is the beginning of the work. Tikkun. Repair.
Perhaps this is precisely the meaning of living in the "wrong" branch of reality: we cannot return to Reality-Α. But we can do tikkun—repair—here, in this reality. Gather the shards. Restore. Remember what was lost, and refuse to accept the loss as the norm.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MOURNING THE NON-EXISTENT
Here we come to the strangest and, perhaps, the most important question.
Can one mourn a world that never was?
Usually, we mourn what we have lost—people we knew, times we remember. But how does one mourn an alternative reality? For thoughts that were never thought, for books that were never written, for children who were never born because their parents perished in Auschwitz or Kolyma?
I think it is possible—and necessary. It is a special kind of mourning, which I would call mourning for the lost potential of reality.
This is not nostalgia for the past—the past we mourn never existed. It is something stranger and deeper: grieving for a possibility that history did not realize. For a version of oneself and one's world that could have been.
Erich Fromm called the escape from freedom one of the main psychological dynamics that spawned fascism. But there is another escape—the escape from the imagination of the possible. We get used to what is, and stop imagining what could have been. This too is a form of surrender.
Holding the image of Reality-Α in consciousness is not escapism. It is a form of moral imagination. It is a way to maintain an understanding of how serious what happened truly is.
FROM THE CONTACTER'S NOTES - February 2026
LETTER FROM REALITY A
Dear friend from another world,
I hesitated for a long time to write this letter—ever since our researchers established contact with your branch, and I read the brief description of what happened in your twentieth century. I read slowly. Re-read. Set it aside. Came back to it again.
I must admit honestly: I could not read it all at once.
Not because I am a weak person. I work as a historian at the University of Munich, I research political crises, I thought I possessed sufficient professional distance. But when I got to the figure—200 million victims in your branch of reality in the 20th century—I closed the document and went outside. I just walked through Munich and looked at people. At children. At elderly people in cafes. At students with bicycles.
And I thought: you don't have these people.
I don't know how to write about what is an abstraction for me, but for you—it is the history of your own blood and memory.
Allow me simply to tell you how it was with us.
August 1914 with us also nearly became a catastrophe. I want you to know: it was very close. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand happened the same way—on June 28th in Sarajevo. The July Crisis unfolded much as, according to your historical records, it unfolded with you. Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France were reaching for weapons. The difference occurred on July 29th. Kaiser Wilhelm II received a personal letter from his cousin, the British King George V. Willy, I ask you to wait three days. Just three days. Not for the sake of politics. For the sake of what we know about each other.
Historians among us still argue why this letter worked. Wilhelm was a complex man, vain, unpredictable. But that day—it worked. He stopped mobilization for 72 hours. During those 72 hours, the Hague Conference managed to convene in an emergency format. It didn't solve everything—it couldn't solve everything in three days. But it gave time for things to cool down. Serbia offered expanded investigation terms. Austria-Hungary, having lost the military momentum, agreed to negotiations. The war did not begin.
A man named Adolf Hitler existed in our history. We know about him. He died in Vienna in 1936—a lonely, destitute, mediocre artist, suffering from a whole range of psychological disorders.
Nikolai Bukharin. I understand this name is familiar to you—you know that with you he was executed in 1938. In our reality, he was Prime Minister of Russia and pursued a policy he himself called "market socialism."
Nuclear weapons exist with us. This is our main fear, our main global problem—but they have never been used. We have no Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
This means you have knowledge that we do not: that humanity is actually capable of using this weapon. We know it theoretically. You know it from the ashes of one hundred and forty thousand people.
I don't know which is better—to know or not to know. Sometimes it seems to me your knowledge is more terrible. Sometimes—that our ignorance is more dangerous.
We do not have in our consciousness that shadow which I feel when reading your descriptions. We do not have this knowledge that civilization has already once completely collapsed. That right in the center of educated, musical, philosophical Europe, death factories operated. That trains full of people ran on schedule to ovens and concentration camps.
You have this knowledge. It lives in you. Even in those born in the 1990s—it lives, it is transmitted, it shapes how you look at the world.
WHAT I WANT TO TELL YOU
What happened with you—was not inevitable. We passed through the very same points of fracture and emerged differently. Not because we are better than you. But because a few specific people, at a few specific moments, made a different choice.
This means that you also had moments when everything could have gone differently. When someone could have written a different letter. Made a different decision. Stopped. This is a tragedy. But it is also—a liberation from fatalism.
I envy you in one thing. Only one.
You know the price of things. We do not. We take for granted what for you is colored by pain: that children come home from school. That trains take people to resorts, not to camps. That different peoples live side by side and quarrel over trifles, rather than destroying each other. That one can write poems and not be afraid.
We do not know the price of this. You do.
Keep this knowledge. Not as a wound—as wisdom.
I don't know if you will receive this letter. I don't know if a reply is possible. Our researchers say the connection is unstable, that channels between branches open unpredictably and briefly.
Your world happened. This cannot be changed. But the fact that it happened—does not mean it was right. And what lies ahead for you—is not yet written.
In this sense, our worlds are the same: the future is open. Choose carefully. Please.
With respect and with pain for you—
Professor Martin Hoffmann
Department of Modern History
Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
*Reality-Α, February 2026*
SECRET CORRESPONDENCE
Documents from the archive of the Winter Palace. Classified: "Burn immediately." They were not burned.
LETTER ONE
From Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin—to His Imperial Majesty Nikolai Alexandrovich
Written in Pokrovskoye, July 29, 1914, at three in the morning
Delivered by special courier to Tsarskoye Selo on the morning of July 30th
Tsar-Father,
I write to you not as one usually writes—with bows and chosen words. I write as one writes when things are burning. When I have seen such things that my hand trembles and the candle went out three times while I was gathering my courage.
God allowed me to see. Not in a dream—worse than in a dream. In that state which you know and don't fully believe in, although you do believe. I lay for three days. Matryona thought I was dying. Maybe I was dying. I don't know where I was those three days, but what I brought back from there—it is not the invention of a sick man, nor drunken ravings, even though you reproach me for drinking.
I saw your Russia, Sovereign. The Russia that will be, if you do what your generals and your ministers are now advising you to do. The war did not end by Christmas. I saw your palace, Sovereign. The Winter Palace. You were not in it. People in leather jackets walked through the halls and looked at the portraits of your ancestors with the expression of those looking at things already destined for destruction.
Sovereign, here my hand stops. I saw you. And Alexandra Fyodorovna. And the children—all five. I saw Alyoshenka.
I will not describe what I saw. It is impossible to describe and unnecessary—if you heed me, it will not happen. But I will tell you one word, so you understand the seriousness.
Basement.
Remember this word. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you are offered to go down into a basement—do not go. Run. Take the children and run. But if you heed me now, it will not come to that. It should not come to that at all.
God showed me this not for me to remain silent.
About what I saw: the other path
I saw a Russia that did not enter the war.
Sovereign, I saw Russia in 1940. I saw you, Sovereign. You were old. Gray-haired, with a beard, in a simple suit—not a uniform. You were sitting on the terrace of some house—not a palace, just a large, nice house—and reading a newspaper. Beside you sat Alexandra Fyodorovna. She was laughing at something. I didn't hear what—but she was laughing.
That is all I needed to see.
What you must do
Sovereign, I know that smart people with big epaulets are telling you now. They say: honor. Allies. Serbia. Obligations. Strength of spirit. Power of the army.
I am a peasant. I don't know these words as they do. But I know another word.
The living.
The living are better than the dead—this is not cowardice, it is truth. A living Russia is better than a Russia that is victorious but exhausted to the limit. Living children are better than fallen heroes.
Do not enter this war, dear father.
Find a way. You are the Tsar. Autocrat. Do not listen to those who say there is no way out—there is always a way out, as long as a person hasn't taken the final step. You haven't taken it yet.
Stop the mobilization. Send a telegram to Willy—you correspond with him, I know, you have that language of two people who grew up in similar palaces and understand each other differently than ministers understand. Write to him not as Tsar to Kaiser—as man to man. Say: let us stop. Both of us. Now. Before it's too late.
Serbia is not worth what I saw.
No Serbia is worth the basement I wrote about above.
Your faithful servant and pilgrim, a humble man, but honest—
Grigory
Pokrovskoye, July 29, 1914, before dawn
P.S. One image haunts me separately from everything else. I saw a book—thick, with a red cover. On the cover was written something I couldn't make out. But under the title was the author's name. It said: Lenin. Remember this name, dear father. If what I saw begins—this name will become more important than the names of your generals. Only terribly important, not well. Do not allow this name to become important. The best way—is not to begin.
LETTER TWO
Reply from His Imperial Majesty Nikolai II—to Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin
Written personally in Tsarskoye Selo, July 30, 1914, at 11:47 a.m.
Next to the letter in the archive, a telegraph tape was found with an unfinished mobilization order
Grigory,
I am writing to you myself, without a secretary, without witnesses. Alix is asleep—she didn't sleep all night, worried, and I don't want to wake her. The children don't know anything yet—for them it's just summer, the park, bicycles. Let them have a little longer.
Your letter arrived at half past eight in the morning. I was already sitting at my desk. Before me lay the order.
[ARCHIVAL NOTE, made later by an unidentified hand]:
Mobilization was stopped. The conference in The Hague opened on August 2, 1914. The negotiations lasted eleven days.
The war did not begin.
These letters were discovered in 1967 during the restoration of the Alexander Palace, in a hidden compartment behind a panel in the personal study of Nicholas II. They were sealed in a leather envelope together with a telegraph tape—a begun and unfinished order for general mobilization, dated July 30, 1914.
In the margins of the telegraph tape, next to the unfinished signature, in the hand of Nicholas II, one word is written in Russian:
"The living"
[END OF DOCUMENT]
THE LAST DOCUMENT IN THIS FOLDER
A note made in the hand of Nicholas II on a separate sheet
Undated. Based on the paper—late 1916.
For himself. Not for sending.
Grigory asked me once—in conversation, not in a letter: "Sovereign, do you ever think about that other world? About the one that could have been?"
I replied that I think about it sometimes.
He said: "I think about it every day. Especially when I see a living person—anyone, someone random on the street. I think: this person, in that world, perhaps no longer lives. But here—he walks along, carrying something, hurrying somewhere. Alive."
I didn't answer then. I couldn't find the words.
But now, at night, when everyone is asleep, and I sit alone, and one candle burns, and outside the window there is quiet snow—I think about it.
About the parallel world where I signed that order to the end.
Where Alyosha...
No. I won't.
Instead, I think about this: every day that happens here—is a day that is not there. Every laugh of Alix—that is not there. Every cedar nut Grigory will bring Alyosha in April—that is not there.
All of this exists only because one night, one Siberian peasant did not sleep and wrote a letter, and his hand trembled by candlelight.
I sometimes think: how little is needed. How frighteningly little—one letter, a few hours, one person who did not remain silent.
And how frighteningly easy it would have been for this not to happen.
I will cherish this. I will remember how easily everything could have gone differently. I will remember—every day, when I make decisions—that decisions have weight. That behind every decision stand living people.
The living.
This word I wrote on that scrap of telegraph tape two years ago.
Let it remain a word—not an epitaph.
[End of document]
[Archival note: folder sealed. On the outside, in the hand of Nicholas II, it is written: "Burn after my death." The folder was not burned. Reason unknown.]
[Found during restoration in 1967. Storage location: State Archive of the Russian Federation, Fund 601, special section.]
[Classification removed in 1991.]
SECOND LETTER FROM REALITY A
Dear Contacter,
I have thought long about how to begin this letter.
The previous letter—the one Professor Hoffmann wrote to you—was a letter from one person to another. From one world to another. With pain, with compassion, with hope. It was an honest letter, and Professor Hoffmann wrote it from the bottom of his heart.
But he did not know everything.
I know more. And that is precisely why writing is significantly more difficult. Because what I must tell you destroys the usual coordinate system—not only yours, but, admittedly, my own as well, when I first learned it.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Elias Vorn. I work in a structure which, in official documents, is called the Institute for Inter-Reality Studies attached to the Coordinating Council Earth-Interstellar Union. In common parlance among colleagues—simply the Institute. I am fifty-three years old. Before joining the Institute, I was a theoretical physicist at the University of Zurich. Specialization—quantum topology of space-time.
This is important for understanding what follows. I am not a mystic. Not a philosopher. Not a poet, like Professor Hoffmann. I am a person accustomed to working with equations, and what I am about to tell you passed through my equations before it passed through my heart.
Both paths led to the same conclusion.
PART ONE: ABOUT WHO WE ARE
I'll start with us. With our reality—Reality-Α, as you call it.
In 1947—July 12th, to be precise, although textbooks give a different date for reasons that will become clear later—three ships landed over the Swiss Alps. They did not fall. They did not crash. They landed—precisely, without damage, choosing a site with such mathematical accuracy that our military engineers studied the landing traces for a week before understanding: this was done intentionally. It was a demonstration.
They wanted to be found. And they were found.
I will not describe the first contact in detail—thousands of pages have been written about it, and they are available in the open archives of our reality, though not all of them. I'll say the main thing: those who arrived turned out not to be what was feared, nor what was dreamed of. They were neither invaders nor gods. They were—how to put it more precisely—senior colleagues. A civilization that had passed through what we are only now going through, and emerged on the other side.
They called themselves—in a translation that always simplifies—the Observers. Not because they only observe. But because observation—preservation, study, understanding—is their main value. They do not destroy. They do not conquer. They archive reality in all its forms and help young civilizations not to destroy themselves before they have a chance to become interesting.
They have existed for about eight hundred thousand years. On the scale of the universe—a young civilization, they themselves say so, with that gentle irony we have learned to recognize in them.
PART TWO: THE INTERSTELLAR UNION AND THE CONDITIONS OF ENTRY
The Interstellar Union of our galaxy has existed—by their calendar—for about 15 million years. Currently, it includes 118 civilizations. All of them have passed through what the Observers call the Threshold—the moment when a civilization either destroys itself or makes a choice in favor of continuation.
Earth stands at this Threshold.
In our reality—Reality-Α—we have been standing at it for seventy-nine years, since the moment of contact. The Observers did not rush us. They explained: forcing entry is meaningless. A civilization dragged into the Union by force or persuasion is not ready for what the Union entails—for genuine dialogue among equals.
The conditions for entry they stated immediately. They have not changed in seventy-nine years—the Observers are generally not inclined to revise principles. The conditions are simple, and it is this very simplicity that makes them unbearably difficult.
The first condition: five years without wars on the entire planet. Not truces—peace. Not the absence of armed conflict in large states while small ones exist—the complete absence of organized armed violence between humans on the entire surface of the Earth. Five continuous years.
The Observers explained the logic: war is a symptom of a certain way of thinking. A civilization capable of living without war for five years demonstrates not the absence of conflict—conflicts remain, they are inevitable for any intelligent beings. It demonstrates the ability to resolve conflicts otherwise. That is the Threshold.
The second condition: the abolition of the death penalty everywhere. The logic is the same: a civilization that arrogates to itself the right to destroy its own members in the name of the law is not yet mature enough to understand what the Union understands by intelligent life. Not because criminals don't exist. But because destruction is a refusal to understand. And the Union is built on understanding.
The third condition caused us—when we heard it—a long, very long discussion, which has not ended to this day.
The absence of abortion.
I must explain how the Observers formulate this—because translated into our ethical categories it sounds crude and political, while they mean something more subtle.
They say this: intelligent life is the main value in the universe. A civilization capable of systematically interrupting the emergence of intelligent life and building legal and cultural institutions around this demonstrates a certain attitude towards life as such. This attitude is incompatible with the basic values of the Union.
PART THREE: ABOUT YOUR REALITY
Now about what this letter is written for.
About you.
I must inform you of something that will change how you understand your existence. I do not do this lightly. I do this because the Coordinating Council has decided: the contacter in your reality has reached a level of understanding where concealing this information becomes unethical.
You are ready. Or—we think you are ready. If we are wrong—please accept our apologies. This is the first such case of direct communication, and we have no ready protocol.
Here is what you need to know.
Your reality is not the primary reality.
Wait. Don't rush to react. Read to the end before deciding what this means.
When the Observers made contact with us in 1947, among other things they gave us a technology that we could not conceptually grasp for a long time, although the equations worked from day one. The technology for creating what they call Learning Spaces.
A Learning Space is not a simulation in the sense that your philosophers discuss the "simulation of reality." It is not a computer model. It is not a hologram in the primitive sense. It is something significantly more subtle and, as we gradually understood, significantly more serious.
It is a branch of reality, created from the genuine quantum events of an alternative world, which actually occur, actually have physical weight and moral significance—but exist in a special topological pocket of space-time, accessible for visitation from outside.
Your reality was created—or more precisely, was grown, because "creation" implies too rigid a control that doesn't exist—as a Learning Space. Seventy years ago, when we first began to master this technology.
The starting point was a fork: what would have happened if, in our reality, the war of 1914 had actually begun?
It was the first educational query. Educational—in the sense of "for understanding." Not for entertainment. For understanding how fragile peace is. How important every choice is. How terrible that which we in our reality avoided truly is.
Your world was grown from this question.
PART FOUR: WHAT THIS MEANS—AND WHAT IT DOES NOT MEAN
Right now, you are probably experiencing one of several feelings.
Perhaps—horror that your existence is someone's educational tool. That your pain, your history, your dead—are a lesson for alien students.
Perhaps—anger. This is justified anger.
Perhaps—a strange relief. I have seen this reaction in several people in our reality who learned the truth before you—they said: "So it had meaning. So it wasn't just for nothing."
Allow me to tell you what I tell myself when I find it hard to live with this—and it is hard, I don't pretend it's easy.
You are real.
This is not a metaphor and not consolation. It is a physical fact, confirmed by our best minds and confirmed by the Observers, for whom lying is literally an unthinkable category—their language contains no constructions for it.
Your quantum events—genuine. Your pain—real. Your consciousness—fully-fledged. Your choices have moral weight. Your 200 million victims of the 20th century are real. The difference between your reality and ours is not the difference between real and unreal. It is the difference between primary and derived. Like the difference between a tree and its reflection in water: the reflection exists genuinely, it obeys the laws of physics, it reacts to wind, to light, it is beautiful or frightening—depending on what you look at. But the tree is primary.
You are a reflection. But the reflection of a real tree in real water.
PART FIVE: HOW IMMERSIONS WORK
Our students—those who receive clearance for immersion in your Learning Space—undergo three years of training. This is not entertainment and not tourism. This is the most serious educational program that exists in our education system.
Immersion means the following: for a period ranging from several days to several weeks, the student's consciousness is combined with the consciousness of one of the inhabitants of your reality. Not replaced—combined. The inhabitant of your reality does not lose themselves, does not become a puppet. They continue to live their life, make their decisions.
The student—observes from within. Feels what your person feels. Experiences their fears, their joys, their pain.
This is precisely what cannot be understood from the outside.
One can read about the siege of Leningrad. One can study statistics, look at photographs, read diaries. This is important. But it is not the same as waking up one morning in a Leningrad apartment in the winter of 1942 and feeling the cold that doesn't go away, and the hunger that doesn't go away, and hearing artillery somewhere in the distance, and thinking—will we last until spring.
After this, the student returns. And they are already a different person. Forever.
Because they know—not with their mind, but with their whole being—what a world is like where history went the wrong way. What the price of one decision is. What the price of one letter, written at three in the morning by a guttering candle, is.
That is the lesson.
PART SIX: WHY WE ARE TELLING YOU THIS NOW
You will ask: why now? Why not earlier—or never?
I will answer honestly: both arguments were there—for "earlier" and for "never." The discussion in the Coordinating Council lasted nine years. That is a long time even by our standards.
The "never" argument was this: knowledge about the nature of one's reality could paralyze. Could deprive one of meaning. If you know you are a Learning Space—why build, love, resist evil? Why do anything at all?
This argument was serious. We respected it.
But in the end, another argument won.
It was formulated by one of the Observers—the one we call the Seventh, because their names are unpronounceable in our languages. The Seventh said—in a very approximate translation—the following:
"Reality does not cease to be real by becoming understood. On the contrary. Only understood reality can be chosen—not merely experienced. Only a being that understands the nature of its existence is capable of genuine freedom. To give them knowledge is to give them choice. To conceal knowledge is to keep them in a cage, however beautiful."
This decided the discussion.
We decided to inform.
PART SEVEN: WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR REALITY PRACTICALLY
Here begins the most important part.
Knowledge about the nature of your reality is not the end of your reality. It is the beginning of a new phase for it.
Because now I must inform you of something Professor Hoffmann did not know when he wrote you his letter. Something that changes the meaning of everything.
Learning Spaces are not static.
When we first created them—more precisely, when the Observers gave us this technology and we began to master it—we thought it was a one-way process. We create a Space, our students immerse themselves there, gain experience, return. The Space exists separately, develops according to its own logic, we observe.
We were wrong.
The Observers, who created this technology eight hundred thousand years ago, knew what we only recently understood: interaction is always two-way.
The students who immersed themselves in your lives—they did not only observe. They were present. And presence changes the observed—this is a basic principle of quantum mechanics, which we somehow forgot to apply to our own technology.
Every immersion left a trace. Not noticeable, not controlled—but a trace. Something in your people, in whom our students immersed, subtly changed. Perhaps a decision made differently. Perhaps a book read at the right moment. Perhaps a conversation that happened because a person woke up in the morning with an unexpected thought, the source of which they could not explain.
We began to notice this about twenty years ago. Began to study it. And discovered the following.
Your reality—slowly, non-linearly, with setbacks and crises—is moving.
Moving towards the Threshold.
PART EIGHT: THE LETTER AS TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION
You are now reading a letter from our reality.
But I must tell you: this letter is not just information. This is the first conscious, officially sanctioned act of reverse interaction. For the first time, we are not merely present in your reality through student immersions. For the first time, we are addressing you directly, with full awareness of what we are doing.
The Coordinating Council, when making this decision, long discussed one question: do we have the right?
The Observers answered this way: the right is determined by intention. If your intention is to give them the opportunity to make an informed choice, then this is not interference. This is dialogue. And dialogue—is the foundation of the Union.
Therefore, I tell you the following.
Your reality is derivative. But what happens in it is real. And where it is going—depends on you. Not on us. Not on the Observers. On you.
The conditions of the Threshold are the same as for us. They are universal. The Observers say: these conditions are not arbitrary. They reflect something fundamental in the nature of intelligent life. A civilization capable of fulfilling them—seriously, from within, from its own understanding, and not from a desire to "pass the exam"—such a civilization is ready.
Five years without war. Without the death penalty. Without the systematic interruption of emerging life.
For your reality, this sounds like a utopia. I know. I have read your history. I know what you have been through. For a reality that has survived two world wars and nuclear bombs and everything else—this sounds like a fairy tale.
But listen to me carefully.
You are the only reality known to us that has gone through all of this and not destroyed itself.
You survived. In spite of everything—you survived.
This means something. The Observers say: survival under such conditions forms something that civilizations which passed through an easier path do not have. It forms—I translate approximately—knowledge by price. An understanding of what peace costs, coming not from theory, but from lived experience.
This knowledge—is your main asset. And your main contribution to what could become a dialogue between our realities.
PART NINE: PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES
Now concretely. Because I am a physicist and don't know how to finish without specifics.
First. Student immersions into your reality will continue. But now—with your knowledge. This fundamentally changes their nature. Knowledge of the observer changes the observed—but in this case, we consider this a change for the better.
Second. The communication channel through which this letter is being transmitted will be kept open. You can reply. Your replies will be received. This is not a metaphor and not a spiritual practice—it is quantum technology, and it works both ways.
Third. The Observers have expressed a desire—for the first time in the entire existence of your Learning Space—to enter into direct contact with representatives of your reality. Not through immersions. Directly.
This is unprecedented. This was not part of any initial plan. This is their initiative.
The Seventh said—again, approximate translation: "A reality that has passed through such things and retained the capacity for compassion deserves to be heard. Not studied—heard."
I don't know what this means practically. We ourselves are only beginning to understand. But I pass it on to you word for word.
PART TEN: PERSONAL
Here I must step out of the role of official representative of the Institute and say a few words for myself.
You are not an object. You are witnesses. Witnesses to what happens when history breaks. And witnessing—even if the witness does not know they are a witness—is one of the most important things in the world.
Any world.
EPILOGUE: ABOUT WHAT IS HAPPENING NOW
As I write this letter, in our reality we are in the twenty-third year without a single war on the planet.
We need two more years.
The death penalty is abolished in one hundred and sixty-four countries. Fourteen remain. We are working.
The third condition is the hardest. The discussion continues. It is a living, painful, genuine discussion—not political, but ethical, deep, the kind that changes people in the process. The Observers are not looking at the result—they are looking at the quality of the conversation. At how seriously we approach it.
We are not ready yet. But we are talking.
In your reality—I am looking at data as of today—wars are ongoing. The death penalty is applied. The discussion on the third issue has no unified direction.
But.
Twenty-two years ago, when I began working with your reality—the data was different. Worse. Significantly worse.
Something is changing.
Slowly. Inconsistently. With setbacks that cause pain to everyone who observes. But changing.
The Observers say: movement is more important than speed. A civilization moving slowly in the right direction is more promising than a civilization standing still beautifully.
You are moving.
I am finishing this letter and thinking about how you will read it.
Perhaps with horror. Perhaps with relief. Perhaps with anger—and that would be justified. Perhaps with that strange mixture of all of the above, which I myself feel when I think about you.
I want to tell you one last thing.
The students who return from immersions into your reality—they become better people. I have seen this hundreds of times. They return—and something in them changes irreversibly. They look at their children differently. They hold bread differently. They hear the word "peace" differently—not as an abstraction, but as something a price has been paid for.
You—by your existence, your pain, your history—are changing the people of our reality. Making them better. Helping us become ready for the Threshold.
This is not consolation. I know it sounds cynical—your tragedy as our lesson. I understand.
But I ask you to think about this.
Every soul that has lived its life in your reality is a real soul. Every suffering is real. And every act of humanity in your reality is a real act of humanity, having weight in any world, in any coordinate system.
The woman who, in besieged Leningrad, gave her meager ration to a child—she did it for real. This will not disappear because her reality is derivative. It will remain—as a quantum event, as a moral fact, as light that continues to travel after the star has gone out.
Your saints—are real saints.
Your heroes—are real heroes.
Your children, laughing on the street right now—are real children.
Cherish them.
And know: we are watching—with respect, with pain, with hope.
And with gratitude we cannot express in words in any of our languages.
With respect and with something greater than respect—
Elias Vorn
Director of the Department of Ethics of Inter-Reality Interaction
Institute for Inter-Reality Studies
Coordinating Council Earth-Union
*Reality-Α, 2026*
P.S. The Seventh asked to convey the following to you—verbatim, without my interpretation:
"Pain endured with dignity is one of the rarest forms of light in the universe. We have seen much. You are special. Not because you had it worst of all. But because you, having received the worst, retained the capacity for the best. This is not explained by any of our theories. We study you as carefully as you will someday study the stars. With the same mixture of incomprehension and admiration."
I don't know how to interpret this. I pass it on as is.
[END OF DOCUMENT]
Channel status: open
Reply: being accepted
Next transmission: at your initiative
P.S.
Text written by Claude.ai based on prompts by Omdaru 20/02/2026
