Zero Sum Reconsidered. Part One: Eat The Dreamer!

I'd like to take a long, hard look at the idea of Zero Sum, and see if there are perhaps other ways to understand it beyond as a simple failure mode. Apparently the concept, and virtually all we know about it, all stem from one out-of-game MK text.

The text itself is et'Ada, Eight Aedra, Eat the Dreamer and only touches on the Zero Sum idea tangentially. Still, it remains our only source and is interesting in its own right. So I propose to see what sense I can make of this document in this post and then follow up with the examination of Zero Sum that I had originally intended.

> [Transcribed from a spore-dream of an unidentified, evaporating Moth Priest that reached zero sum.]

So this is so far as I can tell the only remotely canon reference to the term "zero sum". It references a Moth Priest, which means the individual would be knowledgeable and have studied the Elder Scrolls in some depth. The priest is described as evaporating which supports the idea that zero summing implies disappearance. The fact that the Moth Priest is unidentified could be taken to imply a loss of identity consistent with the popular understanding of the zero sum concept ... or just that the spore-dream (whatever one of those is) of an evaporating priest didn't contain enough information to precisely determine the source.

> The Aedroth Aka, who goes by so many names as to perhaps already suggest what I'm about to commit to memospore, is completely insane. His mind broke when his "perch from Eternity allowed the day" and we of all the Aurbis live on through its fragments, ensnared in the temporal writings and erasures of the acausal whim that he begat by saying "I AM".

"Perch from Eternity" - Aka exists outside of time, in the timelessness of Untime

"Allowed the day" - without time there can be no orderly progression from day to night and back and a day as a unit of time is meaningless.

"acausal whim" - again suggesting that cause and effect did not apply when Aka started time - that in the environment outside of time, cause and effect are meaningless since they are only defined in temporal terms.

> In the aetheric thunder of self-applause that followed (nay, rippled until convention, that is, amnesia), is it any wonder that the Time God would hate the same-twin on the other end of the aurbrilical cord, the Space God?

If Aka is time, then does that mean that Lorkhan is Space? It would fit with Mundus being his idea, and with him being condemned to wander the world.

If so, that means that Ada-Mantia is the tower of Time and Red Mountain is the tower of Space. That fits with Before The Ages of Man when it says that Convention is two events: The Founding of Ada-Mantia and the Heart landing and forming Red Mountain. That established a foundation for Time and Space and everything else followed as an interplay between those two opposing (according our nameless moth priest) qualities.

> [Is it any wonder] That any Creation would become so utterly dangerous because of that singular fear of a singular word's addition: "I AM NOT"?

Aside from the word "evaporating", this is the first indication of negation in the document.

> That all the Interplay is one flea of assertion on a wolf of naught

The narrative is starting to degenerate here, but the "wolf of naught" is interesting, evoking the a line from "Sithis": "Before him was nothing, but the foolish Altmer have names for and revere this nothing". The depiction of Aka as insane also finds echoes from Sithis which presents Auri-El as a demon that feared death - that feared the addition of "NOT" onto "I AM"

So it's starting to look like we can tie this fairly strongly to "Sithis", and from there probably to Vivec. It's still a bit of a reach to link this to CHIM though.

> every experience (that is, everything) born from that primal wail would cascade unto the echo-need of hologram, each slice the same except for scale

No idea. The universe is holographic and each part contains the whole? Fractal nature with the same patters recapitulated on every successive scale? The holographic notion fits with my personal ideas about the Elder Scrolls themselves, especially since this is the testimony of a Moth Priest ... but that's a discussion for another time.

> ... and all the magic that would need to spring forth just to hold it together at living, divine cross-purpose, support struts made from the need to exist (axial, along its two-headed fighting rays, each refusing their origin point, that is, Tower),

This could be taken to imply that Akatosh and Lorkhan, or perhaps Ada-Mantia and the Red Tower form the Axis of the Wheel rather than its supports. Of course, we need to ask "which Wheel?" since Mundus is often referred to as the Wheel within the Wheel. (And White Gold was a Wheel within the Wheel within the Wheel, there's that holographic/fractal thing emerging...)

Still, it's probably unwise to read too much into this as we're rapidly descending into gibberish

> terrestons versus chronocules, and in the end (an end that ever refuses to hold) it all becomes a lobotomized (for what is not lobal if not the dracochoreography made flesh?), reptilian (coiled), and massive map-god (holding a compass, holding a timepiece), drooling (the water from which we dragged ourselves out of to say, mirror-like, autochthonic, automatic, "WE ARE, TOO") on his countless knees, dementia given dimension, dimension dementia...

Time vs. Space again. Time coiled and looping back on itself (which supports the idea of looping Kalpas), "countless knees" referring to infinite Kalpas ... but the narrator here is approaching the limits of spoken language.

> [At this point all transcription becomes impossible, except by way of sheet music, an orchestration of which was attempted during the reign of [NUMINIT], who, along with everyone else in the symphony's radial madness, was vaporized by adjacentia. The requisite adachimelic holding-tendrils activated, preventing Imperial collapse. Imposthumously, the Amulet of Kings granted to the "Coccoon Council" that the spore-dream "et'Ada, Eight Aedra, Eat the Dreamer" be immediately stored in the one thousand and eight Cyrodilic weapons of rapture.]

So the priest abandons words and resorts to music to get the point across. This works well enough that the listeners evaporate just as the priest did. We know that universe can be understood purely in musical terms, so it's possible that the Moth Priest had reached the limit of verbal language to communicate his insight, or it may be that his understand had advanced to the point where he could use music as a medium of expression. The fate of the listeners is testimony to how well the approach worked.

So we can see that zero sum is ceasing to exist as a physical entity as a result of gaining a certain understanding of the Universe. That understanding can be communicated musically, and probably in other ways as well, although these are probably more time consuming.

We still don't really have anything to tie the Zero Sum concept to CHIM, however. They would both seem to hinge on a devastating insight into the nature of reality, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that the same insight is involved in both cases. However, we still have some work to do before we can establish that Zero Sum is the sort of "game over" erasure from existence that many suppose it to be.

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Continued in Part Two