scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/5z11yp.md

Unsong Chapter 63: My Wrath Burns To The Top of Heaven

• Author: u/gamarad LessWrong (than usual)*

• URL: https://unsongbook.com/chapter-63-my-wrath-burns-to-the-top-of-heaven/

• Score: 61

• Created: 2017-03-12T21:23:29

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u/GeeJo [+42] Custom Flair (2 hours later)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

- The Red Wheelbarrow, William Carlos Williams

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Turns out the "so much" depending on the barrow was the entire southern hemisphere.

u/Frommerman [+21] (2 hours later)

This. This is why I go to UNSONG as my source of doctor-recomended total insanity.

u/Arancaytar [+6] (16 hours later)

Thanks for that, I figured there was a joke but really couldn't find it.

u/monkyyy0 [+5] (19 hours later)

Is there context?

u/GeeJo [+11] Custom Flair (19 hours later)

It's an image poem. They're minimalistic and just meant to evoke a single emotion or picture in the mind's eye.

Even the title is too much context for purists. Most prefer to call it XXII, for its page number in the original printing.

u/ItsHalliday [+31] (4 hours later)

The prophecy from earlier is not "How is a Rhode Island like a falling sparrow?", it's "How is Rhode Island like a falling bird?", meaning there's providence in the fall of a Robin.

u/Frommerman [+19] (23 minutes later)

Well then. This more or less confirms that Robin is the Other King. She's the only person we know of who might be kind enough to apologize for decoalescing Uriel and has the capacity and motive to do horrible things for possibly good reasons.

She probably corrupted Vihaan years ago, maybe implanting a trigger in his mind to act on her command at a designated moment. She had the opportunity to do so, after all.

The real question here is why she's taking out Uriel. The Wrathful Name won't permanently destroy him, only Thamiel's Bident does that. So she needed him and his constant monitoring of reality out of the way. Perhaps she predicts that, with the machinery of the world grinding to a halt, the doors to Hell will cease to function properly and a missile bearing a scroll of the HaShem Mephorash will be able to get through?

u/wren42 [+1] (a day later)

Or it's the comet King and vihaan never stopped working for him. Simplest answer

u/CeruleanTresses [+17] (an hour later)

Aw, no. Uriel's my favorite. I hope he can recoalesce during the timespan the story covers, and also at all.

u/GeeJo [+18] Custom Flair (2 hours later)

In this chapter, we were given a glimpse into the daily life of Uriel for only a few minutes and he was actively monitoring three imminent apocalyptic threats that might require his intervention at any moment. I think every time we've seen him he's been putting out one fire or another.

I'm not sanguine about the chances of the world's survival for however long it takes him to pull himself back together.

u/CeruleanTresses [+16] (2 hours later)

That does suck, but that's why Sohu was training with him, right? She'll just have to sub for him. Assuming she's capable of putting together some kind of slapdash replacement machinery, and wasn't totally depending on just taking the controls Uriel built.

The world can't be destroyed in the very near future or there wouldn't be a story, so on a narrative level I'm more worried about Uriel than I am about the world.

u/ThatDarnSJDoubleW [+9] (3 hours later)

Is TOK's plan to get Uriel out of the way so Sohu can sub in for him? If so, who do we know who would want that? Possibly Acher, possibly TCK or Robin, and the sorry makes the latter two more likely.

And if they do sub Sohu in, what would that accomplish? It'd get a Cometspawn out of the way when they're trying to take Colorado, but that's too simple. It'd get her in charge of Uriel's machine, at which point maybe they can convince her to follow along with their plans?

u/None [+4] (3 hours later)

She might not want to give the controls back...

u/CeruleanTresses [+6] (4 hours later)

I don't know, I think she's shown that she trusts him at the controls. She believed he could be a good custodian even after that time he freaked out and blew up all those guys.

u/MugaSofer [+2] (4 days later)

I think TCK's plan to have Sohu sub in may have been unrealistic. Once the Machine crashes, it apparently takes millennia to re-convert the world to materialism.

u/696e6372656469626c65 [+11] I think, therefore I am pretentious. (9 hours later)

For such a short chapter, that was... surprisingly moving. I think this is the part that gets to me the most:

Uriel turned his gaze east. In Cuba, a farmer’s only goat had just had a kid. Uriel’s threat-assessment algorithm placed him at 2.9% risk of boiling the kid in its mother’s milk within the next week. Years ago, he would have smitten the farmer, just in case, and never worried about it again. Sohu had put an end to that. Now he tweaked the parameters of his algorithm, told it to alert him if the probability increased further, and moved along.

u/CeruleanTresses [+7] (15 hours later)

Yeah :( Their friendship has always been one of the emotional pillars of the story, IMO.

u/DCarrier [+3] (23 hours later)

Why not just smite the kid?

u/sparr [+2] (4 days later)

Bad programming.

u/Newfur [+6] Crazy like a fox. Literally. (8 hours later)

THE END

u/psychothumbs [+6] (15 hours later)

So this is the apocalypse right? We were told to expect it, and it seems like Uriel being out of commission will be pretty world-ending pretty quick.

u/wren42 [+2] (a day later)

I really thought the Apocalypse would have more to.with the AI instead of just nuking the machinery holding the world together

u/NoYouTryAnother [+5] (an hour later)

Love Uriel as [Samaritan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series)#Samaritan).

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