"Not so weird. People see stories like they see faces in clouds. Once we gave them the ability to subtract the stuff that felt wrong and reinforce the stuff that felt right, it was only natural that they'd anthropomorphize the world into a story." Perry shook his head. "You think?" "We have this guy, a cultural studies prof, who comes practically every day. He's been telling me all about it. Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories. "Check out the Greeks. All those Greek plays, they end with the *deus ex machina* -- the playwright gets tired of writing, so he trots a god out on stage to simply point a finger at the players and make it all better. You can't do that in a story today, but back then, they didn't have the tools to help them observe and record the world, so as far as they could tell, that's how stuff worked! "Today we understand a little more about the world, so our stories are about people figuring out what's causing their troubles and changing stuff so that those causes go away. Causal stories for a causal universe. Thinking about the world in terms of causes and effects makes you seek out causes and effects -- even where there are none. Watch how gamblers play, that weird cargo-cult feeling that the roulette wheel came up black a third time in a row so the next spin will make it red. It's not superstition, it's kind of the *opposite* -- it's causality run amok." "So this is the story that has emerged from our collective unconscious?" Lester laughed. "That's a little pretentious, I think. It's more like those Japanese crabs." "Which Japanese crabs?" "Weren't you there when Tjan was talking about this? Or was that in Russia? Anyway. There are these crabs in Japan, and if they have anything that looks like a face on the backs of their shells, the fishermen throw them back because it's bad luck to eat a crab with a face on its shell. So the crabs with face-like shells have more babies. Which means that gradually, the crabs' shells get more face-like, since all non-face-like shells are eliminated from the gene-pool. This leads the fishermen to raise the bar on their selection criteria, so they will eat crabs with shells that are a little face-like, but not *very* face-like. So all the slightly face-like crab-shells are eliminated, leaving behind moderately face-like shells. This gets repeated over several generations, and now you've got these crabs that have vivid faces on their shells. "We let our riders eliminate all the non-story-like elements from the ride, and so what's left behind is more and more story-like." "But the plus-one/minus-one lever is too crude for this, right? We should give them a pointer or something so they can specify individual elements they don't like." "You want to encourage this?" "Don't you?"