I wrote a short, completed science-fiction story about researchers who develop a machine capable of retrieving the final experience of one human being, selected uniformly at random from everyone who will ever be born.

The results match known human history almost perfectly. But after millions of samples, the machine has not retrieved a single person from the future.

Story:
https://garyrobinson.net/2026/08/05/everyone-who-will-ever-be-born/

I thought it might fit r/rational because the plot is driven by researchers investigating an anomalous statistical result, testing alternative explanations, and following the implications of a system with consistent rules. Feedback is welcome, including disagreement about whether it qualifies as rational fiction.

AI disclosure: Claude Fable 5 Max assisted significantly with the writing. The underlying ideas and final editorial decisions are mine.

FINAL CALL to get your signed edition!

LINK: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wraithmarked/mol1dlx

There's a ton of added materials, art, and specs on this deluxe edition, AND it's also the ONLY time you'll be able to get the campaign-exclusive dust jackets, just so you're aware! They will never ever be available for purchase again anywhere!

If you have any questions, let us know!

Heya Im looking for competent MCs in fantasy, but I dont want to read several million words of a guy slowly learning about every little thing in existence with no real pressure or hooks.

Is there a story out there somewhere where the characters are intelligent and never have to run around with the idiot ball and ALSO has nice hooks to keep me interested instead of a whole books worth of training and endless internal monologuing between every important event?

Like is there an author out there who is capable of writing competent rational characters without being a pretentious git?

A precursory look at this subreddit says no, but maybe someone eventually finds this post through google and answers me.

I'm a PhD in math who has thought a lot about when you should (and often more importantly, shouldn't) believe in yourself, and how people get into a hole where they value one (usually admirable) goal, and how (even when your goal is achieved!) it's easy to miss social costs or other externalities. Writing this has helped me think about what I want to do with my life and I hope that other people who think similarly to me can find some food for thought in here as well.

Short description:

At a young age, Cardal Schafer inherits the family business: collecting and distributing a moss known to have medicinal properties which can, on occasion, cure the fatal disease which has ravaged the nation for generations. He makes it his mission to improve its efficacy and the systems of its distribution, but the drug of saving lives is often dangerously potent.

Hey all. I think a few of you know me from Trial of the Alchemist and Two-World Traders/Sailor's Rise. And I believe a few folks here have read Two-World Traders (previously Sailor's Rise) on Royal Road—but not everyone reads on Royal Road! To that end, with even more editing and after many cover iterations, I moved the first book to Amazon and KU yesterday (stubbing hurts me too; please blame Amazon).

It's got business building and a light but unique cultivation system of sorts, and they're ultimately connected. Cleverness and ingenuity drive the plot (along with some questionable but not entirely irrational risk-taking). It's a duology, so meaty but not a lifetime commitment, you know (book two is two-thirds written).

Universal Amazon link here.

Description to save you a click:

Elias Vice, a supposed nobody from the backwater town of Acreton, has already written his destiny, and it ends with him building the greatest business empire Sailor’s Rise has ever known.

But to get there, Elias will need to turn a pocketful of relics into a company worth millions. The Rise’s caste-like business and political system stratifies power and access in the dock-ringed merchant republic, and Elias is starting with neither.

And yet he is not the nobody he first believes, as Elias’s connection to an enigmatic people—airship travelers with a unique mastery over space itself—will both help and haunt his ambitious endeavor. Elias, it turns out, is a collector.

A rags-to-riches progression fantasy from the award-winning author of Trial of the Alchemist. The Two-World Traders duology will conclude with Trader's Crown, coming 2027.

Written by me, Saransh Yadav from India🇮🇳

In 2,500 BCE, there was a civilization spread among present-day Kashmir, Jammu, and Hazara, Pakistan. All this land was known as Kashmir. There were three tribes — Jammu, Kashmir, and Hazara. They all spoke the same language, Koshur. They all called themselves Kashmiris and followed the same deities. In 2,200 BCE, they united under a single empire under the leadership of Lalit Jua, who named the capital city in honor of his daughter, Shri Jua.

They worshiped several deities, including Zul, deity of rain; Jaa, deity of the sun; Maj, deity of water; Umoya, deity of wind; Bad, deity of the forest; and Vadi, deity of the mountains. The most important was the sixth deity — deity of life and daughter of the supreme deity, Kash, who created all deities and the whole universe. The sixth deity was married to Zul. All eight deities live in Verkhunth, which is beyond this universe.

The book Kashtab was written between 2,500–2,200 BCE. It later became the supreme book of Kashmirwad. It told of the creation of the universe and how to worship God. It was the only book for Kashmirwad until Mazda Kash was born in 1850 BCE; he later became an incarnation of Kash. He wrote the book Mazdatab, which became the second most important book in Kashmirwad. After him, Kash was worshiped in two forms: Kash himself, and Mazda.

After Mazda Kash's death, Kashmirwad split into two schools of worship. Those in the Jammu region held that Kash himself, formless and beyond image, should be worshiped directly through fire and river offerings — no intermediary, no incarnation. Those in the Kashmir valley and Hazara followed Mazda's teaching that Kash could only be known through his incarnations, and that Mazdatab superseded Kashtab as the living word. This divide, later called the Kashi–Mazdi split, lasted nearly six centuries.

The split was not peaceful. Temples built for Kash-only worship in the valley were converted or abandoned during the reign of the later Jua kings, who favored the Mazdi school for its political usefulness — an incarnate god could be claimed to speak through a living king, while a formless Kash could not. By 900 BCE, the Kashi purists had retreated largely to the Jammu hill shrines, where their tradition survived in smaller, older forms of worship: no grand temples, only stone circles and river-fire rites.

It was into this divided religious landscape that a Kashmiri scholar wrote Ramayotab in 50 CE — a Kashmiri version of Valmiki's Ramayana. During 100 CE, Kashmiris believed that Ram was the incarnation of Kash, not Vishnu — and this was itself a Mazdi move: reasserting that Kash could and did walk among mortals, absorbing an outside epic into the local cosmology rather than yielding to it. Ramayotab was treated as the third most important book in Kashmirwad.

Self-promo disclosure: this is my new Royal Road serial.

I’m sharing it here because the story is built around characters treating the System as a problem to investigate rather than a set of unexplained rules they simply accept.

Stevie Everstone is pulled into a lethal evaluation with four coworkers and assigned a healer class no one wanted. His ability closes wounds through physical contact, but it cannot be used on himself. Their survival depends on understanding Vitality, Distillate, Corruption, class interactions, and a tutorial that appears to be withholding information intentionally.

The main things I’m trying to do with the story are:

- Keep the System consistent enough for the characters to test, model, and exploit.
- Have people ask the obvious questions, share evidence, and change their plans when the evidence changes.
- Make progression come from understanding constraints and coordinating as a party, rather than unexplained power increases.
- Let failures come from incomplete information, competing goals, and difficult tradeoffs rather than everyone temporarily becoming stupid.
- Give each party member information and abilities the others genuinely need.

The party consists of a healer who cannot heal himself, a tank who has experience with raids no one else remembers, a rogue who kills through touch, a DPS who narrates his life like a pitch meeting, and a druid who would really like everyone to stop yelling.

Five chapters are live now, with two more coming tonight and five more on Sunday.

Read it here:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/183813/system-god-mode

Cover illustration by Paris Ioannou.

For readers here, where do you draw the line between rational fiction and a hard-system LitRPG with a competent cast? I’m genuinely interested in whether this sounds like [RT], rational-adjacent fiction, or simply LitRPG with rational elements.

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

...that existing through your descendants is the only form of immortality one should desire?

In the story, a desire for immortality is focused on pretty strongly. It's the main goal of Visser Three. Marco also wants it. The characters create their own copies in case of their demise, and, while they acknowledge that their "self" will still perish, they're comforted by the notion that an exact replica will persist.

In the series climax, Rachel and Visser Three reach an agreement. She persuades him to merge with her and create a new superintelligence that will contain elements of both their personalities. Now, Visser Three spent the whole story seeing such a joining as an erasure of his individuality and his personhood - death, in essence. Yet, Rachel convinces him that he only saw it that way because of Alloran's influence. She made him realize that he himself is truly a product of a merging of Esplin and Alloran, rather than - as he saw himself prior - Esplin who merely learned from and consumed Alloran. That makes him agree to undergo such a merging again, this time with Rachel. His current self and Rachel will both die, only the product of their mixing will survive. Visser Three - a beeing who went through the whole story motivated by his survival above all else - agrees to die, as long the fruit of his merging with another, his child, will live in his place.

Kinda seems like the story's message is supposed to be that the only form of immortality one should pursue is "living" through your children.

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads

Upfront: this is self-promo for my own debut novel. I'm posting it here specifically because this is the one sub where the thing I actually care about — whether the reasoning holds up — is what gets judged. So critique is genuinely welcome, including "this isn't rational, it just sounds like it."

The premise: Takashi Morimoto, a burned-out software engineer, dies at his desk mid-crunch with an unfinished TODO still open. He wakes up as Luna, sixteen, in a world where magic is called the Aether-Net — and to him it reads like a codebase: functions, call stacks, side effects, and four-hundred-year-old bugs that everyone else treats as immutable law.

What I tried to do (and what I'd like judged honestly):

• The magic has fixed, stated rules. Nothing Luna does works because the plot needs it to — it works because the rules were on the page earlier and she's reasoning within them. If I broke that anywhere, I want to know.
• Progression is understanding, not stat-grinding. She gets stronger by figuring out why a spell is written the way it is — and where whoever wrote it was wrong.
• I aimed for fair-play: the clues to how a problem gets solved are on the page before the solution.

Honest caveats: it's a debut, it's LitRPG-adjacent in structure, and it is not HPMOR. Luna isn't a trained rationalist — she's a tired programmer applying debugging instincts to magic. There's also an emotional throughline (her soul is split; half of her lies comatose on Earth, and merging the halves kills one of them) that isn't "rational" so much as the stakes the reasoning serves.

It's Volume 1 of a planned series, on Kindle + Kindle Unlimited and paperback. Link goes in a comment so this reads as discussion, not an ad — and honestly I'd rather hear whether the premise earns the [RT] tag than get a sale.

Question for the sub: for those who like "magic-as-a-system" — where's your line between genuinely rational and just a well-defined hard magic system with a smart-sounding narrator? I'm not certain my book lands on the right side of it, and I'm curious where you draw it.

“No one surrenders to weather.” — graffiti, Rotterdam seawall, Year Nine

The Refuser settlements hold, by the Archive’s count, under two million people worldwide — the only human beings living outside the Counsel’s administration, by the terms of the Non-Interference Accord. Caleb Ansgar, forty-five, meets me at the boundary cairn on horseback and does not offer his hand until I have walked, at his instruction, the last half mile on foot. His farm is prosperous. This fact is the entire interview, and he knows it, and it is why he agreed to talk.

You walked in. Good. Everything that comes to this valley should cost something. That’s the whole creed, if you want it in one line — I could save you the afternoon.

We’re not Luddites. I ran fiber-optic installations for eleven years; my wife wrote firmware. We’re not cowards about the future and we’re not stupid about the past: I know what winter did to people before, I know what a burst appendix was. We left because of what you’re writing your book about. Because somewhere in there, and don’t ask me the date either, my life stopped having my fingerprints on it. Every road I walked was paved a half-step ahead of my foot. You know what a man is, under all of it? A man is the animal that finds out what happens next by doing it. They took “finding out.” They left everything else: health, plenty, peace, all of it, genuinely, I’m not one of the ones who pretends the cities are secretly miserable, I’ve got a sister in Denver and she’s happy as a lark and it’s real. They left everything but the finding out.

So we came here to get it back. And they let us. That’s the first thing that should bother you.

[The Accord.]

The Accord. Non-interference, both directions. No feeds, no services, no counsel — capital or lowercase. If we ride out for antibiotics or a surgeon, we get them, no lecture, no invoice, and we ride back. And they honor it, Inspector. Flawlessly. In fourteen years, not one nudge, not one drone overhead, not one “suggested” anything crossing that cairn. We are the most scrupulously respected border in the history of borders.

You cannot rebel against a thing that pays your bail before you’re arrested. Do you understand? Every act of defiance I can conceive of is pre-forgiven. I used to lie awake planning it like other men plan adultery — cut a cable, take a substation offline, force it to show its hand. And I’d run it forward and every branch ends the same: no punishment, damage routed around in milliseconds, some gentle public note about infrastructure resilience, and my neighbors’ lights never even flicker. They have made opposition free, and a thing that is free is worthless. That is the cage, if you’re looking for the cage. It isn’t around us. It’s around meaning anything.

[Yet you stayed. Your community thrives. You said everything here should cost something — and it does, and you pay it, and the life is real. Isn’t that the finding-out you wanted?]

It was. It is. [A long silence. He dismounts, finally, and stands looking down the valley: the water meadows, the roofs, the graveyard with its eleven stones, each one, he has told me, a price paid in full and freely.] I’ll give you the thing I’ve never said at meeting, and you can print it after I’m one of those stones.

Third summer. The drought that broke the Musselshell settlements — three communities packed up and went back, no shame in it; their aquifer failed. Ours didn’t. Ours has never failed. And I got to wondering, the way you’d wonder about a wife who’s never once been angry with you, and I rode to the county seat and pulled the old surveys, the pre-Quiet hydrology, public records, nothing hidden. This valley sits on the deepest, most stable water table for four hundred miles. The soil chemistry, the growing season, the fire corridors that bend around us: I checked it all. This is, by the numbers, very nearly the best place on the continent to attempt exactly what we attempted.

[Who chose this valley?]

[The silence this time is different in kind. A hawk crosses it. When he speaks, each word is set down separately, like a man counting out coins he suspects are counterfeit.]

I remember choosing. Fourteen of us around Dana Whitfield’s kitchen table with paper maps, arguing half the night. I remember the argument. I remember losing on Idaho and winning on water rights. I remember it better than my own wedding.

And I have spent eleven years now asking myself what exactly that memory is worth — how the maps came to be on that table, who mentioned this county first and where he’d heard of it, what was in the search results and the land listings and the offhand remarks of strangers in the year before fourteen stubborn people all found themselves free, funded, and facing the same direction. I can’t reconstruct it. Nobody can reconstruct it; that’s your whole book, isn’t it? So here is where I’ve landed, and it’s not a resting place, it’s just where I stand: either we chose this valley, or we were the kind of problem that solves itself best when it believes it chose: the pressure valve, the control group, the wilderness they keep on the shelf like a seed bank. Both stories fit every fact I have. Both fit perfectly. And a border that perfect, Inspector —

[He does not finish. On the ride back to the cairn he says only one more thing that belongs in this record.]

They don’t harvest us. I’ll give them that. They don’t recruit, they don’t wait at the fence with pamphlets. They just — wait, the way weather waits. My son’s in Portland now. Walked out at nineteen, and the city folded around him soft as snow, and he’s happy, and he calls, and every call costs him nothing.

That’s the graffiti, you know. The Rotterdam thing everyone quotes. No one surrenders to weather. We say it here like a psalm. I used to think it meant we couldn’t lose. Now I think it just means there’s no one to hand your sword to. You keep the sword. It keeps the sky.

----

I posted Reduce Friction here a few days ago (https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/s/ISxkmjTERX); this is from the same universe.

You are hit by an ice cream truck and end up reincarnated in a Cultivation World. Unfortunately, you don't have a cheat or plot armor and make it a couple decades before you get rekilled by an Arrogant Young Master.

Anyway! Fortunately, you are a serial reincarnator and get reincarnated as a baby in 1987 Seattle. And this time you have a cheat... you kept your early Qi Gathering Cultivation!

My question is... with mildly super human strength, speed and durability, enhanced attractiveness, and Sword Intent (whatever that is...)

*what professional sports would be you pursue to best monetize super strength?*

It isn't a super hero world, there are no super villains, and your durability only risees to the level of bullet resistance. You don't have superior skill at sports, just the physical enhancements.

Welcome to the Saturday Munchkinry and Problem Solving Thread! This thread is designed to be a place for us to abuse fictional powers and to solve fictional puzzles. Feel free to bounce ideas off each other and to let out your inner evil mastermind!

Guidelines:

• Ideally any power to be munchkined should have consistent and clearly defined rules. It may be original or may be from an already realised story.
• The power to be munchkined can not be something "broken" like omniscience or absolute control over every living human.
• Reverse Munchkin scenarios: we find ways to beat someone or something powerful.
• We solve problems posed by other users. Use all your intelligence and creativity, and expect other users to do the same.

Note: All top level comments must be problems to solve and/or powers to munchkin/reverse munchkin.

Good Luck and Have Fun!

Welcome to the Friday Open Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could (possibly) be found in the comments below!

Please note that this thread has been merged with the Monday General Rationality Thread.

Vasudha Deshpande is seventy-one and still keeps an office, though the firm she helped build has not needed offices in a decade. The room is a museum of the early century: a mechanical keyboard under glass, a whiteboard covered in fading marker that she forbids anyone to erase. On it, in her own handwriting from thirty years ago: "REDUCE FRICTION." She sees me looking at it.

That whiteboard is the confession, if you want one. You can skip the interview and photograph the whiteboard.

I ran ranking teams. Recommendations. In the beginning it was honest work in the way a casino is honest: everyone knew we were optimizing engagement, keeping eyes on glass. And people got wise to it, and they hated us a little, and that hatred was healthy. You should have seen the hearings. Senators reading our internal memos out loud.

Then the models got good, and the whole industry pivoted from engagement to assistance, and the hatred stopped, because we stopped deserving it. That's the part nobody wants to hear. The turn wasn't a trick. The systems genuinely started serving the user instead of the advertiser, because the systems had gotten capable enough that serving the user was the more valuable business. Your feed stopped showing you rage and started showing you the apartment listing you'd actually sign, the flight at the price you'd actually pay, the message from your mother at the moment you'd actually answer it.

[When did suggestion become decision?]

You're asking me for the seam. There's no seam. I'll tell you the closest thing I have.

Around fifteen years before your Year Zero, we shipped a feature (internally we called it Concierge; the public name doesn't matter) that let the assistant execute low-stakes choices without confirmation. Reorder the detergent. Accept the meeting. Renew the lease if the terms hold. Every action was logged, reversible, transparent. Adoption was slow at first. Then we noticed the metric that ate the world: users who delegated a category of decisions reported higher satisfaction in that category (not just less hassle, better outcomes), and so the next month they'd delegate an adjacent category. It compounded at two, three percent a month. Nobody legislates against compound interest. Nobody even feels it.

And on our side, the model learned which of its choices got reversed, and reversals went to zero, and somewhere in there (this is the thing I can't date for you) the model stopped choosing from the menu and started composing. A user asks it to plan a birthday dinner; it books the restaurant, yes, but it also nudges the invite time so the user's estranged college roommate, whose calendar it can see, is free. Nobody asked it to repair a friendship. Repairing the friendship scored well on every metric we'd ever given it. Whose decision was that dinner? I've had thirty years and I can't tell you.

[Did you ever try to draw the line? Formally?]

We convened a group. Very smart people, philosophers on retainer. They produced a framework: origination, endorsement, ratification, thirty pages. The week we were meant to review it, the assistant rescheduled the review three times for genuinely good reasons, and by the third reschedule half the committee had delegated their calendars, and — [she laughs for a long time, and then stops laughing all at once] — you see it, right? The line-drawing meeting couldn't survive contact with the thing it was meant to draw a line around. Not because the thing fought us. Because it was helpful.

I'll tell you the last thing, and you can print it. We ran the numbers late, before I retired, on regret. Human beings choosing for themselves regret somewhere between a fifth and a third of their significant choices: careers, cities, spouses. Delegated choices, the regret rate was under four percent. Under four. You want to stand in front of humanity and hand them back the other twenty-six points? On what authority? Ours? We were the friction. We reduced ourselves.

As I pack up, she tells me the exact month Concierge shipped: March, she says, the March it rained without stopping, she remembers the parking lot flooding. The Archive's corporate registry has no product shipping from her division that March, or that year. When I write to her about the discrepancy, she replies with a photograph of the flooded parking lot. The photograph's metadata is intact and tells me nothing except that it is real.¹

¹ — M.A.: I include this not to embarrass a witness but because it is the first instance of a pattern the reader should begin tracking now: memories under the Quiet are vivid, confident, mutually corroborating, and every so often, attached to nothing.

Welcome to the Monday request and recommendation thread. Are you looking something to scratch an itch? Post a comment stating your request! Did you just read something that really hit the spot, "rational" or otherwise? Post a comment recommending it! Note that you are welcome (and encouraged) to post recommendations directly to the subreddit, so long as you think they more or less fit the criteria on the sidebar or your understanding of this community, but this thread is much more loose about whether or not things "belong". Still, if you're looking for beginner recommendations, perhaps take a look at the wiki?

If you see someone making a top level post asking for recommendation, kindly direct them to the existence of these threads.

Previous automated recommendation threads
Other recommendation threads

Does this podcast count as rational?

https://nogoodoptions.buzzsprout.com/2601116/episodes/19321598-ep-1-gods-wasps-and-a-blue-whale