17.3

Krouse turned to look at Jess, where Cody was settling her into an armchair.  ”You were going to explain.”

“I don’t know if I should.”

“We have to know what’s going on, what to watch out for.  This screaming in our heads-”

“Don’t remind me,” Cody said.  ”Fuck me, I’m losing my mind.”

“That’s what I was going to ask,” Krouse said, staring at Jess.  ”Are we losing our minds?”

“Not… not permanently,” Jess said.

“Oh god,” Marissa said.

“It’s what happened in… what was that place called?  Lausanne?  Switzerland.  She showed up, and nobody wanted to pick a fight with her, and they were curious, so they studied her, and tried to communicate with her.  Tons of people gathered.  Then she… sang?  Screamed?  Whatever this is.  There was chaos, people didn’t know what was happening, so they weren’t able to evacuate that well.  Roads clogged.  And then they started flipping out.  Emotions ramped up, inhibitions lowered, flashbacks to old traumas.  And a lot of the emotion that got juiced up was fear.  People can do pretty stupid, dangerous things when afraid.”

Oliver put his hands to his head, his fingers scrunching up his hair, his eyes wide.  ”She’s getting into our heads?”

We have nothing to fear but fear itself, only it’s taken literally, Krouse thought.  Aloud, he asked, “It goes away?”

“A temporary break in sanity can be pretty devastating,” Marissa said, her voice small.

“Yeah,” Jess said.  ”But it’s still temporary.”





17.5
“Because this is what she does.  This is why she’s scary.  Behemoth can turn people to cinders if they’re within two hundred feet of him, Leviathan has sunk or leveled major landmasses.  Killed millions in one day.  But the Simurgh is the one that scares them all the most.  You saw how she fought, the way she dodged and blocked stuff.  She sees the future.”

Krouse nodded, “I kind of guessed that, but-”

“No,” Jess cut him off.  Her eyes were wide.  ”Listen to me!  She showed up in this city in Switzerland.  First time.  Then after a while, she sings.  Starts throwing buildings around, puts a nuclear power plant in critical condition, spreads winds contaminated with radioactive dust, kills some heroes, drives people to riot and panic with her song.  Like, okay, that’s Endbringer standard, right?”

Krouse stayed still, waiting.  He could see Marissa and Oliver nodding.

“Six months later?  A promising scientist commits suicide.  Another person tries to blow up a TV station to get back at his girlfriend.  Superhero assassinates a prime minister and the next guy to be in charge of that country starts a war.  They were all there, when the Simurgh showed up.  The superhero’s friends said there was no sign, before his encounter with the Simurgh.  He just went downhill, after.  There was other stuff, stuff I don’t remember.  But it’s all bad.”

“I don’t get it,” Luke said.

“It keeps happening.  Every time she shows up.  Every time, people who’ve heard this song that’s in our head?  Things go wrong.  They snap, they break, their lives fall apart, or they do something, and it makes something else happen, and there’s a major disaster.  That guy who was supposedly making a clean energy source that could power whole cities?  His wife and kids got killed and he became a supervillain who made it a life goal to murder anyone who tries to better society with their powers.  There were others.  Over and over, every time she shows up.  She never does quite as much damage as Leviathan or Behemoth, not right away, but stuff always happens later.”

“So she… what?  Makes people into murderers?”

“No,” Jess said.  ”Not exactly.  She doesn’t change how you think.  Not directly.  It’s more subliminal, like… like cause and effect.  Every time she shows up, she picks a few people, turns them into guided missiles, so they make something horrible happen weeks, months or years after they ran into her.”

Krouse looked at the suitcase.  ”And you think this briefcase is that?  A cause and effect thing?”



17.8

“Perhaps.  But when making an argument or making a sale, I find it’s best to lead with the second best offer, move on to the weaker ones, and then close with the best.  I am offering you one more thing.“

“What?”

The man on the phone told him.

It was another minute before Krouse hung up.
.......

I know it’s not easy, but there was a third offer on the table.  A third thing he was giving us.  He said we should consider it a bonus.”

“What?”

“Hope, Noelle.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He just got someone working for him, and this person can see the future.  And she says there is a way to help you.  Definitely.  Chances are low, but he says he’s confident he can maximize them.”

“He could be lying.”

“No, listen.  The Simurgh?  This guy said she has a weakness.  Two ways where she can’t see the future.  Two ways to break free of her cause and effect.”

Noelle didn’t say anything.

“The first way, you’ve got to be basically immune to powers.  Scion is.  He’s immune to precognition, throws everything out the window when he shows up.  I saw it when he fought the Simurgh.  She couldn’t automatically dodge his stuff, because she either couldn’t read his mind or she couldn’t see the attacks before they happened.  So he hit her, a bunch of times.  I saw it.”

There still wasn’t a response.

Krouse was getting more excited, had to press his hand flat against the floor to stop it from shaking.  ”And the other way?  There’s thinker powers that mess with her ability to influence events. If another precog gets a hand in events, the Simurgh automatically shuts them down and vice-versa.  The way this guy said it, the precogs get overloaded with the second-guessing the other precog, on top of having to figure out all the quantum possibilities and split paths.  And this guy?  He has a power that messes with precogs some, and the precog working for him has a power that will help circumvent the Simurgh’s power.  Get it?  So long as we work for him, we’re free of it.  No more cause and effect.  No more feeling like we’re doomed no matter what choice we make.  We go from that kind of safety to home.  To our world.“



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From these chapters, it seems that the Simurgh can't directly change the long term daamge were the Simurgh carefully manipulating cause and effect using her precognition- not bluntly and directly changing the way people think. If the fallout she causes works this way, it's easy to see how precogs and certain other kinds of thinkers can ruin her influence, like what Coil promised to do for the Travelers.

(Before you read this next part- this is my own speculation based on what I knew at the end of the Echidna arc. It's not why I decided to copy/paste these passages, but it is relevant) With Noelle, I believed that she was free of the cause and effect, but that it was too late to help her. I thought it was her passenger that fucked with her head, not the Simurgh (though the reason her passenger went so wrong was because of the Simurgh- so it's her fault, but its indirect). In Noelle's case, I figured that the Simurgh hadn't planned out exactly what would happen- she screwed Noelle over in a way that made her a ticking time bomb, but not in a way that made her a time bomb set to detonate at the worst possible time and place. I was pretty happy with that, and I thought I understood how the Simurgh worked. I figured the Simurgh can see the future and plan things out, but not super long-term, because the farther in the future something is the worse her predictive power should be, due to the influence of other precogs. And I mean something more general than "X meets Y precog. Y tells X not to do Z"- the Simurgh would be unable to account for any of the far more subtle influences Y could have on X's future without the two ever meeting. Basically, the sphere of potential influence of each precog grows larger the further into the future you look, until eventually they overlap and neither precog can make specific predictions. For things more than a few months in the future, I expected the Simurgh could set up general chaos (ie, what she seems to have done with Noelle), but not with a specific target in mind.


There's one other minor thing I wanted to throw out there- several people have complained about the Travelers having inconsistent characterization. I just want to clarify this- the way they act in the Migration arc makes sense, given that their heads are being fucked with by the Simurgh. What bothered me about the Traveler's inconsistent behavior happens earlier in the story. The two parts that come to mind are the way Ballistic behaves when he's trying to clear out Parian, and the way Trickster behaves when they're invading the Mayor's house. I haven't gotten to that part yet in my re-read, so my impression could be wrong.
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Cell 22.2

“Maybe you don’t really get what the Birdcage is.  See, I hate it.  I was in Lausanne in two-thousand two through oh-three.  Fought a whole mess of ugly.  People that couldn’t be reasoned with, people who were hopeless, in the grand scheme of it.  Victims, as much as anyone else.”

I found myself listening, despite myself.

“We shot them, the people who heard too much of the Simurgh’s song, who weren’t just walking disaster areas, but who’d listened long enough that they lost something.  Men, women and children missing that moral center that people like Miss Militia and I have.  Hell, even you’ve got morals.  They didn’t.  I’m sure you heard about it, you’re not that young.  Suicide bombers, dirty bombs.  Terrorism, if you will.  Eleven year olds and old men making their way to Amsterdam or London and opening fire in a crowded area.  Just like that.”

Tagg slammed his hand down on the metal table, coinciding with the ‘that’.  I jumped a little, despite myself.

He’s just trying to rattle me.

“Once we realized what was happening, we had to act, contain the damage.  Contain families.  Had to act against people who went home from a day of trying to kill the rest of us and cooked a nice dinner, oblivious to just how fucked they were in the head.  People who were otherwise good, who got warped on a fundamental level, left open to the preaching and the incitement of their angrier neighbors.  Two years of fighting before we got the word down from on high, that they couldn’t rehabilitate the ones they’d captured, the ones who’d listened too long.  The poor assholes would play nice until they saw an opportunity, then they’d take it, do as much damage as they could.  Two years fighting good people who’d been convinced they had to throw their lives away fighting an enemy that didn’t exist.  So we closed the perimeter, bombed them out, herded them and gunned them down.”


Interlude 23

The second person he thought of was Noelle.  His first love, the betrayer, the monster.

He shook his head, which only intensified the ringing in his ears.  When had that started?  With the shockwaves?  During the fight with Chevalier?

Or before all that?  Before the Yàngbǎn.  Had it ever stopped?

He thought of the Simurgh, thought of all of this in the context of him being just one of her pawns.

His head hung.

Always a pawn.  Always the expendable one.  Kicked off the team, traded away to Accord for the team’s safety.
......

“I hate smartasses,” he said, and he squeezed, feeling her windpipe collapse in his grip.

She fell to the ground, and he watched as she struggled for air that didn’t come.

The faint screaming rang through his head as he watched her struggle to climb a chair, taking ten, fifteen seconds to just get her upper body onto the seat.

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And these two chapters just threw out everything we were told about the Simurgh in the Migration arc.

It seems like the Simurgh's effects are a lot worse and a lot more blunt than simply manipulating the future via cause and effect. She warping people so they're fucked up (kind of like the clones Noelle spits out)- and its permanent. I don't see how precogs could really fix something like this. I can understand Jesse being wrong or perhaps lying to make her friends feel better, but not Coil. Coil would know about what Tagg mentioned about the Simurgh's victims being beyond help (especially since Calvert works for the PRT), and I don't think Coil would be dumb enough to use the Travelers unless he actually thought Dinah could end the Simurgh's influence over them.

And Cody's actions doesn't seem like the general chaos I thought Noelle was. He seems very specifically directed to do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time, other precog's sphere of influence clouding the Simurgh's view of the future be damned.

It's alright if my speculation was wrong, but even ignoring my speculative theory of how the Simurgh works I still think 22.2 and interlude 23 contradict what we know about her from the migration arc.