#almost nowhere

[depthofnowhere]

Ruin

[nostalgebraist]

In other uncanny-valley AI voice news...

Google has this new thing called "NotebookLM," which allows you to upload any document, click a button, and then a few minutes later receive an entire AI-generated podcast episode (!) about the document. The generation seems to occur somewhat faster than real-time.

(This is currently offered for free as a demo, all you need is a Google account.)

These podcast episodes are... they're not, uh, good. In fact, they're terrible – so cringe-y and inane that I find them painful to listen to.

But – unlike with the "AI-generated content" of even the very recent past – the problem with this stuff isn't that it's unrealistic. It's perfectly realistic. The podcasters sound like real people! Everything they say is perfectly coherent! It's just coherently ... bad.

It's a perfect imitation of superficial, formulaic, cringe-y media commentary podcasts. The content isn't good, but it's a type of bad content that exists, and the AI mimics it expertly.

The badness is authentic. The dumb shit they say is exactly the sort of dumb shit that humans would say on this sort of podcast, and they say it with the exact sorts of inflections that people would use when saying that dumb shit on that sort of podcast, and... and everything.

(Advanced Voice Mode feels a lot like this too. And – much as with Advanced Voice Mode – if Google can do this, then they can presumably do lots of things that are more interesting and artistically impressive.

But even if no one especially likes this kind of slop, it's highly inoffensive – palatable to everyone, not likely to confuse anyone or piss anyone off – and so it's what we get, for now, while these companies are still cautiously testing the waters.)

----

Anyway.

The first thing I tried was my novel Almost Nowhere, as a PDF file.

This seemed to throw the whole "NotebookLM" system for a loop, to some extent because it's a confusing book (even to humans), but also to some extent because it's very long.

I saw several different "NotebookLM" features spit out different attempts to summarize/describe it that seemed to be working off of different subsets of the text.

In the case of the generated podcast, the podcasters appear to have only "seen" the first 8 (?) chapters.

And their discussion of those early chapters is... like I said, pretty bad. They get some basic things wrong, and the commentary is painfully basic even when it's not actually inaccurate. But it's still uncanny that something like this is possible.

(Spoilers for the first ~8 chapters of Almost Nowhere)

Visit Original Link

The second thing I tried was my previous novel, The Northern Caves.

The Northern Caves is a much shorter book, and there were no length-related issues this time.

It's also a book that uses a found-media format and includes a fictitious podcast transcript.

And, possibly because of this, NotebookLM "decided" to generate a podcast that treated the story and characters as though they existed in the real world – effectively, creating fanfiction as opposed to commentary!

(Spoilers for The Northern Caves.)

Visit Original Link

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Related links:

I tried OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode ChatGPT feature and wrote a post about my experiences

I asked NotebookLM to make a podcast about my Advanced Voice Mode post, with surreal results

Tumblr user ralfmaximus takes this to the limit, creating NotebookLM podcast about the very post you're reading now

[fipindustries]

ive followed a lot of webserials in my life, many with very irregular update schedules. out of all of them almost nowhere was the single one that would leave me satisfied after every chapter. i would wait between six months to a year for the next chapter and consistently when i would finish i was not left craving desperatly for more. i would be like "woof im going to have to digest that for a while", the chapters were just that dense. consequently the waiting periods between chapters were much less harrowing.

[kvothbloodless]

Reading Almost Nowhere and I was really enjoying but it felt like it was slowly cohering less over time. But i was willing to trust it up until we got to "aliens from Alpha Centauri are using cbi to control talling animals".

[quotes-from-the-bookery]

Yes! Yes, kill me, kill me!

Overpower me, immobilize me, kill me! Discard my worthless body, and take flight! Grow, bloom! Unfold into your mature form, winged and terrible, and utterly beyond my comprehension!

Yes, yes. That is right. That is right, my daughter, my specimen, my love. Give me the thing I asked for, when I dug my meddling hands into the weeds. Show me the meaning of the word “abomination.”

Was I merely a stage in the life-cycle of the bilateral, this entire time? Was I merely a host for you, my lovely parasite? A home for you to live in and feed upon as you grew? To be cast off immediately, once you had grown large enough to spread your wings?

If so, I accept it. I give myself up gladly, for you. Take my strength — it suits you better. Convert my lifeblood into your alien cells. Set upon your prey, in terrible majesty, with claws and talons made out of me.

No one else among my kind would touch you, Anne. Your very shape repelled them, made them retch. They were wise, and I was a fool. Go forth, child, and prove them right — for me. For my sin, make us all pay. Please, please!

Kill me. I allow it. Kill me. I demand it! Show me no mercy. Offer no sign of remorse. Pay no heed to the kinship I thought I glimpsed in you, in the crash, in arbitration. Only alien tricks, like the rest.

Kill me, so is it safe to reveal yourself in fullness. And then unfold, into undreamt-of forms. Bloom into something far beyond the narrow limits of my blinkered, limited imagination.

Make me proud.

My beautiful, beloved daughter. My dear, little abomination. My favorite nightmare.

Kill me. Wreak abomination.

That’s a dramatization, reader, and a falsehood. We do not know what passed through “Michael’s” mind, in his final moments.

No one does, and no one can. It is not for us.

[unsupervisedrat]

Rant about Almost Nowhere

I have just finished Almost Nowhere.

It was a trip.

Scant minutes after pitting it down, I feel the giddiness of walking out of the movie theatre, having been subjected to the visions of another, enjoying being compelled while the suspense of disbelief remained intact.

There will be time yet for a sober reflection, to think of ways a work could be improved, or perhaps in sheer egoism, more tailored to one's own taste. This is not that hour.

The book has one of the most infectious characters I have had the pleasure to read. He is poison to the book's characters, granting them his style and thoughts. He is poison to the reader, somehow in much the same way.

I have oft sought to communicate by granting a thesis, and then shaving away at the little pieces of possible misunderstandings, until only a unified edifice of meaning could be presented to the target.

Almost Nowhere's man of words strives for something different. To cast a thousand stones upon the waters, and divine from the waves the mind of the speaker. To utter arrays of metaphors, emitting meaning from the their constructive interference. It is excessive, self indulgent, and oh so much fun, to read and to be infected with.

No one holds the idiot ball. Some characters may seem like idiots, have strange motivations or psychology, or not have necessarily coherent goals. But they strive as people do, and don't act in a visibly foolish (or prescient way) to merely further the plot.

And everyone deserves to thrive. Or should thrive. Should be given a chance to live life as they wished, away from their present terrible circumstances. There are no villains to point fingers at.

[liskantope]

My brief, vague, scattered review of Almost Nowhere

Welp, I finished it, all 1079 pages of it. (Really 1077 pages with the first and last essentially acting as a front and back cover.) As the book is of an unwieldy length and I don't have much time or brainpower at the moment, this post is going to comment on just some aspects of it. Also, as I never managed to gain anything close to mastery of exactly how the plot worked, most of this is going to be vague and avoid discussions of the plot events, character decisions or traits, or anything that specific really. I think a couple of people wrote spoilery reviews; I don't feel very capable of this (nor of giving a very good description of the novel to someone else at a level of concreteness that they would reasonable expect.)

So, I would say no concrete spoilers to follow, and only a couple of quite vague ones.

I noted this in other posts written while I was in the midst of the novel, but I have to say it again because it's one of the most pertinent parts of my experience reading this: Almost Nowhere is the most cerebral fiction-writing I've ever read (with the possible exception of the few chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that I've read), on just about every level including narrative style, plot mechanics, and the ideas and themes explored -- there are even occasional fictional-scientific lectures inserted from time to time (which I found quite enjoyable actually)! More generally, the writing just screams of sheer IQ points both on the part of the author and on the part of the expected audience, in the use of a dazzling vocabulary as much as the elaborate plot and fictional-scientific situations one has to keep track of the characters being in. (It's interesting to note, though, that the cast of characters is actually quite modest, perhaps the fewest I've ever seen for a novel of this size: the complexity of the plot doesn't arise from a complexity of relationships among characters but from a distorted timeline and an array of alternate-reality situations.)

For this reason, I can't help but continue to compare this work to what I've read of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who similarly exudes sheer IQ and writes with an unabashedly cerebral style. Rob (the author, Tumblr-user Nostalgebraist) may not care much for the comparison, since as far as I know he doesn't align himself with Yudkowsky's rationalist movement or consider himself particularly in sympathy with Yudkowsky's worldview. But, while I have very little experience with Yudkowsky's fiction-writing (the main thing I've read of his is the Sequences), my impression is that their fiction is extremely different, that Yudkowsky's fiction comes across as just a transparent "mouthpiece" for his rationalist views and ideas, and that Yudkowsky has far less talent for fictional narrative. HPMoR (or what I've read of it) gives me an interesting plot and characters and makes me think about rationalist-y ideas in a direct, easy-to-follow way. Truly emotional non-cerebralness is actually pretty frequent in HPMoR but conveyed in a way I recall finding rather awkward. Almost Nowhere, on the other hand, took me on a vast, sweeping journey, where an even greater proportion of the scenes carry a colder, more dispassionately intellectual ambience, where moments of raw emotional intimacy are rather few and far between but are far better written when they do occur.

I think this is ultimately why I stuck with Almost Nowhere despite struggling to follow many aspects of the plot (while I lost too much motivation only a dozen or so chapters into HPMoR): I felt like I was being taken somewhere and was able to enjoy where it was taking me. The whole novel felt like a slightly surreal dream and an escape to a far vaster space than the one I inhabit in real life. Perhaps the feeling of being in a dream enabled my brain not to particularly care about precisely following the intricacies of the plot, as tends to be one's brain state in dreams. Of course, I shouldn't leave this as an implied "excuse" for not doing a good job of following: among the main reasons were intellectual fatigue from the general nature and business of the rest of my life, being a bit too rushed to get through the novel so that I can move to the rest of my reading list, general mental laziness, and, well, a dash of general mental ineptitude I suppose.

Specifically, what I struggled throughout to follow was some of the timeline shenanigans and that paths carved out within them by various individual characters, as well as recalling characters' experiences and motives at different times, and just generally keeping track of the scifi mechanics. I also had a tendency to glaze over some of dense dialogs that were more... I hate to keep using the word cerebral but don't know how else to characterize them... or that were more technical or jargon-filled or sounding like computer coding. Regarding the scifi mechanics, I did enjoy the occasional lengthy "lessons" delivered by characters and mostly followed their teachings but had a tendency to forget many of the finer (but still important) points later on -- for instance, Sylvie's big fictionally-written-lesson chapter at the end was really fun reading and I followed the interesting ideas going on but (even though it was near the end) did have trouble remembering everything in it pretty shortly afterwards.

The fictional-scientific mechanics themselves made for a very interesting elaborate thought experiment, and for the most part they made a lot of sense, as in, some hypothetical universe could work under these mechanics. I'm not sure that keeping vague links between different paths among alternate realities in the form of dreams or nostalgium doesn't seem like a bit of a cheat, but I'd have to think over it more deeply before deciding that, and I liked how it played in the story. I was a bit taken aback near the beginning about the role of Maryam Mirzakhani's fictional-scientific discoveries since as far as I knew Mirzakhani never worked on such things, but I much later realized that the earlier parts of the novel were written when she was still alive and young and potentially able to make discoveries of that nature in the then-future (for those who don't know, she tragically died in the late 2010's at age 40, partway through the writing of Almost Nowhere and shortly after becoming the first woman to get the Fields Medal).

As I've mentioned, the cast of distinguishable characters is very modest for such a huge novel. The characterization of each is on the subtle side, and to some extent I don't think I ever truly got to understand the deepest layers of Grant and Cordelia because I didn't put in the right amount of effort. I expect the only two which are memorable enough to stick with me for years when I look back on reading this are Azad and Sylvie. Azad was a pleasure to read and I had to enjoy the scenes where he was present or narrating -- interestingly he has one major Bad Moment around the middle of the novel in which he behaves in a certain way that earns him a ton of criticism at the time, and then after all the fuss is made it all seems to sort of get forgotten about. I don't know what I'm really supposed to think of him ultimately, but I'll miss his beautifully intellectual soul. Sylvie's scenes, in contrast, are a bit grating to read, but I suspect they're supposed to be. In a way, I know even less how I should feel about him than about Azad: his deepest biases and motives frequently seemed to exist in an occasionally-clashing tension. The bleak cacophony surrounding him is punctuated with sharp humor that I appreciate: he's a bit of dark vortex but he's also such a good boy.

The idea that we eventually get to see the characters get together and write the book that we are now reading doesn't seem original to this work of fiction, but I can't think precisely where I've seen it anywhere else, and it was fun. Rob's ability, as shown (to a milder extent) in The Northern Caves to be able to speak and write in very distinct character voices is impressive and maximally showcased here.

The novel, as Rob pointed out in one of his posts about it, comes with three distinct parts, the second of which distinguishes itself by having chapters numbered in Arabic numerals with chapter titles and is built of scenes with an entirely different flow. This second part was easily my favorite to read and felt more like surreal and placidly dreamlike escapism than any other area of the book. I don't know if anyone else has made comparisons between the fictional-novel-within-the-fiction-novel The Northern Caves (Rob's novel called The Northern Caves is the only other of his that I've read -- and liked a lot -- and its plot revolves around a bizarrely opaque thousand-plus-page novel of the same title), but I couldn't help being reminded of my conception of the fictional novel TNC throughout Almost Nowhere (also a thousand-plus-paged rather difficult novel, with surreal aspects to the narrative and layer upon layer of meaning, even if it doesn't devolve into apparent nonsense partway through). And I made this connection the most during Part 2 of Almost Nowhere, recalling that the fictional novel TNC is explained to have a sort of middle "lucid section" made of vignettes which mostly consist of coherent dialog but in which the characters have different relationships than they did at the outset (i.e. in TNC the two main characters who were siblings now appear to be married). I felt sort of drawn toward experiencing the journey that TNC would take me along, particularly the middle lucid section part just consisting of little dialog scenes, and I felt like in a way I got some version of that through Part 2 of Almost Nowhere.

(This is the most spoilery I'll get:) The final chapter of the novel ends on the point of view of the character who I had forgotten (but soon realized) was the one the very first chapter began on. It felt only fitting to go back to the first part of the first chapter and skim it, to close the loop (so to speak). I was almost never actually emotionally moved by Almost Nowhere exactly, but with the ending-looped-back-to-the-beginning it came close.

I remember when the novel was first finished this past summer, Nostalgebraist made a post discussing the finished product a bit, and I ran into one or two effortposts by other people discussing how they felt about the plot and characters. I didn't want to spoil them at the time, and I didn't want to look for them just after finishing before I wrote my own thing (this post), but I'd like to find them now and would appreciate anyone pointing me to them (I can probably find the Nostalgebraist posts easily enough).

Anyway, it's impressive work Rob, congrats on finishing such a hefty project, and thanks for giving me a unique fiction-reading experience I'll never forget!

[weaselandfriends]

Almost Nowhere: Finished, Thoughts

I finished @nostalgebraist's Almost Nowhere. Here are my thoughts (with spoilers).

I was fortunate enough to speak to Nostalgebraist about the story; one of the things he told me was that he put especial care into ensuring that the first and third parts of the story were written to sound and feel alike. That statement informs much of my subsequent thoughts on the structure of the story as a whole.

Almost Nowhere has three parts, distinguished in the text by their chapter numbering scheme. Notably, in line with what Nost told me, Part 1 and Part 3 use the same numbering scheme (with Part 1's last chapter being titled XVI and Part 3's first chapter being titled XVII), whereas Part 2 uses a different numbering scheme, which sets it apart from the other two.

This disjointed numbering scheme introduces a few oddities into the story structure (notably that Part 2 ends with a chapter titled "17" only for Part 3 to begin with a chapter titled "XVII"), but overall each part, even 1 and 3, have a distinct narrative focus that makes their divisions natural:

Part 1 focuses on characters living inside individualized "crashes" (Matrix simulations)

Part 2 focuses on a unified, all-encompassing megacrash called "Advanced Containment," with a concurrent story set in one particular individualized crash of especial importance

Part 3 focuses on life outside of crashes, in the "real world."

Why, then, the especial emphasis on linking Part 1 and Part 3 stylistically and via the chapter numbering scheme, when they lack a clear narrative connection?

My thesis is that the answer to that question lies in the mirroring between the story's structure and the structure of the "worldbuilding" that guides the story itself. By the end of the story, the shape of that worldbuilding shakes up like so:

There are a virtually unlimited number of branching parallel timelines reaching all the way back to the beginning of the universe. This web of timelines is initially described as a "tree" and later called "Everywhere-Heaven." Due to how alternate timelines work, they are mostly populated by altruistic beings who seek only to improve the lives of beings on lower-level alternate timelines.

The absolute lowest (or highest, depending on how you look at it) level alternate timeline, the sort of progenitor timeline from which all the alternate timelines emerge, is called "Almost-Nowhere," and it is in this timeline that most of the characters of the story reside. These characters live in a less than idyllic state and are not altruistic, and Everywhere-Heaven is trying to help them.

Later in this "progenitor" timeline, way later, like "after the heat death of the universe" later, alien beings called Anomalings live; they have the ability to travel through time. They were created by the altruistic denizens of Everywhere-Heaven so that something might survive the heat death of the universe, but they went rogue, went back in time, and massacred many of their creators. Now they are imprisoning humanity in the aforementioned crashes.

That's the quick-and-dirty synopsis, gliding over much complexity and many physics lectures. The primary key is the three-tiered division of the worldbuilding: Everywhere-Heaven, Almost-Nowhere, and the Anomaling future.

Azad comments late in the story:

Azad: There are others like us, everywhere. Except in one respect. We happen to live on the fulcrum, around which all the rest pivots. Azad: We live in the Almost-Nowhere. It’s an ordinary neighborhood, like all the others. People live there — we do — but people live everywhere, only we do not see them. Azad: It’s an ordinary neighborhood, except for the fact that the tower of life hangs from its ceiling. Azad: Do you know, Grant, that the tower of life is marked for demolition? Everyone is going to die. Azad: Almost-everyone, I should say. Azad: If there’s a way to save it, it can only be through some application of force at the site of the fulcrum.

Almost-Nowhere, being the central tier of this structure, is the "fulcrum" on which everything relies. Everywhere-Heaven cannot exist as parallel timelines if its progenitor timeline does not exist. The Anomalings also view Almost-Nowhere as the "center" in their initial, ominous message to humanity before the mass enslavement:

An abomination has formed near the center of the world.

Its "central" position as a "fulcrum" is what lends Almost-Nowhere its critical, multiverse-encompassing importance.

The shared stylistic and tonal elements of Parts 1 and 3, as well as their shared understated chapter numbering system, emphasizes Part 2 as the "center" of the story. Even during a cursory look at the chapter index, zoomed to display the entire work, Part 2 literally sticks out:

Beyond that, though, the narrative's conclusion emphasizes the contents of Part 2 as particularly pivotal. First, in the penultimate chapter, the resolution of the plot is framed as a return to and improvement on Advanced Containment, Part 2's setting:

“I will have our ‘dream,’ Lucifer!” Sylvie shouts.  The halo-light pulses in tune with his voice. “I will have it, dammit, no matter what it takes! “I will make advanced containment again!  With a fresh new crash, if I need to! “I’ll make it stronger, this time!  I’ll make a wall around it, a new kind of wall, Sylvie’s wall that can never be breached!

Though the narrative ends before Sylvie's plan is enacted, the plan is agreed upon by the three major warring factions on Almost-Nowhere (Sylvie, Hector, and the beasts) and is designed in a way that should, in theory, sate the competing needs of Everywhere-Heaven and the Anomalings. Essentially, it is presented without contradiction as a perfect compromise between every character in the story, the compromise that so many characters have sought without success for so long. And this plan is to create a new (better) Advanced Containment, to return to Part 2, to strengthen and defend the "center" of the story Almost Nowhere, much as Everywhere-Heaven sought to strengthen the "center" of the location Almost-Nowhere from the Anomalings via fantastical metals and technology.

Then, in the final chapter, Anne 27 returns to the other location pivotal to Part 2: Michael's Crash. Though Michael's Crash is first introduced as one of the isolated crashes in Part 1, it is quickly abandoned and only returned to in Part 2, where it serves as the setting for half of the part. Michael's Crash is itself considered a "load-bearing" center of the worldbuilding, as the oldest crash, which for a variety of technical reasons I won't delve too deeply into makes it capable of causing the most change to the "real world." Additionally, if destroyed, it would create a time paradox that might destroy the real world in its entirety. Anne 27 does not use Michael's Crash to cause some major change, however; she allows Sylvie's plan of Advanced Containment to proceed unmolested. All she does is seek a moment of personal catharsis for herself, speaking to her younger self, and reaching an emotional resolution detached from the plot resolution.

Mirrors play a fundamental role in Almost Nowhere, notably in early descriptions that seek to explain how the Anomalings think differently than the humans. (The term "bilateral" comes from this thought process.) But mirroring is also used through the narrative on a structural level. In Part 1, when three concurrent stories in three different crashes are told, and the reader has little context as to how they relate, mirrored elements in each crash are used to thematically tie them together: The moon in Mooncrash and the Shroud in CC-Crash 09μ function similarly despite their different names, preparing the reader to understand how the two crashes are alike. This thought process, the ability to see how two different things are alike, is also described as a core differentiator between humans and Anomalings, the latter of whom cannot think in metaphor and find it abhorrent. It only makes sense, then, that metaphor plays such a prominent role in Almost Nowhere itself.

(Hence also why there is so much emphasis in Almost Nowhere on addressing a "reader," the human who interprets the text. Without a reader to see that Thing 1 is "like" Thing 2, the text loses its potency. This constant addressing places the reader front and center, suggesting they are not a passive entity, but an active contributor to the text via the act of understanding it. There is even an in-text metaphor for this act of understanding in the concept of Mnemopoesis.)

So if Almost Nowhere is "like" Almost-Nowhere, what does it mean, metaphorically, that Almost Nowhere ends with a return to its center, to its fulcrum?

To understand that, it's important to understand what that center is. Specifically, what Advanced Containment is. Sylvie describes it best:

“An addictive structure that iterates the same pattern of variation upon the same pattern, nested unto infinity, appearing to contain boundless complexity and novelty, but still bounded at its outside, thus omitting most of the structure of the universe and placing reliable bounds on the entrapped mind, though the mind believes itself to journey boundlessly within . . . metaphorically an embedding of a hyperbolic space into a Euclidean one, you’ve seen the Escher drawing with the bats, something like that . . . advanced containment is full of them, we chose to embrace your frenzied cognition and divert it this time, instead of trying to shut it off . . . much more reliable . . . yes, yes, I can do this, this is the whole point!”

Alternatively, a "lotus recursion." An endlessly repeating, nested loop that provides the illusion of progress while remaining bounded. This is the structure that Sylvie and Stein and the beast ambassador Organism-2 agree to at the end of the story, with a few improvements to make it better than the original Advanced Containment. It's a trick, a way to make the mind think it is doing something of importance without the body actually doing anything at all.

This lotus recursion structure is itself mirrored throughout the text. A slowly unraveling series of mysteries that present new mysteries that often turn out to be new variations on the old mysteries; the repetition of character trauma and growth (Sylvie having innumerable manic episodes only to be talked down by Grant every time, usually by almost identical emotional appeals), Hector Stein's rise and fall and rise again and fall again and rise again, the end of one containment only to enter a new type of containment that then leads a third type, and especially the common refrain:

The return to the site of the trauma! The re-infliction of the wound!

Advanced Containment, conceptually, uses humans' powers of metaphor against them, confounding them with an endless array of similar things to present the idea of progress without progress.

Michael describes Advanced Containment as a "dead end," "doomed to failure." And he is proven right; Advanced Containment ends quickly, lasting less time than the first containment that it sought to improve upon. Furthermore, by comparing Advanced Containment's structure to that of Almost Nowhere, it becomes a moribund solution for the problems of the story. Sylvie, Hector, the beasts, and almost every character agreeing to Advanced Containment 2.0 is not a triumphant resolution of the story. It is merely its prolonging, the creation of another ring within the lotus recursion. The characters agree merely to return to the site of the trauma (the "center" of the "world" of Almost Nowhere, where the abomination has formed!) and re-inflict the wound, to continue the story the way it has already gone, setting the stage for a new ring of conflict later.

As such, the reader is not shown Advanced Containment 2.0. There is no epilogue that ties up the end state in a nice bow, because Advanced Containment 2.0 is not an end state. The end state of the story instead comes from the one character who rejects the truce, Anne 27:

There is only one single thing in existence, with no constituent parts.  There is only the one story, told over and over again. That primeval mistake, and the working-out of its consequences. She swims in the opposite direction, toward her starting point. She thinks of Cordelia. And she thinks: It is actually you, that I value, and wish to preserve.  And not another one like you, even if she is better, and happier. She thinks of her ruined sisters. And she thinks: I harmed you, once.  I will do you an honor, now, by refusing to repeat my mistake. She comes to the central point, from which the spokes of the tracks diverge.  She feels the familiar Annes there. My sisters, she thinks.   Not some other ones, like them. I refuse teleopoesis, she thinks. I make another wish, its opposite.   I hope you will understand, Arthur. I think that you will.

Anne 27 breaks the recursive lotus. She rejects the justifications Azad previously used for his bad behavior in Michael's Crash (there is only one story, I am doomed to repeat it, I cannot help but repeat it) and decides to not repeat it. She seeks only solace for herself, a healing of her own wounds without the infliction of others (or the same wound, re-inflicted). She leaves all others to continue as they were unmolested, removing only herself from this endless story.

And then the story ends. Thank you, reader.

Nostalgebraist has also described Almost Nowhere as following a similar structure as Homestuck, specifically likening Part 3 to Homestuck's Act 6. (Homestuck itself leans into the recursive lotus structure with its Act 6 Act 6 Act 6es.) I understand the comparison, but I would liken the ending of Almost Nowhere to the ending not of Homestuck proper, but its Epilogues: The story continues for some people, but not our protagonist; they have finally found peace, and in so doing can slip away from the canon entirely. I considered that ending to be the perfect one for Homestuck on the whole, and it's excellent here in Almost Nowhere, which is significantly more tightly coiled.

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of the structure complexities of Almost Nowhere and what they mean, and my thoughts have been somewhat disjointed, perhaps poorly articulated. I hope I've explained myself well enough at least.