“Succulent godlings descend, twice, thrice for optimal value and you will regret only does the sound bother you when if questioned the nature of…” an Oracle clacked noisily up onto the plaza on its brassy spider legs. Its alabaster torso span round as it sought a victim to focus on. Annoyingly she caught a brief glimpse of its deep golden eyes before she managed to turn away. Typical luck with everything else she had going on today, she gained a sudden interest in her shoes but these things weren’t exactly programmed to respect boundaries and it lurched noisily over to her.

“The Church of Tomorrow prays for you daughter of today,” it extended its spine so that its head could get itself between her eyes and shoes. Before it had been transformed it’d have been a pretty striking young man, the Church only ever used the beautiful bodies for Oracles. She really wished they didn’t leave the eyes as human or at least as uncannily human as they looked to her superficial inspection.

“Please go away, I’m really not interested,” the tiny kernel of doubt she had that there was anything human left in the Oracle stopped her being more forthright, Mom and dad would have been proud of her manners.

“Let me walk the Path of Futures and see where your life goes,” it retracted its spine quickly, its head bouncing as it went. For added drama the too human eyes lit up , “Almost never the fourth one along will find the way within abstract dreams cried by the one time where ultrakinetic projectiles shatter the hope sometimes we all must give up for perpendicular to all current objectives the sad lord of delicious nutritious ideas falls sweetly…”

It kept blabbering on and irritated her to the point she broke her own censorship taboo and blocked it and anything else from the joke-too-far Church of Tomorrow. It became a silent and unobjectionable neutral gray cuboid, the default representation for something somebody didn’t want to deal with. Detecting it had been blocked it slid smoothly away in search of its next victim to prophesise at.

Compared to most she was exceptionally light on using perception filters. As much as practical she kept her vision real-real rather than consensus-real. Charmingly old fashioned or bizarrely regressive, she left that judgement to others. It was shocking there were people out there who’d tweaked their perception filters to conform everyone and everything to their own particular ideas of beauty. All the idiosyncratic difference and variety that made for such an interesting spectrum of people to look at replaced with stock, nigh-identical forms. Sad in it’s own way, making life here not much better than in one of the Full Equality zones. Still that people were able to make this choice was an even more fundamental statement of life in the Free Expression zone. Transgress against the prevailing expressive norms all you want, people can always edit you out if they choose.

Since a missionary outreach pod had come crashing into the sea last weekend the City had been, only barely metaphorically, crawling with Oracles. As always and to the normal futile outcome the City had complained at the Church’s orbiting hive cathedral. Additionally and to even more expected futility the Highers had been petitioned and asked to intervene. They would already know, of course they would, what had happened but it was the City’s belief that each and every transgression from the Church and others must be protested. Still it seemed increasingly accepted and normal that the zone’s boundaries could be violated with no reprisal from the Overwatch. Why this was and what that meant was something she’d thought long over as had so many in the zone.

Uncertainty over the sentience or not of Oracles made them difficult to get rid of for good. For as presumed sentient beings with uncertain access to resurrection to destroy them without their consent would be severe choice-theft and was severely punished. However rounding them up and dropping them back off at their pod was entirely kosher and there were several clades competing to see who could rid the City of the most of the nuisances. A quick search showed a friend of her friend Raul seemed really active in Team SoLongSpookyChurchySpiderPeople and she sent him a quick ping to let him know about this one. “Cheers mate. We’ll take care of that soon for you!” came the reply along with a badge flash she could put on her profile to show support for Team SoLongSpookyChurchySpiderPeople. Although beautifully animated she tried not to avoid showing public support for meaningless causes since the Toast War a few years back.

What started as an entirely fun marketing campaign by a bakery over how toasted people liked their bread had escalated unbelievably quickly into zone-wide violence with thousands killed. Both sides had naturally adopted flamers and energy weapons to scorch their opponents to show them the error of their ways with maximum ironic effect. After a particularly silly and lethal battle in a public park which destroyed many historic trees and non-consenting bystanders City and the other Admins declared Special Measures, disarmed both sides and gave time-outs to the serious offenders. To other societies which hadn’t opted for resurrection this was the sort of decadent attitude to death and violence which Commissars, Thought-Leaders and Yolo-Ministers regularly berated to their crowds. Although many in the zone had at the time complained about the situation due to the widespread inconvenience, now it was fondly looked back upon as “only in the NorthWest Free Expression Zone”. As was typical a few months later the Atlantic Metopia had their own shamelessly derivative copycat “Bagel Battle”. Truly tragic.

Should the rival Oracle hunter groups decide there was better sport to be had in fighting each other rather than relocating wayward preachers although she knew it, like the Toast War, would be hilarious in retrospect this was not the time. Being assassinated in such a silly conflict would undermine her part in a far more important battle being waged.