The Book of Now and Forever

The Book of Now and Forever is a book created by the CIA to induce an artificial Siol transformation. It's greatly simplified from the normal steps a person would take to awaken to the power, and has greatly increased the number of Siol in the multiverse, however it comes with many drawbacks and dangers, and leads to more volatile outcomes. Among established Siol, which are vanishingly rare, it's seen as a kind of remedial democratizer, and Siol so ascended are often denigrated.

While the Book offers a great foundation in logic and mathematics, it overlooks many of the more subtle and spiritual elements of the process, which can often lead to disastrous outcomes for the Siol involved. Because of this, they are often derisively called by other Siol now and laters-- "now you're a punce, later you'll be dead."

The Book heavily uses computer metaphors, and to the uninitiated will look like a manual of advanced programming techniques. Siol ascended by it will often use basic desktop computers to assist them in many of the exercises, and their techniques after ascension will as a result often take the form of computer GUI elements. Rally and Rourke are examples of such Siol.

History and Creation

The Book of Now and Forever was created by the CIA in the execution of its project MKSIOL. The concepts contained within are too complex and subtle to be the work of a non-ascended human without the aid of the extradimensional intellectual prosthesis that a natural Siol would have access to-- at least not naturally. But in a pinch, by LLM models and blind trial and error have been sufficiently able to tap into the collective underlying truth of the universe, and after many failures (some of them disastrous) they finally managed to create something that kind of worked. The name of the book was chosen by opening to a page at random and picking a phrase that sounded propitious-- thus the Book of Now and Forever was named.

Leaking and Spread

Naturally, the book was beyond top secret at the instant of its creation. But the power was so seductive that many involed in the project tried to secrete it away for themselves, perhaps reasoning that they might be able to make use of it for themselves once the more disastrous problems with the thing were solved, or at least better understood. It became something of a running joke within the clique working on MKSIOL-- often an agent, usually an overly ambitious one, would stop appearing for duty and be found weeks later dead in their home after undergoing some horrible accident. Limbs would be dislocated, bones would have turned to sponge etc. By and large, the other agents were glad to be rid of someone who might be a competitor (for the power as well).

At some point someone must have released a copy into general circulation.