The Fate of Olympus | Reynabeth [✓]

30. The Ring and the Midterm

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5. We want education for our people that exposes the decadence of the gods, tells our true history, and exposes our role in society.

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Annabeth was glad Percy hadn't murdered her. She was mad that the Fates had basically confirmed that he had sacrificed the world to do it.

Actually, Annabeth didn't believe in the heart of Western Civilization any more than she believed that America was the modern Rome, as Chiron had once told her. She sure wasn't about to say it out loud, though. Annabeth's lack of prudence had gotten her and her friends into enough trouble. Speaking of trouble...

She handed the Ring of Gyges to Grover as they headed down the elevator. "You should keep an eye on this."

"The Ring of Gyges?" Grover bleated. "Why me?"
"You're the bravest satyr I know," she said. "And I know you won't be consumed by it. The Ring whispers to you that you're better than anyone, even the gods. You're much less inclined to believe that. In your hands, the Ring could become a powerful ally. If you choose to use it."

"I won't," promised Grover. He shoved the Ring into the pockets of his hoodie. It was out of her hands now. Annabeth felt like she was fifteen pounds lighter. Now she was free. She could focus on her studies.

~~~

Annabeth spent the rest of the time leading up to her midterm studying. She stayed up late to cram. She memorized names. She memorized similarities between the gods. Something about the mundanity of the practice of memorization bothered her, but she was not deterred. Annabeth hoped that her professor, who was primarily an art instructor and art critic, would be lenient since Comparative Mythologies was her side interest and not her main area of expertise. Still, the fears of poor performance in school haunted Annabeth.

She returned to her quarters in the haze of exhaustion.

She dreamed about Zeus conspiring to ensure Annabeth's failure. Zeus had enlisted the help of Loki, vastly underestimating Loki's trickster ways. Annabeth wanted to shout, but she couldn't speak in her dream. She didn't dream of anything else that night.

Annabeth kept studying for days on end, trying in vain to re-capture what had made her feel like a valuable asset to Camp Half-Blood, but it was so difficult to remember everyone's names. It was so much harder to remember who Hesiod was when she had no memories of his work, never mind every myth in the world. It didn't feel like she was just brushing up on old knowledge. It was like learning mythology for the first time all over again. Maybe she should just tell her professor what had happened...but her professor was the type of person who probably wouldn't care as long as Annabeth passed.

Annabeth found herself staring at a wall. What was the point?

Loki and Sulis had both said that Loki would take what mattered most from Annabeth. He'd taken memories of books.

Really? Did Loki think that books her priority? Not Percy? Not Reyna or Camp Half-Blood or her other friends? Was she motivated by trying to prove that she was always right? Or was she motivated by what she thought was best for half-bloods and all beings under the rule of the gods? Had she lost sight of what was really important?

Annabeth sat in a study room in the library to think things over. The library was one of the only places at Camp Jupiter where she could think in an environment with absolutely no distractions.

Because Annabeth didn't have any actual memory of her studies in Greek mythology, she had to fall back on metaphors to reason about the gods. One metaphor that played in Annabeth's mind was the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, an idea that mortals had used to explain the behavior of small particles. 

Maybe the gods were like particles in quantum superposition. A wisdom god could be Thoth and Athena and Minerva and Sulis Minerva all at once. And when Annabeth observed them with a certain worldview, they collapsed from their quantum superposition into a version of reality that Annabeth believed in.

If Annabeth were to observe a wisdom god, what version would she observe? Well, it was governed by probabilities. Most likely, she would see something mundane, like a mortal, bookish stranger dressed like an academic. There was a lower probability that the wisdom wavefunction would collapse into Athena or Minerva or Asanti or Thoth. Even Sulis Minerva could be observed as part of the same part of the wavefunction. 

By her own logic, wisdom was a point on a web of interconnected ideas. What an observer witnessed was a matter of probability, perspective, and attention. That's why even demigods could be tricked by the Mist. That's why Annabeth could see one thing while Reyna saw another. 

Annabeth had eliminated her belief that only Greek myths were real. Now she could see the truth of it all—or at least she could see a tiny fraction of it all, the tiny fraction that her attention was primed to notice.

Superposition was the key to understanding the Mist. Was Ra the same as Apollo? The answer was yes and no. He both was and wasn't, at the same time, until he was observed. It helped explain why the heatwave was occurring. He could both control the sun over Jupiter's dominion and he couldn't.

Annabeth was surprised, but the metaphor could be extended past the Mist and straight to the gods' spheres of influence themselves. 

Maybe the gods themselves were like subatomic particles: there was some probability could appear within their sphere of influence which wasn't always the same. 

So where did Annabeth's sphere of influence belong? Was her place at Camp Half-Blood? Was it designing a new Mount Olympus? Was it in the destruction of Mount Olympus?

The Greek gods would have Annabeth believe that only the United States was a place where gods could be seen. The gods implied that seeing gods in other countries, like Boreas in Canada, was an exception. But maybe it wasn't, Annabeth realized; maybe it was part of a pattern.

Particles (which could be observed as both particles and waves) could interact either destructively or constructively. Maybe some spheres of influence overlapped destructively—like Greeks and Romans going to war—while others overlapped constructively—like how Greeks and Romans created Greco-Roman gods, or how Britons and Romans had created Sulis Minerva. The gods pointed out the destructive patterns and systemically ignored constructive patterns to justify further isolation. Even at Camp Half-Blood, campers were isolated from each other based on their godly parentage. It was about power.

Annabeth frowned. The gods were so focused on consolidating power that they had isolated their children from the rest of the world, and from each other, in the process.

Annabeth felt how Aristarchus of Samos must have felt when he had placed the Sun at the center of the Solar System instead of Earth. It was a fundamental dismantling of hubris, learning that humanity was part of a bigger picture, but not at the center. 

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A/N: I just imagine people's eyes glazing over while they read this chapter, like it's a physics textbook.