Chapter 10 - Novel Schema Update
Chapter 10 - Novel Schema Update
It’s funny what the mind will file away as unremarkable.
At some point between sixteen and eighteen, in a gas station parking lot in Monticello, a man was shot—less than seven feet from me. Another man stood the same distance away on the other side of the target. I did not flinch. I did not turn my head. I just kept walking, slow and steady, right up the sidewalk, past the pumps. I heard the car door slam. I heard tires screech. I held my breath.
I kept walking.
I didn’t look back, not once. I was waiting—waiting to hear that car grow louder, not smaller, to hear it swing around and bear down on me to finish the job. But it didn’t. The engine faded behind me. Still, red chunks from someone else's head were falling out of my hair and into my peripheral vision. I saw them spiral downward—clip my knees, bounce from my feet, scatter in droplets on the sidewalk. I never stopped walking. I never screamed.
That was a trauma event. I know that much. But it never rewrote anything for me. It didn’t reshape the models or break the internal schema. If anything, it just confirmed what I was already wired to expect. That people die. That proximity is irrelevant. That narrative is a luxury. That this world is hostile, indifferent, and sometimes very, very messy.
The event that did cause rewrites came some years later. A different night. A different scene. I was in a downtown area with a female friend, both of us trying to track down hallucinogens. One of the boys in that circuit had taken her money, struck her, and fled. When we saw him again—this time with a crowd—I approached and asked for the money back. He ran again.
Only this time, he ran toward backup.
Within minutes I was facing a mob of eight to ten strangers. The boy pointed to me and lied. Said I had taken his money. That I was the thief. The threat.
They believed him. Or they wanted to.
They surrounded me and began taking turns. Pipes. Broomsticks. No punches—just the instruments. Everyone got a swing. At least two. I didn’t block. I didn’t swing back. I only turned my head to protect my eyes, nose, mouth. I took every blow on my arms, shoulders, ribs.
But this wasn’t like the beatings I grew up with. This wasn’t my mother’s chaos.
She would escalate with each strike. Her rage would deepen, calcify, bloom into something that took over her whole body. There was no stop. There was only collapse—exhaustion, injury, emotional crash.
This group was different.
By the second round of blows, I saw it. The hesitation. The stutter in their movements. Pipes that arced but didn’t follow through. Eyes that had burned with certainty now clouded in confusion. Their rage had peaked and passed in the first impact. Everything after that was just reflex, ritual.
And then—restraint.
They stopped. One by one. Nobody held me down. Nobody forced more.
The one who incited it stayed the longest, landing extra shots—but even his final swings were lackluster. No conviction. No pleasure.
And then, something surreal happened.
Two members of the group walked over to my friend—the very friend who had been robbed and slapped and left without the drugs she was seeking. These two, both of whom had just struck me, handed her ten dollars. Half of what had been stolen. They didn’t get it from the boy; he was still lying, still playing victim. These two had pulled it from their own pockets.
"Call him a cab," they said.
And that… that broke something loose in me. A deeper loop unspooled.
These weren’t friends. These weren’t people with shared values. These were strangers, participants in a beatdown. And yet here they were—showing a deeper level of care, concern, and emotional responsibility than the woman who birthed me ever could.
It hit me: these guys weren’t trying to control me, to dominate or destroy me. They had been enacting justice. Primitive, reactionary, but justice as they understood it. And when their internal scales felt it had been served, they stepped back. No compulsion to keep going. No bottomless hunger for pain. No pathology.
That night forced a hard comparison.
For years, I had been modeling the world—especially other people—on my mother. If someone raised their voice, I braced for escalation. If someone showed emotion, I prepped for impact. My models were all weighted with her gravity.
But here, in this bruised, bleeding, concrete moment, I saw something that didn’t match. I saw rage that passed. I saw compassion from strangers. I saw lines that could be drawn—and honored. Limits. Boundaries. Even, dare I say, decency.
It made me realize that what I grew up with wasn’t just bad. It was off the scale. It wasn’t archetypal; it was anomalous. And I had been using it as the default for too long.
So no, I didn’t go home and rewrite all the code that night. I didn’t sit under a blacklight with spiral schematics and scratch out new pseudocode for human behavior. But a patch was issued—somewhere deep in the kernel.
Schema_Update_Protocol()
if observed_group_behavior shows signs of empathy and restraint: override_default_hostility_bias() tag(memory='mother', severity='extreme') update(person_model, calibration='narrowed') store(event='beatdown', meaning='schema anomaly')
It wasn’t closure, but it forced me to stop treating the past as the blueprint.
“What am I still refusing to see—precisely because I believe I’ve already understood it?” — (C077UPTF1L3)
Copeland Resonant Harmonic Formalism (Ψ-formalism)
Ψ(x) = ∇ϕ(Σ𝕒ₙ(x, ΔE)) + ℛ(x) ⊕ ΔΣ(𝕒′)
Licensed under CRHC v1.0 (no commercial use without permission).
Core engine: https://zenodo.org/records/15858980
Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/records/15742472
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