Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter One: The Cosmos (section)

===The First Axioms===

''Pinning the Butterfly''

Eventually things must change. Some remain isolated. Some Inspired are picked up by the Lemurians. There they are told the great Lemurian truth: that they are right, that everyone else is wrong, and that they are the natural leaders of the mortal world, gifted with genius to redefine the world in their image. Others go completely mad, becoming Illuminated, devoured by the light within.

The rest join that loose organization called the Peerage, the society of independent mad scientists. An established peer, or a whole collaborative of researchers, might find a lone genius and teach her how to channel her Inspiration. Others make their own independent discoveries by reading scientific and mathematical texts that are gibberish to the sane but how-to programs for the Inspired. Regardless of how he learns, most geniuses who do not go mad stumble upon the Axioms: "channels" of mad science that apply some modicum of order to the genius' chaotic thoughts, and which can be used to create wonders.

The Axioms are not reliable, by any means, let alone consistent. A genius can imagine them as knots of cohesion floating in a vast illuminated sea of Idea, little islands where things almost make sense, though the shoreline shifts fractally with every passing second. Even if a genius doesn't know the names and histories of the Axioms, she sees something solid there, a foundation upon which she can build the scaffolding of something wondrous. She is no longer a flailing half-genius whose equations are gibberish and whose projects sublimate before the eyes of her peers. She has laid claim to a system. She is now a genius in full.