Information Manipulation

Background

Information Manipulation is the power to control, manipulate, change, and destroy the underlying information of reality. The ability appears in many forms depending on how a setting defines information. At its most basic, information refers to any pattern or signal capable of being interpreted. This may include natural phenomena, sensory data, symbolic abstractions, or digitally encoded structures.

Information is not equivalent to knowledge—it is what allows knowledge to emerge through interpretation. Information can exist in analog or digital forms, in physical systems or metaphysical frameworks, in data sets or spiritual essences. Because information underlies structure, behavior, and logic, its manipulation can range from mundane effects like data editing to high-concept alterations of existence and reality.

Also Called

• Informational Control
• Ontological Data Manipulation
• Code Restructuring
• Fundamental Pattern Control

Possible Applications

• Rewriting History: The user could change recorded or remembered history, causing people and events to be remembered differently—or forgotten entirely.
• Undoing Damage: By altering the informational state of an object or body, users can undo wounds, restore destroyed matter, or even raise the dead by restoring prior versions of their data.
• Perception Control: Users can change how others perceive a subject by manipulating the information others rely on to sense, remember, or interpret them.
• Falsification of Reality: Create illusions or alternate outcomes that become real due to the informational rewrite rather than traditional illusion or memory tampering.
• Anti-Conceptual Combat: Bypass durability or abstract defenses by attacking the subject's information instead of their body or soul.
• Digital-Godhood: In digital or simulated universes, the user essentially becomes a system administrator with unrestricted access.

Practical Uses

• Changing one’s own or others’ abilities by reprogramming informational parameters
• Concealing existence by deleting identity traces from informational space
• Restoring erased characters or objects by recovering lost information
• Erasing memories or historical presence from the informational framework
• Gaining immunity to certain powers by removing the information they rely on

Variations

Digital Information Manipulation

The user manipulates digital information that defines the existence, identity, or structure of beings and constructs within electronic environments. Unlike basic Data Manipulation, which often affects stored data, code, or operating systems, this variation targets the core digital essence—such as digital souls, avatars, or metadata that constitutes a being’s presence in cyberspace.

Users may reconstruct corrupted entities, create autonomous digital life, extract or inject identities into systems, or alter digital realities down to their core logic. This can result in:

• Rewriting avatars' capabilities or form mid-existence.
• Reviving deleted entities by restoring their informational blueprint.
• Infecting or purifying digital organisms by editing their structure.
• Causing logouts or death by deleting their digital core.

Data Manipulation

Aletia can manipulate the virtual reality of Code Lyoko to return the real world to the past.

Virtual Reality Manipulation, alternatively known as Data Manipulation, is the ability to alter digital structures and environments. The user can create, modify, or erase virtual worlds or constructs, often while a simulation is active. Depending on the verse, this can extend to affecting real-world objects or people via linked systems.

Physical Information Manipulation

The user can manipulate physical information carried by physical systems. This includes the data underlying physical matter—such as the chemical formula or structural constants of an object.

In multiversal fictions where mathematics is considered fundamental to reality (such as Level IV multiverse theory), this can extend into rewriting mathematical laws, formulas, or constants that govern physical entities.

Existent Information Manipulation

This variation deals with the information tied to the identity or history of something that exists. The user can erase or rewrite the knowledge, memories, and records of an entity, even as they remain physically unchanged. It may change:

• How the world perceives them
• The logic that governs their abilities or existence
• Their role in history or causality

High-level users may rewrite cause-effect chains, histories, or even concepts linked to the entity.

Conceptual Information Manipulation

At the highest tier, the user can manipulate the informational essence of reality’s building blocks—abstracts like truth, logic, time, and causality. This allows rewriting the informational substrate behind fundamental forces or metaphysical laws. At this level, information isn't merely data or knowledge, but the pre-conceptual layer from which reality itself is shaped.

Possible Limitations

• Information Overload: Interacting with too much information at once may exceed cognitive or processing limits, even for higher entities.
• Fragmented Reality: Rewriting information without precision may create paradoxes, inconsistencies, or unstable phenomena.
• Perception Dependency: If the verse ties information to perception, then effects may depend on whether others accept the new state.
• Resistant Entities: Some beings may have protected or anchored information that resists manipulation.
• Requires Access Medium: In lower-level forms, the user might need an interface, system, or sensory bridge to enact manipulation.

Users

• Lain Iwakura (Serial Experiments Lain): Lain can control the informational data of the real world, doing things like deleting memories entirely making everyone forget events ever happened.
• Chara (Undertale): Chara is able to destroy the entire world of Undertale, which is a metafictional reality aware it's a virtual video game.
• Samus Aran (Metroid): Samus can take objects stored in her data and create them in the real world.