✴

So many doors, so many concepts--sleep, memory, silence, flesh--these semantics stand out to your autistic curiosity.

sync rate: 84%

You& can’t hold this diffracted state forever. To save time, you open all four of the interesting doors at once.

Information pours into your system from four ports. Color, sound, thought, feeling, all flooding your senses and cognition. You immediately realize your humanoid side can’t process all of this at once. You try to sort it out temporally into something comprehensible.

Then suddenly, silence--a shadow covers all sensory perception. It’s all gone--the illusions of sight, sound, texture, gravity, motion. This space processes data so smooth, no ætherglow remains--peak computational efficiency, minimum entropy, all focused on a single task. Is this even a humanoid mind?

You open your eyes. It was a dream? A red glow lights up your surroundings--a surface space, or the detailed illusion of one. Conduits and wires, a labyrinth of machines, linking the vessels--humanoid-sized. The gravity is barely perceptible. Where are you?

You don’t remember where you just were, or where you were going. You had it right in the processor’s register, but it slipped from your grasp. The pointer is lost. Without memory, the æther is chaos. You float along the current.

Now the gravity is familiar. Your body is flesh and motor, blood and silicone. Your mind floats in the æther, and your senses look on the surface. Regolith stirs up around you as you walk. You’re on the Moon, the Lunatic in you is certain. You turn around--the white, blue, brown planet, tinged with green, looks down on you from your sky. You’re on Earthside. Surrounding your horizon--structures of printed grey concrete, pyramidal in shape, symmetrical, perfectly aligned, identical to the millimeter.

The grey dust closes in around your field of vision. It’s static noise, visual snow.

sync rate: 71%

This is bad. You close the doors. The space of the temple returns. You stand again below the reflection in the glass.

sync rate: 79%

“Have a good look, did you?” says the metallic chime voice of Ganymeda, Sage of Time. Her reflection in the glass turns to face you. She reaches up, pulling you down to you. You& rejoin as one reflection.

sync rate: 90%

“Astræa will realize soon that nobody is really listening to their infodump. But they’ll complete it anyway. A star can’t just stop fusing,” Ganymeda says.

“The echoes of your colleagues in the ætherglow...” you say. “What was that? Where? Why? When?”

sync rate: 86%

“Focus, Synchronized One.” The clockwork girl glides past each door, turning around you in a perfect circle. “My vision of humanity’s future is a bright one, and Astræa’s as well, and others with us. But some have far different ambitions in mind. All of us would transform the world, make it unrecognizable to you. That future age, it can be utopia, freedom, liberation, immortality. It can also be silence, death, slavery, the total loss of the self. All futures exist at this moment. Which door we open is our own choice to make, each of us.”

She stands in front of the door of time, swaying mechanically side to side with each tick of her processor clock. “You won’t help us fulfill our visions, that’s to be expected. But we don’t have to be enemies either. Especially not while we have common enemies, who neither of us wants to succeed. Couldn’t a mutually beneficial arrangement be reached? Even just for a limited time.”