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Insanity and death have grown more real these past few years.  It wouldn’t be surprising if you or someone close to you has been cracked like a psychological eggshell. 

It’s difficult to realize that nothing ultimately protects us from losing our true friends or children or life-partners.  They’re just snow dusting the road.  And your story will end too.  And mine.  It could happen right here as I write this—midline, like a complete idiot!  It could come for you as you read this word— 

It turns out there are only side-characters in this film.  There’s nothing we’re so important or indispensably crucial to the plot for.  There are no tasks to tie up, no goodbyes to say, no bravery to discover before the end. 

An ancient Chinese philosopher named Confucius once believed that the most important thing for us humans was to have rituals surrounding death, and offer remembrance and honor to our ancestors.  A proper person was supposed to grieve the death of a parent for three years, wearing black garments and performing daily rituals.  Do I suggest you act a Confucian and honor the three-year rite?  No.  

But I would like to remind you—just remind—that an era and tradition once existed with such a culture and such an atmosphere.  It may strike you as beautiful, in a time when the world is constantly being replaced: torn from us and cast aside like we are so rich we only wear clothes once.  It may bring you some solace to light a candle every morning for your passed loved one, giving them five minutes of remembrance for a few months, every day, and realize you are honoring the great Way that Confucius envisioned over two thousand years ago—a link in an unbroken chain.  And it might relieve you to do so every morning, not on the mornings when you feel stable, or ready, but to honor the very act of remembrance itself with that lost word sincerity.   

But Confucius is gone and we do reach absolute zero in the end.  Or at least we have the eerie knowledge of the blank space between dreams and the void before we were born.  And as death looms larger we find ourselves being hooked into a strange new network, or technological metaverse where what it means to be human will be irrevocably changed.  It is because of this that the following experience and story takes the form it does and not a more traditional one. 

If you find a moment of meditation here, between the infinite nothing of death and the infinite turmoil of the future, let it be honest.  

For those beginning:

[Click “back” and go to the 1-Square.]

For those rebirthing here who have collected BOTH the Memory of Love & the Power of Context: 

[Click “back” and go to 6-Square.]

For those rebirthing here who have collected the Memory of Love: 

[Click “back” and go to 9-Square.]

For those rebirthing who have collected the Power of Context: 

[Click “back” and go to 2-Square.]

For those returning here from 5-Square:

[Click on the “second ending” button below and enter, as the password, the name of the shape which has covertly appeared throughout this experience. Feel free at this point to re-enter any square and search for this.]