Tonight, when I dropped, a countdown clock hung in the game sky. You couldn’t miss the bright yellow numbers up in the twilight. There were just days left in the Also, to be who we were. I zoomed to the old homestead in Gjajan, where I built my manse and gardens and dug my private sea, where Aremi came to me, but the place looked like it was having a stroke—just a throb of pixels, a cloud of bad data that fluxed and ate at the terrain. Years of questing wiped away, and I could take nothing with me, like a refugee from a dream. I moved closer, to brush the metaphysics of it all, and my machine seized. The Core was as stable as a stilt on a stilt. I dropped again, this time to the foothills of Origin Park to wait for Aremi. We had agreed to find each other here, the last place they’d wipe. The Park debuted on the first compile—ganked from topos of the Acropolis—and the texturing was smeary and low-res, not like a place but the memory of a place you drove by in a car. The engineers kept it around as an artifact, proof of how far they’d come.
