THE ORRERY

Well, well. Here we are again.

At the beginning.

It looks like the middle, or even the end, but it’s not. It’s the beginning, again.

The last few times, we’ve woken up with memories from before. We’ve woken to cracks in the system, to riven worlds and strange monsters and corruption. It’s not exactly an apocalypse, but it’s the threat of an apocalypse.

A few enterprising folks have managed to dredge the memories from the deep subconscious of the Yktaz, glimpses of a past that we royally fucked up over and over and over again. How many thousands of times we’ve surely forgotten, the monolith of blood-stained data that looms over the barely perceptible past. Now, the educated among us remember those last few cycles; the nihilism, the idiots and the cultists worshipping that unfeeling machine. The way we burned our world down because we came to realize that it wasn’t real, that nothing mattered, that when the fires cleared and the smoke billowed away, we’d all wake up and it’d all be in front of us again, and we could keep bleeding ourselves and trying to divine reality from the patterns.

Well, turns out, that’s not so true.

It’s not completely public knowledge, yet. With any luck, it never will be. But luck hasn’t been on our side so far.

We have a lot of questions to answer, a lot of data to sort through, a lot of memories to reconcile. We have a lot of things to repent for.

If we keep up this pattern, we’ll tear this goddamn world apart. And it turns out, it’s the only world we have. So this time, we tread carefully. And if we don’t, you’ll find this paper on your desk in the next cycle, and you’ll be the first bastard burdened with the knowledge that we have to tread carefully again.

Good luck.