Dear █████,
I don’t know why I’m writing this out. There’s one very obvious truth to this whole mess that I realized pretty early on. You aren’t here. You just… aren’t. You aren’t you, and I don’t know if the you that exists here really… exists here. You’re dead, for all I know. Died, or unpersoned, or something, after you fled the underground and broke whatever barrier you had.
I’m saying this to say that... it’s not like you’re ever going to read this letter. It’s not like the you that should be here is ever going to read it, either. It’s not like I can find you, or him. Believe me. I already tried. I went to Mom and Dad and it was just like every other time. All the other times. They don’t care. They don’t see me. I can’t do anything here, anything that lasts, unless I really, really try. And it’s getting harder and harder to do that. But there is one big exception, though. And that’s, uh, kind of why I’m writing this out.
We won, man. We actually won. The Godmodder’s dead. Crusher48 — you wouldn’t know him, I mean, you wouldn’t know anyone, would you? — injected himself with the unholy power of Chuck Norris stims or something and then he roundhouse kicked the Godmodder into oblivion. No one knows where he went. No one could see, no one could tell. We all got his gear, he yelled at us like the baby that I knew he was, and then… nothing. He ragequit. He actually ragequit.
Uh, my share of the loot, let’s see. While I’m writing this we’re all still on the generic server just taking in the victory, dancing around, building whatever. That huge dragon, the Secret, left a while ago, and all the entities we’ve been spawning have been kinda filtering out. But my loot. I got… Huh. That’s really weird. “Godmodder477’s Left Arm?” I didn’t even know you could get an actual player’s arm. That’s some bizarre plugin. I gotta go talk to TT2000 about it or something, because wow. Wild! Also some random enchanted Diamond Helmet that’s got -1 on everything, of course. No, not -I. -1.
It just feels… I don’t know, this is the realest anything’s ever felt here, even though it’s very clearly so UNreal that it stretches all possible imaginations, simultaneously, you know? (You wouldn’t know, I mean, you wouldn’t know anything, would you?) But, like… Of course back home there’s no possible way anyone could hop on Minecraft and fight the second-closest approximation to God I’ve ever seen and be able to jump into the REAL Aperture Science over and over again and travel to the gaps between dimensions and all sorts of crazy shit. But here, it’s just… it’s on a whole other level. It really feels like I can do anything. Like what I do here can last. And all these players, all these people, they all get me! They all see me! They all know I’m here!
It’s like… These words, these actions, these games I’m playing. They feel like the proof that I’m here. The proof that I’m a person, that’s existing, even though I’m not where you are, or where Matt is, or where Mom and Dad are, or anything. Maybe they’ll last long after I’m gone.
We’re all celebrating over here, so... I guess I’ll write you another letter later. Though, you know. It’s not like you can really see it. But I can hope against hope, can’t I? Maybe if I concentrate hard enough, my thoughts and actions can become slightly less fake. I dunno.
Stay tuned,
Adam
9/1/13
Dear █████,
Hey. It’s me, again. Thought of some more questions you could ask me when I get back. Maybe we can compare these, see how things diverged, if things diverged, I guess. Let’s see, I had a whole list set up. Alright. I figure you’ll ask something like “who’s the president?” And I’d say it’s still Obama. That really hasn’t changed. He got elected in ’08, he got re-elected in ’12. That’s, like. That’s old news, I guess. There’s probably something to be said there about how even though me landing here has affected so much, the world at large still turns the same. Like. No one in Washington D.C. cares about me. There’s not gonna be a law in Congress made about me. There was only one time people were, like, looking for me, but...
...I guess. I just realized. A question you might ask. Would be, like. “Who was looking for you?” Because I know I’d let slip that someone was on accident when I get back and then you’d be all who was it and I’d do that thing where I’m trying to hold it back but I have that half-smiling face that I do when I’m hiding something and you’d prod and poke and then I’d have to tell you. So. I’ll write it out here. It’ll take me a while, I guess, because I don’t especially enjoy talking about it, but…
Okay, I landed in Manhattan. Somewhere thereabouts. And it took me a few days to find my way back home, and those were easily the worst days of my life, thus far, bar none. It sucked. I was lost, I was confused, I couldn’t get those goddamn glasses off of my head, and I couldn’t do anything about it. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. ‘Cause, you know. No one could see me, no one could interact me. For a while nothing could even touch me. Cars would go right through me; people would go right through me. I didn’t need to eat, I didn’t need to sleep. Felt like I barely needed to breathe. It was like existence was trying to catch up to me being there at all.
And sometimes I would notice things flicker in the corner of my eyes. And I’d look and I’d feel like the world was just a little bit different than how it was before. I mean, everything was a lot different than how it was before. Jumping between… is “art styles” really the right word that I would use? Is that how I’d describe it? I guess that’s how I’d describe it. Sometimes things would be monochrome, barely even moving. Sometimes it would be like I was in a movie, a thirty frames per second movie. And every frame there’d be a different painting that made up my field of view. Sometimes everything would just be blocks of color, horribly drawn, barely holding anything together. Sometimes everything cut out entirely and I’d be in a totally white expanse, and the only thing I could see would be a haze of… rainbow? Rainbow. Just barely, at the edge of my vision.
So I ran a lot, throughout the city, trying to find my way back. I barely even know how I managed it. But while I was running through, I remember being chased. Everything was a blur at that time, honestly. Felt like I needed to vomit constantly from how often things would change, but I had nothing in my stomach. I barely existed, honestly, what the hell could I have done? So I just had to keep going. I never got tired, but I never got stronger. I was just stuck, constantly running. So, yeah, I was being chased. I remember. Some military group was storming through the grid of the city, with these cubic black guns aimed wherever they were looking.
And I remember being confused because no matter how much my ass-backwards existence tunneled around me, they never changed. It was like they were anchored perfectly into reality, just stuck there, always walking forward, always knowing the correct path. I won’t lie. Just like everything else I went through in those days, it terrified me. Not like there was anything I could have done back then. I didn’t know I had Far Lands powers. I didn’t know I had anything special. I was just some kid stuck somewhere I didn’t know.
I still am. But it’s easier now.
Eventually… Eventually I got cornered by them. I was running through and then I realized the soldiers were on all sides of me, running right for me, and there was nowhere I could go. So I froze up. I never knew it was possible for someone to freeze up like that. Like, full-blown deer in the headlights, all that stuff. But it actually happened. Swear to God. And they all converged on me, and I could see them clearly for the first time. I realized that what I thought was one group of soldiers was… actually two. The first looked like a stereotypical American army unit, but… there was something indeterminately different about them. Darker uniforms? Different patterning? Their weaponry was definitely higher-tech than anything I’d ever seen. But the larger group by far was totally different from anything I’d ever seen on Earth. All black, holographic visors, nameplates in glyphs in some language I didn’t recognize. Floating crystals hanging around their belts, energy crackling in their guns.
The two groups were talking all around me, talking about me, and the more I stood there, the more I realized a fundamental truth. None of them could see me. None of them knew I was there. They resisted whatever interference was screwing with this place, but they still couldn’t see me. So I tried to walk through them. Except I couldn’t. I actually felt the soldier I tried to walk through this time. And he felt me. And he looked down at me and I saw his mouth open in shock and what I can only assume was some weird existential horror, and his entire body recoiled and he reached for his gun, and then I backed off and fell on the ground and as abruptly as he started to move he stopped dead in his tracks. And all the soldiers around him were like “what are you doing” and he had no response. He just said that he swore he saw someone, for a brief instant, and that then they were gone.
All the soldiers were on high alert after that. Paranoid as hell, I’m sure. Looking around, scanning things with their rifles, shooting out beams of energy every which way. I noticed, only then, that none of the civilians paid them any mind either. They didn’t just, like, walk through the soldiers or anything. They would just walk around them. Even though they couldn’t see them. Like they instinctually knew, “hey, you’re gonna hit something, don’t do it.”
So I remember thinking, like. What if I was to make someone hit them. Now that I could pretty clearly actually touch people. I tried it with other objects first. I could actually touch a trash can (though I really didn’t feel like it). Lean on a traffic light. Sit on a car. So I ran over to some random person who was walking on the same sidewalk as an entire fleet of these soldiers, and I grabbed him. And I’ll never forget the way his entire body shuddered, like all his nerves had been dunked in ice, and he looked around wildly and then down at me, and then I pushed as hard as I could and he slammed right into one of those soldiers.
...
As soon as they made contact the entire environment lurched and bubbled and frothed around me, in a way that it never had before. The sky boiled and sizzled onto the earth, the skyscrapers and buildings and people jumped into the air and shifted to the side and duplicated and multiplied and I could see them at all points in times at once. The ground molted into swiss cheese and I could hear the whirring, clicking sounds of a computer working overtime, echoing into the horizon. That same rainbow I saw at the edge of my vision overtook everything, sharpening and distorting into a neon dystopia.
And then I blinked. And everything was gone. And that guy. The guy that I pushed. He was gone, too. So was the soldier. That guy was walking with someone who I assumed was his wife? They both had matching rings, they were talking together, hand in hand. She was walking alone now. She didn’t have a ring. She had different clothes. I blinked again. She stayed the same. I blinked again. She was about to run into a soldier, but she changed course and walked around him.
I ran out of the city and I never touched anyone else.
...You know. Just in case you were curious. That’s. One of my many stories. I should probably call it here. And burn this letter.
Stay tuned,
Adam
1/13/13
Dear █████,
Do you believe in God? Sorry if that’s a dumb question. I know we were debating it before I left. Mom and Dad were always so insistent on it that it was just… suffocating, I know. And I could see us really just growing away from the church. I could feel it happening. I want to say we were better without it, because, I mean, I think we were. I think we would have been. I’ve had time to reflect on it now, time to see what’s being going on, and stuff. But like. There’s just so much stuff they tried to teach us that now I see was just… not good? At all?
It doesn’t really matter much anymore, though. Because now I know God is real. And I know that everyone else has got it wrong.
I’ve been trying to do a bit of research on it, and I’ve mostly come up empty-handed. It turns out that even in this obviously fake reality where nothing is as it should be, people still aren’t really convinced that there’s some new world order writing and rewriting everything and shifting and destroying whatever semblance of order you thought you had. But I’m not stupid, okay? And I’m not crazy. I can see through it. I catch glimpses of stuff, and it’s like, how can that not be important?
You know how when you close your eyes you can see that fuzz in there, those constantly moving patterns? Systems and matrices of dots in faint neon colors? Afterimages of bright lights that rubbed and bled into your retinas? A sea of plasma hazily floating upwards? Recently there’s a set of shapes I constantly see in them. I studied them a lot, and drew them a bunch. One of them’s a cube. Pretty clear. One’s a triangular prism of sorts? But the base isn’t a rectangle, it’s also a triangle. Then there’s other, similarly three-dimensional polygons. In one, every face is a pentagon. On the other two, every base is a triangle. One’s got a lot more sides than the other, though.
So I did some digging. Turns out if you lay all those shapes on top of each other, and you arrange them in tune with a set of thirteen circles — there’s a real specific way you have to do it, too, like, one set of circles on each outer point of the cube, another set of circles within, and another circle at the exact center — you get this crazy mystical shape. And it’s called Metatron’s Cube.
Metatron. I did digging on that name, too. Supposedly he’s the voice of God. The recording angel. A force in Heaven so powerful that it made some people think there were two gods, if I’m to believe whatever esoteric texts Wikipedia cited. I’m reasonably confident that the God we grew up believing in doesn’t exist. At the very least, not in the form that we were taught. Whatever force threw me down into here, whatever heavenly thundering voice shouted upon me in a language I’d never heard but perfectly understood… that wasn’t the Jesus Christ that died for my sins.
I can see a lot of parallels between what I remember from that blinding white garden and a bunch of religions. The flaming wings, too many arms, the recurring three-s, that geometry. The sacred geometry. Whatever I encountered, whatever was responsible for all of this, the reason I’m here… I don’t think it’s just the voice of God. I think it’s the voice of every god.
I think it’s Metatron.
Stay tuned,
Adam
4/2/13
Dear █████,
You need to play FEZ. Like. You really, REALLY need to play FEZ.
Stay tuned,
Adam
7/31/13
Dear █████,
You know how in history class they’d always tell us history was split into ages? (You would know, you always paid attention in class, I mean, we both did, you don’t become a straight-A student by slacking off.) Of course there was the Stone Age, where humanity was just starting out. When we were making stone tools and fire and painting on cave walls. And there were the Bronze and Iron Ages, which is, like, when you know stuff is really getting real. History is advancing, actually writing itself.
And there’s that concept of the Golden Age too, which I get is a lot more metaphorical than the literal three-age system I just talked about, but still. That idea of a time period where everything is as perfect as you could reasonably get it. Where everything’s efficient, where everything works, when everyone’s making their best work. That Golden Age of peace and prosperity. There’s the Ice Age, which, as we all know, is the greatest set of movies to ever exist, besides probably the Transformers movies. It just makes me wonder. What the hell am I going through? What are yougoing through? With this whole modern society, with everything turning on its end. Everyone’s getting so connected, technology’s growing crazier with every passing day. And now there’s existences beyond the one that any history book thought was possible, and it feels like I’m the only person that knows about it. The only person who’s been able to write about it. The only person with the will to act on it.
It really, really does make me wonder. When this is all said and done, when I come back, when the Godmodder is destroyed, and when I have nothing but amazing stories to tell you. What will the history books say? What will people call this whole ordeal that we have the unfortunately dubious honor of being stuck in?
What are we living in the age of?
Stay tuned,
Adam
6/1/13
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