Phase Q/Epilogue
After you have made your coveted decisions, and gone traveling through many strange worlds, you now live, or exist, or are vaguely aware of the existence of, a life full of the curiosity that it takes to try new things, go new places, do new things.
You and Natalya merged successfully into one super being, at first planet-like and later even more abstract. Smitty and Tommi have gone to their separate bits.
The Fyuchees created, or tried to create, a new set of conditional properties, in which they and maybe you can live fantastic lives which may lack substance, but have ample meaning.
Mr. and Mrs. President, and all their guards and guards’ guards and so on, fought for a while to remain the status quo, and then wound up succumbing that most natural of disorders, entropy.
The Zonnyxes managed to overturn a lot of the natural way of things, ripping apart reality at its seams. Whether their utter destruction would last, who knows?
Many, many, many, many, many animals and plants and other types of life, some of which don’t even exist yet, were harmed in the making of this story, most of them irreparably. Sorry.
This tale probably has many morals, some yet to be discovered. A lot of them are probably shouted loudly and clearly, much more so than necessary. A few may have come across as quite welcome pieces of insight, practically by accident.
The landscapes themselves constitute remarkable works of beauty. It’s a shame that landscapes aren’t self-appreciating. There are so many exotic planets and stars and even non-spatial backdrops, which have luxurious aesthetic appeal, yet which require some animal or robot or whatever to actually bother appreciating their beauty.
You can rematerialize at the beginning of the story again, and try taking a different path. Or, if you know how, you can rematerialize anywhere else in the middle of the adventure. And if you’re really savvy, you can even rematerialize the material itself.
A warm smell of smoky foods wafts over. You inhale deeply, remembering how long it has been since you last metabolized something new. And how delicious it would be. Also, a warm bath and some warm music would help. Maybe some warm scented candles?
A wild animal trots by. The sky changes in color and brightens, lending your face a softer cast. Soft, billowy clouds of happiness appear on the horizon. A bright light flashes in the sky. It briefly outshines the daylight, then is gone.
The sky above and the ground below give way to reveal a marvelous scene. Ancient rocks have crushed each other enough to provide a pool of resources to autocatalyze into a new form of life. Swimming about for a while, the life evolves in complexity. After the local equivalent of billions of years of evolution, the life has become a diverse ecosystem full of intelligence and emotion. Then, practically by accident, some tiny little peripheral element launches a sequence of events that vaporizes the whole place.
That light flashes in the sky again.
What is it?
It’s time to eat.
That’s funny.
Phase Q: An interactive adventure.
