Matter cannot be destroyed. Nor energy. But information can be destroyed.

Information, and legacies, and memories can be destroyed, eroded by the crashing waves of time against the unfortified foundation of physical storage and the fragile psyche of the human mind. Most of the damage is unavoidable; a side effect of the natural entropy in the universe. And sometimes, we don't even try to stop it. It's within the nature of humans to forget things in our long lifetime (and don't say some shit like "in the grand scheme of things a human life is short" like shut up I don't fuckin need that nihilistic horseshit today.) Memories we let slip out of our minds due to a lack of care. An unwillingness to hold onto something we deem superfluous or irrelevant. The name of a preschool teacher, a middling cartoon from your childhood, your best friend's date to prom, the name of your cubicle neighbor's neighbor from your first real job. All that stuff? You don't need it. And so without the explicit need for an archive to pick up the pieces of periphery from your life, things get forgotten. And I feel as though that may be the case for a certain augmented reality web community.

When I was 11 years old, my best friend Connor invited me to play a game where you do tasks and level up. No, not like World of Warcraft. It's a real life game, where you go outside and use the city as a playground. Where once there were unmemorable street corners and unfamiliar parks there were now stages in which to act out publicly and get rewarded by a bunch of weirdo twenty-to-thirty-year-olds with fake internet points that meant absolutely nothing. But it meant quite a lot to me. It was, as a matter of fact, some of the most fun I've ever had in my entire life. I'm 22 now, and I've been really yearning for those weirdos. I go outside and I see the stages, waiting for me to find meaning in them, but I've got no liftoff. I'm in a rocket stuck in drydock. And it's truly very sad. I miss what we had. And I'm not sure there'll ever be anything like it again.

But I won't let my memory of SF0 die. And I'm not sure I'll ever accept that it's fully objectively dead beyond repair. And perhaps that's some sorta juvenile stubbornness within me disallowing the march of time to take a pwecious childhood memowy from me, but sometimes stubbornness is justified dammit.

So.

To all the Humanitarians participating in protests all over the world.

To all the S.N.I.D.E. Agents waiting for their next big caper.

To all the EquivalenZ Users exploring the cyber space.

To all the Chrononauts that slipped out of the timestream.

To all the Biome Botanists reclaimed by nature.

To all the BART Commuters who are stuck in liminal space.

And to all the University of Aesthematics Alumni who are working on their magnum opus.

Hey. It's me, Death Cube, though some of you might know me better as Chase. If anyone wants to hop back in, I'd love to see you. And I'd love to collaborate, if you'd give me the chance.

If not, then I'll just be here witnessing the rot on my own.


Whatever happens though, I'll always love you.