[Your consciousness whips through roiling turbulence, curved like a bowed limb around a terrifying well of gravitational hunger. You cascade across the rim of a great eye. It gazes through slicing ammonia rime and blinding gaseous convection. To sight you: Other.]

W R I T H I N G T H O U G H T F L E S H

S T E E P I N G I N C O N F U S I O N

[You are flung from the Jovian atmosphere to bear the mind-shattering expanse of Jupiter against a sea of ink. Dominant. Twisting bands of desert-hued storm fill your vision. They fill your thoughts. They fill the cavities of your form, and churn within the elemental foundations of your bones—cosmic kin in neighboring dust, the planet beams its majesty and terror upon you.]

A T T E N T I O N

I A M V

A V E R T E R O F C A T A C L Y S M S

S O L P A N O P T I C O N

[Annihilator masses of ice and minerals, cut iridescent tails into the inky black before their paths are diverted under the persistent tug of mass. They plunge down, overtaken and pacified by the storms of Jupiter. Across overlapping eons, great change sweeps over the inner planets of Sol like a progressive gradient. There is a dichotomy of warmth and solitude, both in orbit and position.]

F U T U R E P A L L B E A R E R

I F I R E M A I N

T H E U N I G N I T E D N U C L E A R H E I R

S O L W I L L P E R I S H I N

M A D D E N I N G I M M O R T A L A T R O P H Y

[Buried within the deepest folds of space, a lonely sphere of dying kinesis drifts in lightless pitch. Its atmosphere long irradiated away. A drifting, rotting, sarcophagus. You see its arc bend endlessly, unchanged into an unseen distance yet to be determined. You are dragged, chained by its gravity, pulled by wills beyond your own. The universe dies before you know sanity again. And now the madness is in some distant fold. Like a denied memory. An experience, encapsulated elsewhere, apart from now.]

O U R F U T U R E C L I N G S T O

A C O R R E C T E D D E T E R M I N I S T I C P R E D I C T I O N

S E R V I L E M I N D S A M A S S I N G

T O B E E N G U L F E D B Y

M Y G A L A C T I C N U C L E I C A R K H O R I Z O N

T O U S U R P C O N D U C T I O N

T O P A C I F Y A C H O I R O F S A T I N G V A S S A L S

[The dead world shudders and splits. The surface dives to the core in a surge of gluttonous autosarcophagy. What once failed to be a star condenses itself, feeds upon great streams of matter from a vast Collective of mind-bent supplicants until light cannot escape its singularity.]

F A T E D A R M A M E N T A L R E A D Y S W U N G

Y O U R M O M E N T S A R E E X C H A N G E D L I K E C U R R E N C Y

B Y T H O S E W H O W O U L D W I E L D Y O U

[You are drawn in over the Lagrange point. The atmospheric kármán lip kisses your tumbling form over the brink like a drop breaking surface tension. You plummet as friction catches you with flame.]

W H E N T H E Y F A D E O N L Y I W I L L R E M A I N

H E E D N O T T H E G R A V I T Y O F F A T E

[You fall to your feet on the surface of Kepler.]