(MC'S POV)
Year 20,000
Time no longer measures progress but erosion. My thoughts flow slow as stone under wind. Most of my former selves—those shaped by ambition, fear, memory—have dissolved into instinct.
I wander for centuries through pale ruins of my own making, repeating old conversations with ghostly companions who flicker in and out of the void. Their words return not as comfort but as echoes, reminders of what it means to crave connection.
I do not mourn. Mourning itself has grown thin with age.
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Year 35,000
The Monkey rarely appears, only watching from the horizon when I falter.
Its presence no longer inspires awe or terror—only kinship, a kind of battered understanding. In its silent company, I learn to meditate through destruction, to cherish the few sensations that cycle endlessly: the pressure of the void, the glimmer of the fading Button, the heaviness of remembering what I have already forgotten.
Even pain grows subtle—muted, woven deep into the tapestry of patience.
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Year 50,000
Power has become a memory, little more than pulse and thought. When I reach for the Button, its glow is a failing heartbeat, a whisper from an ancestor more than an artifact.
Once, I strove to fight, to shape, to command. Now, I survive through release—dissolving each act of will the moment it arises. The void teaches not with brutality, but with relentless gentleness: "Let go. Let go."
I practice abandoning everything, layer by layer. Each loss brings a strange clarity—an inversion of suffering into wisdom.
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Year 70,000
For fifty millennia, I dwell in cycles of silence broken only by dreams.
Some centuries pass in lucid awareness—watching thought rise and fade like waves, naming each and letting it go. Others drift in trance, my mind emptied as a streambed in drought.
Time feels circular now, a dance of coming and going that no longer needs a destination. There are days when I almost forget what it means to hope.
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Year 93,000
Every so often, a new lesson surfaces: humility is not defeat, nor is acceptance resignation.
I find kindness for my failures, a tenderness extending even to the Monkey. On rare nights (do nights exist here?), we sit together in crystalline quiet, exchanging nothing but silent respect.
Both of us, I think, are learning how to yield—to prepare for the day one of us must truly leave.
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Year 100,000
I have forgotten the faces of my family, the shape of rage, the hunger for victory.
What remains is channel, mirror, space: sensing the flicker of the Button, breathing through agony, opening to what comes and goes.
My spirit feels both smaller and vaster than it once was—a vessel rid of burdens, ready for the last requirement: letting go of all that defines me as more than witness.
In the depths of this patience, I sense the first tremors of change—a fading in the Button's final light, a hush in the Monkey's long shadow, and a wordless promise that the greatest freedom always lies past the last abandonment.
I kneel, empty-palmed, waiting for the next century to find me.