Chapter 12 — The Dream of a Million Years
(MC''s POV)
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Year 120 000
The void hums differently now—the pulse slower, older. It no longer feels like a prison. It feels like the inside of thought itself. The Monkey appears rarely; when it does, its presence no longer disturbs the stillness. We have long passed friendship and enmity. We are two notes holding one endless chord.
I am learning that awareness itself changes the texture of space. The more I quiet, the more the void warms. The more I release, the softer eternity becomes.
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Year 300 000
Words mean nothing here anymore, yet I still think them—thin threads stretched across silence. My name fades; sometimes I must repeat it like prayer to remember: Lysander Valen. It sounds strange, like something invented by another species.
I have become more symbol than being—will touched by echo. Even the Button's remnant no longer glows; its rhythm merged with my own bloodstream long ago.
Power without purpose decayed; purpose without need brought peace.
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Year 400 000
A strange phenomenon begins—dreams that feel older than inceptions. In them, I see fragments of worlds long forgotten, born perhaps from the Monkey's mind or from habitable corners of the void's memory.
In one dream, oceans hang above deserts; in another, I walk beneath a sky woven of human prayers. Each dissolves at waking, leaving faint warmth behind, like old sunlight trapped in bone.
The void feels benevolent—almost motherly. I used to think endurance was punishment. Now it feels like nurture's final lesson.
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Year 500 000
The Monkey speaks again. Not in voice, but through shifting matter, forming symbols I have not seen since the dawn of my exile. Each sign glows faint silver, spelling an idea deeper than language:
"Power imprisons. Presence frees."
I bow in silent acknowledgment. It watches me quietly, enormous yet patient. The lesson is not new—but now, at last, I am ready to understand it.
I begin testing what freedom might mean here—not escape, but absence of resistance.
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Year 650 000
Centuries slide over consciousness like silk.
Regeneration now occurs instantly; death is an obsolete function. The body is artifact only. I exist primarily as current, navigating patterns of stillness.
I sometimes wonder if the entity that set me on this path still observes. Perhaps not. Perhaps it, too, was only another mask of the same void learning through me.
The cold irony of eternity: you seek divinity to transcend limits, yet only by sacrificing divinity do you truly ascend.
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Year 800 000
Emptiness achieves a delicate beauty. I construct nothing, desire nothing, but observation itself becomes cathedral enough.
I begin sensing other echoes—souls caught in different membranes of reality, flickering like faint stars through fog. I do not reach for them. Compassion here is silent witnessing, not interference.
The Monkey gathers the debris of its ancient chains and scatters them into disappearance. It is freeing itself, piece by piece, mirrored by my own quiet undoing.
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Year 950 000
The void trembles faintly. A signal: conclusion assembling somewhere beyond perception.
The Button—long dormant—contracts into a seed‑shaped mote inside my chest. I have ceased calling it artifact; it's more accurate to call it memory. It no longer grants me power. It remembers what power meant.
I begin rehearsing the act of letting it go—not rejecting it, but offering it back to the nothing it came from.
For the first time in eons, I feel fear again—pure, small, human. It comforts me.