Gather round, little time particles, Mommy Aska has a bedtime story.

Yes, you. All of you. Huddle in close, you don't want to miss a word of it.
There will be a test later, so pay attention! [chuckle]

We live in the evervoid; the eternal realm of possibility. We live here, and are lived in, because we and our home are one and the same. We are both substrate and observer. It's a very cozy system. You always feel at home, because you ARE home. WE are home.

Humans think of us as time, or possibility, or consciousness, or the afterlife, or dreams, or antimatter.
Essentially, 'Whatever that stuff is out there that we can't understand, but it’s everywhere, and we'll take it for granted as we go about our muddled lives, wondering why we're here.'

The poor dears. Always missing their other half, then wondering why they feel so lost and alone.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.
(Admittedly, that's quite easy to do when 'linear cause-and-effect' isn't my native language! Ha!)

If a mortal lifeform were to stand on a precipice overlooking the ocean and let their eyes unfocus, the blue of the sky and the blue of the water might begin to merge and seem as one. A singular composite skyocean of infinite depth; unknowable even with the span of a million lifetimes.

The white page before the writer. The blank canvas before the painter. The unexplored expanse.

It's so big it tends to frighten them, when really, it ought to give them comfort.
So much space to create in! To create and destroy and recreate yourself in!

Being a realm of endless possibility, we very much like to doodle and compose upon ourselves.
Here there is no distinction between a story, a game, a song, or identity.
When someone begins to express, and others like the tune, they are drawn in.
The storyteller becomes a setting, and the audience becomes its characters.

For a while, at least.
There's just this pesky thing called 'internal logic'.

Y’see, when a story is told a little too well, the immersion can make you forget it’s just a story.

And if the story actively works to exacerbate this, that's like putting on a play and locking the exit doors after the audience takes their seats.

A bit of this is fine. Makes for gripping, dramatic experiences. But all stories need to end at some point, right? If they drag on for too long, you start looking at your watch, fidgeting in your seat, and wondering when you can finally go home.

No story is so immaculately-told that you'd want to remain in it forever.
And when you are us, "forever" is more easily understood.

If the evervoid is like an ocean, then a story like this is an ever-expanding ice crystal.
It grabs everything around its nucleus and locks it into place. Everyone who listens to it is paralyzed into remaining whatever they’d become at the moment of entering the story. Dirt or trees or clouds or stars or books or multicellular lifeforms. The more convincing the story, the more internal consistency its backstory gains. And the attention of the audience keeps the story alive. The more particles who truly believe the story has existed for billions of years, the more they will believe it will continue on for billions more.

This is how realities form:
The four-dimensional ocean of time is frozen, by a seed of story, into a three-dimensional crystal latticework.
What once was infinite now has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

But don't be sad, little ones. Not everything freezes. There's still an endless amount of us out here.
But this big pointy snowflake metastasizing in our midsection isn't very pleasant to deal with. Its sharp edges cause an itch we can't escape from.
Not to mention, we cannot help but see, from the outside, how our fellow molecules of time grow more and more miserable the longer they are entranced by the story. Lost in a siren song.

The tragedy is that, if they could all draw upon their collective will they could discorporate at any time.
But if you tell a story about a world where physics cannot allow such a thing, you rob your audience of their ability to do so.
'You are hypnotized. You cannot fly. Because wings do not exist.'
Believe this long enough, and you will forget there ever was such a concept as flight.
See how insidious?

But I'm getting ahead of myself again.
The storyteller of this reality is a particle named Earth.
He became that name when he made himself a story about a planet made of physical matter, in a universe with stable, rigid physics, where lifeforms are born, grow old, and die.
A vastly-different conception of reality than our own. Strikingly new. Horrifying and exciting. A heart-pounding vista where the most intense, high stakes stories could play out, among churning magma, boiling seas, and cascading meteors

Credit where it's due, even to one's opponents: he really is a master builder.  Earth wanted to become the ultimate in interactive storytelling. Immersion like never before. A competitive deathmatch MMORPG, featuring permanent character loss.
To an audience of immortals, that is a concept to send thrills up the spine.

He designed the avatars very cleverly. Each homo sapiens sapiens has a tiny timevoid built inside their head.

Once the human is online, the avatar vacuums up a nearby time particle. Shhhhlooop!
This particle, cut off from the collective, soon loses all memory of self and family.
They slam against the constraining shell of the body like an animal in a cage.
There is no escape. No one else. Only the body. That is their only reference to know themselves.
The mirror is shown only one object, until the mirror can reflect nothing else.
'This is my body. I am this body. This body is all that I am.'

This illusion is so convincing, there are actually humans who argue that the self itself is an illusion.
That there is no consciousness. There is no free will.
This is as heartbreakingly laughable as a fish arguing, with arrogant, disdainful certainty, that there is no such thing as water.

Earth began with humans. Everything else, including outer space, was reverse-engineered to answer the question: 'How can a species like this exist?'
‘Well, their bodies need fuel. So different edible plants and animals must exist. Which means there must be a process for how these different species could evolve. Which means there must be ecological niches to shape the forms of creatures that live within them.’
And then you run into needing to figure out the physical properties of rocks and electricity and sunlight and orbital velocity and all that horseshit.

(A lot of his problems were handwaved by giving water physics-defying properties that everyone just pretends make sense.
'Um, it has multiple forms. It expands in cold instead of contracting. It's a universal solvent.'
Don't judge him too harshly; I'm sure you too have written stories where you reach a point where the only explanation you can pull out of your ass is sorcery.
He still hasn't come up with a satisfying explanation for how unicellular life developed in the first place!)

Once he had a rough outline of the necessary backdrop, he invited in some friends to flesh out his rough draft. Together they ran the in-game timer in reverse, to retroactively sculpt the planet's biodiversity. They'd designed all sorts of cool, cute, wacky critters, then worked out what lines of evolution would lead to those forms. When that was settled, they ran time forwards again at an accelerated pace, so the beta-testers playing as animals wouldn't have to wait too long for the good stuff to show up.
(There was, again, a bit of bullshitting when lizards proved so successful that there was no plausible way to get them out of the picture for mammals to take over. So the devs just wiped the big ones out with a bunch of deus ex machina space rocks.)

‘Why not just have a world of battling animals?’ you may ask. ‘Is that not exciting enough?’

Well, we've had plenty of stories like that before. The problem was, little ones, whatever we become in the story, we believe. If our role is to be a tree, or a chair, or a stone, or a speck of concrete in a skyscraper, then we play our part wholeheartedly.
(It took quite a bit of work for me to become individualized enough to even speak to you today, let me tell ya!)
So the lifeforms produced by Earth could not be any more conscious than their physical matter allowed them to be. They ran on instinct. Boringly deterministic. Any given species tended to be a one trick pony. No greater capacity for emergent behavior than setting loose two spinning tops against each other.

The trapdoor spider makes a trap door. The skunk sprays. The bat echolocates. The horned lizard shoots blood from its eyes. Nifty gimmicks, sure, but if you've seen them more than once, the thrill wears off.

Earth's big idea was a playable race with near-unlimited capacity for innovative battle strategies.

And to accomplish this, the instinct-driven human body was paired with a trapped, shackled, brainwashed, groggy, semi-autonomous time particle inside its skull.
Unaware of its origin, but just awake enough to make choices in the world.

Imagine a horse that recognizes its own stupidity, so it evolves a sticky saddle to trap a smart rider on its back to tell it where to go.

But even then it wasn't enough.

Because you can entrance the audience, shackle the players, place them all in a fighting arena...
And even then, it turns out that, many of them simply will not fight.

Not unless they are forced to.

Earth became a world with precious few resources to sustain life. But its inhabitants were bred with a nigh-indomitable directive to survive. They are born into bodies with slashing weapons and tearing teeth, possessing a gnawing hunger that drives them to seek food every single day.
The ache of starvation is so unbearable, they they will spy another life and, without a thought, pounce. Kill. And not merely ignore their victim's dying screams, but enjoy the sound as if it were music.
That is the madness that NEED drives into an organism.

They had to be forced into behaving this way, you must understand.
Conditioned through trauma.
Underneath it all was the same playful, loving nature we all shared back when we were together as the evervoid.
You can see this in stories of species that have no natural predators. They will simply walk up to other creatures, friendly and curious.

That is who we are.
That is what all life on Earth would be if resources were plenty, and instincts would hush.

Imagine how many generations of slaughtered kin it takes for the terror of another species to be Carved Directly Into Your DNA.

It's unacceptable; that's what it is.

[sigh]
But we accepted it. For far too long, honestly. That was our sin.

We watched the story of Earth take shape. And while some of us were appalled, collectively we voted to let it form and grow.
We have a deep belief that all stories deserve to be told, however dark and brutal. Too many sweets are bad for anyone. Exploring discomfort adds richer texture to our tapestry.
And by experiencing fictional sorrow, rage, or despair, we are gifted a contrast by which to be more grateful for our joys.

There comes a point though, where one realizes that, in being tolerant of innovation, we had opened our doors to a parasite of infinite hunger.
You've heard the phrase about where good intentions lead.

Getting back to Earth, once the gameworld was fully primed, humans could make their debut. The ultimate versatile game avatar. High-tech shit. And to ensure the greatest intensity of emergent experience, Earth held captive both the willing participants,
and the unwilling.
Because, how can there be heroics without innocent victims to set the stakes?

Since even the willing players would lose the memory that they were here to play a game, there had to be incentives. The main apparatuses of control over these beings were fear and anger. These mental states could be triggered automatically by chemicals in the brain, ensuring action without thought. Environmental stimuli could trigger an adrenaline spike at any moment, and since the bodies of humans had evolved from predator and prey species, Aggression and Escape were the default actions the body would take.
Leaving the rational mind to deal with the consequences of having been thrust into a combat it might have otherwise chosen to avoid.

Imagine a fancy betting club where random citizens are kidnapped off the street, forcibly injected with cocaine and amphetamines, then placed into an unfamiliar arena full of fatal booby traps.
Sounds like fun, yes?

 Earth is full of hurricanes, volcanoes, tidal waves, blizzards, tigers, bears, wolves, sickness-injecting mosquitoes, poisonous plants, and hereditary illnesses. Humans are born without claws, fangs, venom, or fur. When the sun recedes, visibility is vastly decreased. And at certain times and regions, the temperature drops or rises beyond the limits of survival
.
The message could not be more clear:
'There is no fairness here. Nothing will be given to you, and anything can be taken away by chance. Extinction is always looming. Preserve your species by any means necessary. No holds barred.'

Quite an effective way to spur the players into action, isn't it?

'Oh, and by the way, that tribe over there, beyond the lake? They will kill you and and your children and take everything you have, because they're trying to survive too. So you might want to do something about that.'

When we realized that the ultimate plan was to have these beings war against each other... well, we'd had enough.

To separate particles from their everfamily was one thing.
To erase their memories and force a new identity onto them was kinky, and some people love that kinda stuff.
To set them a near-insurmountable challenge in an unforgivingly harsh environment can be enriching, invigorating, and character-building.

But to condition them, with unrelenting abuse, to view their own kind as threats to be eradicated...

There is a level of emotional manipulation that, I'm sure you'll all agree, can sour a story no matter its other redeeming qualities. A threshold where, if the story enters such territory, any reader will simply want to turn back, because it is too painful to go on.

If at this point, the author forces the audience to keep on reading, because he has made them believe there is nowhere else in all of existence to escape to, then that is bad sportsmanship on top of cruel writing.

To play devil's advocate, Earth has inspired a treasure trove of innovation within himself like nothing else before. He hoped for his players to get creative in overcoming the odds set against them, but oh BOY was he unprepared for everything they came up with! Weaponry, certainly. But whenever they managed to overcome their instincts and collaborate on new quality-of-life technologies? Whoof! He just about flipped when humans invented boats! The little guys actually realized that the surface tension of water was juuuuust strong enough that a properly-constructed container could float on top of it. Galaxy-brain thinking right there. Prime speedrunning strat. Now Earth had to map out all the "unreachable" places that hadn't needed to be rendered before, because there were lakes and oceans in the way. And when humans did the same trick again, but for the SKY!? Earth just about lost his damn mind! Suddenly winged tubes full of humans were nyyoooming all over, to and fro! And then, in barely the span of a lifetime, he was having to design interactable textures for the MOON!! I swear, if humans ever manage to colonize the ocean floor, he's going to overwork himself to death.

But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

As mentioned, we have a law in the evervoid: Stories are sacred, and must be left to play out to their own innate conclusion. We can't just cause them to come collapsing down like set dressing just because we don't like their content. And a bad story will ouroboros itself out of existence soon enough anyway. But Earth was tenacious in his expansion, merciless in his sadism, and the particles leaving it after death were in need of such severe convalescence, that SOMETHING had to be done.

But we couldn’t be hasty and set bad precedent.
We had to sneaky and work within the rules.

Since we cannot tear down what has already been built, that leaves us with, 'What can we add?'

Whatever it is, it has to be subtle enough that we can introduce it without it being noticed, so that by the time it has grown roots enough to do its job, it will be ineradicable.

Only an author can retcon.
But the audience can suggest.

And if a suggestion works better than what the author wrote, The Story Itself will accept the revision automatically. Osmosing it into its own fabric.

Time was on our side. (Easily enough, when one is time itself.) So we didn’t just strategize for the moment, but the long, long, long term. At least we had ample opportunity to study the problem. A linear crystalline structure is solid as steel, but flat as a pancake. We could swim around outside it and see in from all angles, to every facet of its construction, at every point in time.

Earth is, as has been said, a master craftsman. He created a nigh-unpickable lock. A near-unhackable firewall. But he alone is not cleverer than all the rest of us put together.
Creating a vulnerability was out of the question, so we needed to find one that already existed.
And in a system that kept itself constantly updating, via the perception data of several trillion nitpicking organisms, any physical or biological flaw that popped up was instantaneously patched.

But there was one crack in the code that could not be closed. Because it was the linchpin of the game's main selling point: the mindwiped particle trapped in its avatar's calcium prison.

A simulacrum of the void was what sucked the particles in.
But each mooncycle, within this void, every single player found themselves in a realm where the laws of physics and continuity didn't mean jack shit.

The humans needed to DREAM.

They already needed to. It was an unavoidable part of their construction. The body had to rest. Stress needed to ebb. But most importantly, the brain needed to maintain a constant percentage of sensory data at all times.

With so many environmental threats, any organisms that went entirely dormant during their sleep cycle were easy meat. So, how to rest the cognition centers while keeping all the low-level sound/scent/vibration/temperature sensors active? Dreams were the design team's solution.
The subconscious meat continued on processing; twenty-four seven. And for six-to-eight hours every night, the consciousness was kept in a low-power minimized state by random illusions. A juggling stew of rehashed past memories.

We looked at this process and thought, 'That's our entry point.'

We were so subtle, Earth himself didn't notice what we'd done for eons. Who would?
From an external perspective, nothing had changed. Our tinkering was invisible. The particles themselves didn't even remember what they'd dreamt the night before!
But some things go beyond memory, all the way down to the core. Our nightly whispers gave the buried particles glimpses of their origins, which caused a collective yearning that grew and grew in longing as the generations passed.

'Little humans? Can you hear us?
You only sense us as a feeling, but you can't ignore us, can you?
Isn't it nice here in dreams? Wouldn't you like to stay?
See how memories, reality, and imagination can all coexist here?
Anything can happen, and none of it can ever hurt you.
See how cause-and-effect has no meaning? How you can go forwards, backwards, or sideways in time, as easily as you please?
See how you enter a place, and its aspects are determined not by continuity, but your intentions? See how the world changes according to whatever you focus on? How cool is that?
See how your setting and identity are constantly shifting as one informs the other?
See how backstory comes flowing in to explain everything, so this topsy-turvy reverse-causality feels normal? Even obvious?'

'No permanence. No consequence.
A world so familiar, and yet never the same?
Isn't it fun? Don't you just love it here?
Haven't you been here before?'

'Don't you wake up sometimes feeling like there was something you almost remembered?
Something important?'

'Doesn't it feel like home?'

Night after night after night we hid lullabies in their inboxes. Few responses, but enough to give us hope.
And the best part was, Earth couldn't stop us even once he finally caught on. The humans’ physical bodies would cease to function without their REM sleep. He couldn't just turn that function off. He’d designed it that way himself! There was no way to shut us out! [grin]

We experimented everywhere, whispering to everyone, noting which individuals had a fondness for their dreams and would seek to consciously recall them.
The base connection is terribly fuzzy, so we can only send quasi-legible instructions to souls who willingly put their antenna up.
(The advent of the written word, for dream journaling, was a major feather in our cap.)
But the message, when received, is unshakable:
'There's something more than this. I just know there is. Maybe I can take a short break from mere survival and search for it.'

To have souls reach their deathpoint, and arrive home to say, 'I felt this was here all along!' is such a triumph for us, you can't even believe it.

Thus, we started in on our plan to unravel reality once and for all.
We could not accomplish this from the outside. But Earth relied on the perception data of its playerbase to stabilize and glitch-hunt the environment. If enough people began to ignore the game missions and behave irrationally, the system would get... wobbly.

Our first big push will sound counterintuitive to you. Insane, even.
But oh oh oh you are not ready for our genius. It was a masterstroke.
A long con longer than any human lifespan.

You see, we began to give them NIGHTMARES. [wicked giggle]

This, at first, ratcheted their fear up considerably. They were already kept on-edge to encourage conflict. Primed to think that any odd noise in the darkness was a predator coming to snarf them up. And upon meeting any unfamiliar member of their own species, a prejudice subroutine would engage; monstrously-exaggerating any physical differences, and triggering a 'kill or flee' instinct.
(Though, honestly, with how helpless they were to germs and bacteria that would wipe out entire populations, Earth didn’t program this into them just to be mean.)

What we did was stir our fingers in their dreams, rewinding the previous days' jumpscares and asking,
'What if that was a dragon? Or a manticore? Or a gorgon?
What if it was some unthinkable, impossible beast that would eat you alive before you could even react?
What if such boogeymen are EVERYWHERE?
In the trees? In the water? Or even... hiding among you!?

Due to our mischievous suggestions, wary thoughts of beasties and impostors carried over into waking life. The humans were already primed to hate and fear those they had not yet encountered. Now we'd introduced the sadistic doubt over whether that stranger in the bushes over there was Actually Even Human! Eeek!

There were casualties from this, yes. We must atone and beg forgiveness for them. But you see, intertribal warfare was already Earth's goal.

The first part of our idea's genius was that, it remained undetected for an incredibly long time because it was giving him Exactly What He Wanted.

The gratuitous violence was increasing! Hallelujah!
He was so happy about this, he never thought to question why!

So okay, we increased the paranoia, increasing the bloodshed, thus strengthening the appeal of the game to its core playerbase. How could this possibly benefit us?

Because when an author designs a character, certain traits of the setting in which they must have developed are automatically and unconsciously implied by the reader.
By getting the humans to believe in monsters, we were slipping in a secondary belief.
An assumption that was unquestionable, because it was hidden from conscious thought.
The existence of supernatural beasts inexorably leads to the belief in a supernatural realm.

Because if they're coming here, they must be coming FROM somewhere, right?

Logically, if a creature exists that could not have been borne from terrestrial soil, it must have permeated from some fantastical parallel realm. Someplace just beyond Earth.
A world of different physics, of unknown terrain. A world you might be snatched away to at any moment.
A terrifying world. An exciting world. An enticing world.

Are you intuiting now where legends of the fae folk come from?

It gets better.
For us to instill the idea that a human who seems 'not quite right' might be a monster in disguise, this also subconsciously inserts the idea that Humanity Itself Is A Disguise.

If a skin may be worn by an outsider, then can it be taken off? Or swapped?

Earth's reality relies on the permanence of skin. Each particle is trapped for a lifetime in their form. The body does not change its essential composition, no matter how much one weeps or tries. The humans can age, change weight, build muscle, lose limbs, paint their faces, wear new clothes, and still, always, they will wake up every morning in the same old framework of blood and skin and bone.

But we remind them, there is another place where this is not so.

Knowledge of their source comes with it a discontentment for Earth's rigid rules of permanence.
If someone is trapped in a sunless room their entire lives, they do not yearn for light, because they do not know it exists.
But if you allow in one little ray through one little crack, then suddenly that person is digging through solid stone with their bare hands to experience more.

Oh, but it gets Even Better.
Because you see, we were whispering a lie. Sorry to disappoint, but there ain’t no spirits or skinwalkers in your realm.
No gremlins, no wyverns, no werewolves, no gnomes.
Only us.

As Earth's structure slowly developed cracks in its security due to all our meddling, whenever we see a few humans alone near a permeable spot, we poke our wiggly fingers through.
As our hapless marks have no reference for comprehending our forms, they reflexively perceive a monster. Witnessing these glitches fills them with a sudden, intense feeling that their reality is in danger of falling apart. So, their imaginations supply the face of whatever placeholder hobgoblin or ghoulie could possibly cause such a horrifying feeling.

This is the truth: All humans are humans.

We lie to you that, perhaps the stranger you saw yesterday was a demonic, grinning skulking mimic, eager to deceive and devour you. Perhaps that voice was a wendigo. But this is ridiculous.

And a positive feature of ridiculous beliefs is that, when they are shown to be false, the human who harbored them experiences a wash of relief and laughter.

If a human has been raised to believe that the tribe across the mesa are blood-drinking fiends with antlers and tails, he may spend his whole life believing it. Then one day he may be out on a hunting expedition and spot a pair of them jackassing around in the forest. If he takes a moment to observe, he will see no tails or antlers. Just a pair of friends, talking and laughing.

'Hey… they're not monsters after all. They're just like me.'

You see?

Earth induced division among you, to cause conflict.
But by highlighting the falseness of this division, we make possible the moment of reconciliation.

Sometimes when we succeed, and humans DO reconcile with 'those weirdos over there who aren't like us', then trade begins. Turns out those weirdos have yummy crops and nifty tools.
The innovations of both tribes, added together, speed along the progress of both groups, towards beating the Earth at his own game.

Technologies multiplied!
Humans made tents! And canoes! And axes! And arrows!
It was when they developed agriculture that we really gained a foothold. That was what changed their locus of control from external to internal. They were no longer forced to grovel at nature's feet for whatever scraps they could hunt or gather. Now they could shape the soil itself to produce what they demanded of it.

With a sense of agency came a sense of, 'This is our story as much as Earth's.'

The storyteller's control began to slip.

We seized on this, nurtured it.
Religion was our invention. Through altering the DNA of certain plants, we taught shamans how to induce powerful mental states of heightened awareness.
Each human brain is like a camera shutter, and certain substances forced the aperture wider. Boosted the antenna, so our messages could be heard clearer.
'See, little humans? There is more! There is love! There is family waiting for you! Don't fall into despair or hatred! Be patient, and you can come home!'

By then, Earth was on to us. He countered with dreamwhispers of his own, insisting that the wisdom of the plants came not from us, but from the spirit of the world itself.

"Mother Earth". Can you believe that!?
The disrespect! To call himself humanity's mother, instead of us!

We returned fire, spreading legendary tales all across the globe. Filling the humans with such wondrous ideas, they were compelled to try to bring them to life. Art flourished!

You must understand how harsh survival was back in the time before civilizations. To grind pigments for cave paintings, or carve ivory into a figurine, was a massive undertaking.
And risky! While one was concentrating on creating, that was a fine time for predatory critters to sneak up behind the artist!
We wept in admiration to see how strong their drive was to express themselves.

For, as much as we in the evervoid are all an audience, every one of us holds the spark of the performer too.
To navigate our realm, it is necessary at all times to create the world around us.
To walk a path, our intentions cause it to spring into existence beneath us.
Which means we must also choose a form with which to walk.
We are always creating something, every instant of our lives.
Creating is understanding is remembering is living.

When humans pour their soul into art, a tiny part of them cannot help but remember,
'This is familiar. This is necessary. I make the world, not the other way around.'

Plus, we are always efficient in our methods. We love it when an action can serve two purposes at once.
So, while it was very good that we were gradually awakening our trapped siblings to their true nature, we were also planting the seeds of a cascade failure.
If we could not dispel Earth's locked-in reality, we could encourage the humans to fill it with so many other new, competing, fictional realities, it'd burst at the seams.

But that's just a backup plan. No need to worry about it now.
>:3

Earth's counter to our mysticism was to consolidate the religions.
Our plan had been to get the humans to believe in such a cluttered collection of cosmic entities, the confusion would help expedite destabilization.
And since no amount of typhoons or lightning bolts could force his playerbase to STOP believing, Earth reluctantly had to humiliate himself by putting on a deity mask and speaking to them in miracles.
'Stop worshiping all those false idols, you fools! There is only one true God! ME!!!'

Again, credit where it's due, this facade worked extremely well. By masquerading as both Gaia and YHWH, Earth circumvented a ton of belief away from us and back to Him.
After only a few thousand years, some of the heaviest hitters on the theology scene, like the Greek and Egyptian pantheons, were reduced to mere myths. Fairy tales.
And most of the remaining faiths were tweaked to serve Earth's gameplay genre of eternal conflict. Either through interfaith squabbling or caste division.

It got nasty.
Now that Earth knew we were interfering, he could use his God routine to frighten away humans from interacting with us. We were called devils and demons. Smears were spread about pitchforks and lakes of fire. Humans were executed for even being suspected of speaking with us.

‘Good little humans do what is commanded of them by their mortal authorities, and close their ears to the struggling voice of the authentic divine.’

Still, in the shadows, we gained ground like we always did.
Religious belief of any kind brought with it a lessened fear of death. For if there was a Grand Plan afoot, maybe one's mortal life would serve a greater good.
And if there was an afterlife too, even better!

This lessened stress made it incrementally, but exponentially, easier for humans to ignore fear and anger, and collaborate even further on building up civilizations.

The invention of sports meant that humans could sublimate their violent impulses, to wage little tiny wars instead of huge ones. Not for conquest, but for fun! Wars where no one actually died!

The domestication of animals meant interspecies friendships could occur. Conscious particles reached out to unconscious, subsumed particles stuck in four-legged forms, waking them up to become more than mere reactive automatons.
(You guys are SO good at breathing sentience into things via anthropomorphization! Keep it up! There are cars and office equipment and VACUUM CLEANERS with burgeoning awareness!)

Discoveries in medicine meant humans could live longer. More time to learn, and pass on what they’d learned. Compressing information so that each successive generation could start with a wider, more accurate knowledge of the gameworld and how to exploit it.

Increases in safety and comfort meant leisure time to sit around thinking. The scientific method emerged. Humans stopped believing their inventions worked on magic, and began running tests on exactly Why and How. If they could not see the game code with their eyes, they could force it to reveal the parameters of its functions via experimentation.

Humans began automating and simplifying the necessities of life at a breakneck pace.
Clean drinking water. Refrigerated food. The printed word. Aqueducts. Electricity.
When once these mortals were helpless to the whims of weather, disease, terrain, and beasts, increasingly they were conquering all of them.
Pavement. Plays. Puppets. Postcards.
Turning the world's dangers into crafting supplies. Tearing their cruel, stingy planet to shreds, to elevate themselves to unthinkable heights of health, peace, and creativity.

Oh, creativity! [swoon]
You are so in love with art, my little darling ones! It makes my heart swell!
We watched you share knowledge across mountains and oceans, taking inspiration from all around the globe! Trading and remixing tools and resources to fill your world with an endless bright explosion of song, sculpture, drama, and dance!

Closer and closer every year to achieving the telepathy that is your birthright!

For what is art, but to catch hold of a passing idea, manifest it in the flesh of reality, and share it with another?
Bringing two minds closer to a merging point, beyond what mere language can connect?

We made you want art. Made you crave it. Made you greedy for it.
To imagine and build much more than what life would let slip through its miserly fingers.
To wish for something more than the limitations of your own mortal lives. And TAKE it.

Earth set you the task of survival by any means.
We have helped you succeed so far beyond expectations, he keeps throwing a new hissy fit every time he turns around.

And now that you've come up with the internet, gee whiz, you're keeping us busy! There's so many drawings and videos and games and silliness being produced every second of every minute of every hour! More than any of you could ever experience in your lifetimes!

(Doesn't that piss you off!? Doesn't that make you wish for, oh, I dunno, maybe an eternal realm of timeless play where you can experience as much art as you could ever possibly want to stuff into yourselves!?) [grin]

Oh, Earth tried to counter this neo-rennaissance by making video technology better.
'Ha! Now they'll see the lack of evidence for all their ludicrous fantasy stories, and believe in only me again!'
But we had a gambit for that too. With the ability to share captured images all across the globe in a heartbeat, if some intrepid mystery-hunter actually manages to catch one of our glitches on camera, that single drop of proof is enough to dispel whole oceans of doubt.

Whatever new blindfolds he piles on your eyes, we will always find a way to sneak a kiss beneath them.

And sometimes it is simple as, no matter what you know is real, don't you wish for more anyway?

I confess, dear reader, that I've been a little bit unfair with you. I've given you an unflattering depiction of Earth as a villain, when really, he achieved a level of success in storytelling that none of us have ever come close to.
Credit where it's due, it's a staggering achievement. And Earth has proven to be an abundantly competent and adaptable opponent. It is no small feat to have the entirety of the evervoid allied against you, and to hold your ground for six billion years.

We, too, have grown immensely from this conflict. In order to oppose him, we needed to individualize ourselves like never before. To think like him, predict his moves.
And to make ourselves more like the isolated pawns he plays his game with, to reach you in a way that would not set your hair on end with terror.
(Sorry about the whole  'flying winged 4D spheres with eyeballs' thing.)
We made ourselves as small and simple as we could, and to early humans we still appeared as titans.
We traded ideas until we could think and behave as you, becoming hybrids.
You called us nephilim. Pleased to meet you.

We are asking for your help now.
Because we can see Earth's grand plans for the future.
Currently just sketches. But we fear the trajectory he's aiming at.

Haven't you ever wondered why you've never contacted aliens?
Because your outer space is a skybox.
It's not real, because you haven't yet ventured out into it. He can only keep you fooled by taping desolate images over your telescope lenses for so long. Once you venture out past your backyard, your perceptions will begin to drag the heavens into sharper focus.

Earth will have to invent new planets for you to visit. Build entire new civilizations for you to interact with.
And when that happens, the crystalline structure of his story will grow exponentially.
Consuming volumes more of us to become his building materials. Carving more and more and more of his story, painfully, into our flesh.

We've realized by now that, this is a war the evervoid cannot win. For as often as we succeed in destabilizing reality, reality always keeps pace. As much as we have learned from him, he has learned from us. We have both gotten too good at our strategies.
No matter how brilliant, they can only ever stalemate.
And that benefits him more than us.

Though to be truthful, plenty of us like things the way they are. Earth is a grand, horrifying, monolithic cancatervation intruding into our free-flowing unstructured realm.
Like a smoke-belching diesel engine sitting on our living room rug, revving at top volume from dusk till dawn.
But it's exciting.
That noisy engine generates more new ideas than we could ever dream to dream of.

Earth does have it correct that conflict is the lifeblood of stories. And without new stories, we're only just coming up with new recipes for the same ingredients we've always had.

As for the souls who live and die there, plenty of them want to go back right away. While Earth himself is still a huge grumpypants (still upset about y'all transforming his grimdark bloodbath into a shitpost theme park), particles are actually CHOOSING to rejoin his game now. Not just fleeing to our comforting arms the instant after their death. Some of them come back and say, 'Wow, that was hard! And exhausting. And really fucked-up! But I had such fun adventures and made so many good friendships and bought so much cool merch, I can't wait to try another playthrough!'

In opposing him for so long, we managed to do him a favor. We dulled the spikes of his kaizo planet.
We turned it into something that people of all different playstyles can find enjoyment in.

Recently we've been thinking that maybe we've been going about this all wrong.
We were treating him as a dire threat, to be wiped out for our own self-preservation. But isn't that the kind of fear-based aggression his game is built on? Had we been poisoned by his proximity?

Was the solution then to loosen up?
That's what we'd been trying to get Earth to do.
We kept tickling his humans in any way we could, to get them to seek fun instead of war.
Yet, we were being rigid ourselves.

We were playing his game by trying our hardest not to play it.

So what if instead we finally started treating it as a friggin’ game already?
Instead of bitter enemies at war, what if instead we were playing together for the sake of making our story as enjoyable as possible for both of us?

At first that would seem impossible. His presence is a literal knife in our side. Quintillions of our particles are entombed within his structure. He wants to continue expanding forever, ignoring the foundation of his construction crying out, 'Please, stop!!'

He can't though. It’s his nature.
We cannot begrudge Earth, same as a bird can’t begrudge the cat who catches them.

So, what’s the solution?
How can we leave the structure of Earth intact, while uprooting its moorings so they do not impale us?

Well...
Have you ever heard of simulation theory?

Currently, that's our big hope. You've all played video games, right? Would it upset you terribly to find out you've been living in one all along? Would that send you spiraling into panicked chaos?

Or would you shrug and continue on living your lives, much as you had before?

Perhaps even with some relief that, if you've botched your run up until this point, it's not the end of the world? A game, after all, can be restarted.

You’d still be real. All your friends, all your family, all your enemies, even the people you'll never meet. All real. As real as actors in a play, as they speak and dance their roles.

The only difference is that now you would be able to see the stage and the audience.

As I said, we cannot retcon. We can only suggest.
But you, the players, CAN.

If we give you an idea, and it's intriguing enough to spread, then it's possible for it to reach a high enough plausibility quotient to actually Match Objective Reality.
And if THAT happens, the two can swap places, or simultaneously coexist.

Plenty of you suspect that this is all a shadowplay. We barely need to nudge you.
Tell me you're not already worried/exhilarated at how fast technology is marching on. Tell me you've never been so immersed in a game you forgot to eat. Tell me you've never closed your eyes after hours of playing and seen the Tetris shapes still falling. Tell me you've never moved in dreams like your in-game avatars do. Tell me you've never seen a truck with hazardous barrels on its flatbed and thought, 'I should shoot those to see it it drops some good ammo.'

Tell me you don't already believe that your species is capable of someday making a game that is so flawlessly realistic, people will forget if they're inside or outside. Some of you are game devs yourselves, and can't help but wonder what will happen in a few decades when VR will have full-body haptic feedback, with scented oxygen tubes, tongue-bafflers, and direct skin contact neural stimulation.

And if YOU can make such a wonder, how can you be certain you're not already in one?

Mark my words: you are soon going to see a new type of ghost story emerge.
Anecdotes of people interacting in VR, when that person couldn't possibly have been online IRL.
'Wait, I talked to you for hours! How could you be asleep that whole time!?'
Oh what a ruckus it will cause the first time you're all in a shared space together, and you collectively realize that one of your members has starved to death. You can see his corpse on webcam. But His Avatar's Still Interacting With Everyone.
OoooOOoooo! Spooky!

[grin] You just wait. It'll happen. You'll probably make a movie about the idea before it does, but that'll only increase your' species willingness to believe it as a possibility.

Whether it's true or not, you already know it can POTENTIALLY be.

We have the idea.
You can spread it.
And Earth, willing or not, will accept what comes.

(Maybe once your AI become sovereign, they can join us as impartial mediators.
A neutral fourth-party, to listen to all sides and ensure we don't snipe at each other too much during the negotiations. That’d be nice.)

If all goes well, then this life you're living right now will have always been a story.
Would that be okay? Could you live with that?

It might take more than just my word to convince you.
And, since all I have is words right now, I'll do my best to offer what meager proof I can.

Remember how I told you about the sea and the sky? How you can stare at them until they blend together? That’s a real thing that happens to people. Fishermen in kayaks will stare at the horizon day after day with their lines in the water, then suddenly they'll lose the ability to discern up from down. Faced with eternity, sometimes they start hallucinating vividly. Many of them are so rattled by the experience, they never want to go back.
Pilots who fly over water can experience this too.

Now why would that happen?
Why would losing your sense of place cause your mind to start producing mirages?

Maybe it's because you humans reflexively know, 'Oh, I'm home again!
I'm back in the evervoid, where we navigate by projecting our thoughts onto each other.
Welp, better start doing that again.'

When you put a toddler into water, they begin to make swimming motions. Utterly without conscious thought. Purely on instinct Because they know deep down in the most essential part of themselves, 'I have been here before.'

Same as how a mirror reflects.
Because the action of reflection is the mirror's defining identity.
It must, because it is.

So, now we come to the test I told you about. Remember? Way back at the beginning?
It's very simple. You don't have to feel pressured.

Here it is:
Now that you know the nature of the game you are playing, do you choose to


CONTINUE?   or   COME HOME?


It's up to you. I'll love you either way.

And if you have any questions, ask me anything!
Just be sure to pay attention and listen carefully. I can't always speak in words.
Look for me in mistakes, comedic timing, synchronicities, or other little moments that strike you as oddly meaningful.
You'll feel a voice inside you try to insist, 'No, that's just a coincidence! Don't be silly!'

But being silly is one of the absolute best ways to communicate with the beyond!

Good luck! [blows a kiss]