Period of HOZ

There are still recognitions, somehow: that these designations are of a nature that long dead mystics once termed angelic, that this is no region whose coordinate’s Earth’s satellites could locate nor a time whose date history could fix, a territory most games refuse to play on, the outermost layer of existence where real communication and real warfare occurs, and where your real agency lies, that the end of yourself does not lie within you but in an extraterrestrial gameplan about which nothing can be decided in advance.

Before there is time for you to form any reaction, the scene begins to swim in and out of focus. It is dragged in a direction beyond sense. Perhaps it is receding rapidly towards a vanishing point in the center, loss of signal, though that seems unlikely. A distant flicker of artificial light beckons you towards it. You pick your way carefully across the steel floor, shambling like an animated corpse. Figures are seated around a roulette table, talking, drinking and dragging on electronic nicotine adminsitration systems. They are not only humanoid but quite definitely human, at least in comparison to everything that came before. “What's the time?” one asks. It is hard to know.