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Or maybe I’m sitting in the red room at 4am, waiting for you and the sun. You hear about the game in passing at first.. people alternate between speaking about it with reverence and dismissing it as trivial, or simply refusing to speak of it at all. Sooner or later, it’s your turn to sit down and play. You can’t tell if there’s any skill involved or if it’s a game of pure chance, but every time you play, this strange sensation, this itch overtakes you: when you make the wrong move, you feel it immediately, instant feedback delivered to your gut. And so you play again, and again, catching brief moments of clarity, perfecting your strategies only to see them collapse, but somehow this collapse only energizes you, like the game is teasing you, suggesting the possibility of some hidden rule which you can feel but can’t put into words. You begin to research theory in your spare time, studying rare cases which only arise in the most crystalline conditions. Soon, studying the game becomes more pleasurable than the playing itself: you immerse yourself in a hazy membrane of half moves and suggestions, points and counterpoints played out between you and an adversary who never appears. On the rare day when you do play the game, you now find yourself devoured by terror, unable to make the first move. An undying web of love. I hate being locked up in here. I can feel my flesh growing saggy and soft. 9 angels of history float just out of reach, their outlines intermingling in the near future. Maybe we all needed a break. All which once went unspoken will be profaned by words. 
I’m beginning to realize what a pervert I am, just sitting here and waiting for my life to restart more or less as it was. I had become possessed by an effulgent piece of pure evil. Over the hill and curled into a sickle, it rose before me with its most beautiful tint ever changing – impossible to trace – blue, indigo, purple, red, orange, yellow, and violet. Then it set. The sun was gone. The sky was cracked, broken teeth of blackened ebon pearl. It drizzled and drizzled and rained so hard my face turned red, owing to incessant drops pelting the skin like needles stinging my flesh. I've begun to suspect that gesture is not something that we do, but something that we shed. Your problem is that you bring your umbrella with you to study the rain. There is probably no better precedent for this new world than the image of zombies standing in an abandoned warehouse or shopping mall. They mill about aimlessly, a dispersed system better understood as a cloud, or perhaps a spider’s web, than a group of individuals. It is only when someone still living enters the space that they violently converge on this point of newfound intensity. At that point, a gruesome encounter ensues: the zombies overwhelm their victim as they try to fight back, the brain is devoured, a new zombie is produced: the system returns to stasis. Cultural heat death. An undying web of love. Angels come in many forms. It’s been said that Gabriel appears to sinners as two winged ladders, intertwining in the sky. 
 Abe is the leader of a group of people who are looking for a new beginning. He sees the world getting more and more psychotic everyday. He has been suffering from constant nightmares lately, and he has figured out somehow that he is the cause of all this crazy mayhem. He is in search of answers before the end comes, but he ends up falling deeper into some kind of dream state that takes him to a new dimension, a new reality where senses get mixed up, where everything seems familiar yet different at the same time. The only thing that is clear is that Abe needs to wake up from this terrorizing dream. When an eye becomes a mouth, and begins to breathe. A soft dialectic: those ironic spaces where what we say is true. They are the things no one says aloud, the ideas that never mind. I have spent a long time searching for ways to articulate things that never mind, and searching for the places where they live, in between what I tell myself and what I say to you. You will not find them here. The dialectic that constitutes this world pulls on everything. It rusts every truth and every thought. There is no part of it that has not been made to bear some weight, a discomfort in its being in opposition to another state. It carries tension, and with it, caution. There are always the moments just before revelation when I find myself uneasy for what I am asking for. As if the thought of discovery itself has the potential to cause harm, simply by existing as something more than imagined. Or perhaps not even imagined as much as dreamed…It’s those ideas that sit so close to what we know and yet it feels like the edge of a precipice, into the abyss. I know you. I once knew how to get what I wanted from you. When everything was still soft, and you were just growing out of the cocoon, I would play with the soft strands that covered your new, emerging wings. They were smooth and thin, so easy to pull apart. But now those wings no longer fit neatly behind your back, and you’re stronger than me in all of the ways that count. And when it comes to what I want, that book that’s been on my nightstand for months or years, whatever it might be, I can feel how much the asking pulls away from my fingertips. Nostalgia causes a certain pain, an absence. Symbols from the past reappear in a space that is radically changed, emptied of all meaning and emotion, and even the most obscure references appeal to us more than the present. The zombie has been a symbol of popular culture for decades, rising and falling in popularity, standing as an example of everything we fear and love about ourselves. We can never escape our past: we are doomed to seek it out at every turn. Zombies represent reaction pushed to its absurd limit, hyper-nostalgia made manifest: they are what happens when objectivism funnels all creativity into the ground like some sort of anti-Nobel Prize. However, this is not entirely negative. Creatively speaking, they push us forward because they make us uncomfortable. That's why, in a world almost taken apart by routine, we want to revive the spirit of humans. We want to make people realise the fact that life is precious and should be treated as a challenge. I’m watching the sun set: it’s not a clichéd sunset, at least not for here, not for this time of year. A far cry from the Southern California coast, I must admit. No hard edges to catch fire and then burn out. Down to the core of things, this seems to be the principle underlying the soft dialectic, wherein all of our aspirations and dreams are tamed. In exchange, we allow what we have now a small chance to flourish. My memory is foggy, and that which wasn't said hangs about all that was spoken with the softness of a dream. Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?