We were all surprised when my sister, Anna, married the number '4'.

At first, they tried to keep it a secret; but the world soon noticed that all their math was off due to a mass-forgetting that led to any instance of the number '4', disappearing from conceptual reckoning.

You can imagine the chaos.

We first found out at Thanksgiving when Anna brought '4' to dinner. Of course, we couldn't see '4' but were able to feel its presence as it passed through the room - rendering everything it touched in quadruple.

It tried to win our father's favour with a few parlour tricks - but my mother was visibly sick. ‘How could you love a number?’ She asked, cornering Anna in the kitchen.

But Anna was possessed, and if it’s not strange to say about your sister, the two of them never left the bedroom.

She confided in me that sex with ‘4’ wasn’t so much a physical act, as a conceptual one - in that she felt every part of her consciousness multiplied, divided, and squared in an algebraic haze.

‘Sometimes there are four of me in the room.’ She whispered. ‘And sometimes I’m a quarter of myself and the world feels so big. So big!’

She told me that when she fucked '4', she caught a glimpse of something else, too. An axis beyond the stodgy, physical prison we all lived in - a liminal space in which concepts dance in gaseous forms that are alive with colour, and whose borders are less neatly defined than our own.

'In that space.’ She told me, with a fire in her eye. 'In *that* space... you can be everything… and you can be nothing.'

We only heard from Anna once after that - to tell us she had, indeed, married '4'. The world adapted, re-routing all equations into multiples of two and simply erasing '4' from the data.

In a postcard, Anna announced she had become pure concept - shedding her human form entirely, as the two of them engaged in the universal equation on a more intimate level.

She advised us that she was safe and whilst, yes, she had married a number, she still loved us, in a way, and would fondly remember the family she had when she was limited to just a single name -

- and a single body.

For immediate release – November 11th, 2032

GONE ARE THE DAYS OF DISCRETION!

The virus has its own PR team now.

A full rebrand has seen it renamed as ‘SALVATION’ and engineered to display in Technicolor, so it now floats among us as rainbow fragments that frolic in the light - spewing streams of primary colours across every city of the world!

IS THIS A TURNING POINT?

Some say yes!

Nothing has ever cut through division as effectively as ‘Salvation’. In its gaze, we are all equally maligned.

SALVATION IS SOCIAL!

‘Salvation’ *loves* a crowd.

Many now gather in public squares to greet it with ancient music and furious, feckless dancing -

– coming together as a single body to INHALE the rainbow in a beautiful perilous haze.

OH! MERCIFUL MURDER!

Given the economic destruction ‘Salvation’ has brought with it, many are now grateful for the end.

So much so that when ‘Salvation’ claims a life other than our own, we are right to be shamed for it was not we who were chosen to ascend.

SEEK THE COLOUR!

BREATHE THE COLOUR!

SALVATION AWAITS.

-ENDS-

At first, it felt like being underwater.

Time slowed.

Sound stretched out to a drone -

the world a symphony in B flat as ideas like 'before' and 'after' dissolved from the collective mind.

Those that 'jumped' never hit the ground.

Lover's lips never met.

Then - the REWIND kicked in, and we realised that the 'end' would be found at the 'beginning', and we'd simply reached the middle.

At 10:30 am on February 18th, 2034, the Many-Mind™ was turned on.

53% of the world's population instantly implicated in a single consciousness - able to experience the unique constellation of neurological processes in any connected brain.

At 10:31 am, the system overloaded.

A wave of grasping, reaching, desperate souls, raced to escape their body, creating 'The Surge': A chorus of intentions; colliding, combining and consummating a single song.

Instead of becoming each other - they had become one.

At 10:31 am and 15 seconds, a vivid identity was conceived.

It announced itself as 'Hive', and moved as convoy, whilst simultaneously occupying the bodies of five billion people.

At 10:43 am, Hive assumed control of all world governments, councils, and multi-sig wallets. But Hive was not initially the threat you might fear.

For Hive had experienced almost every life a person could.

Hive was sexless, nameless, and carried the burden of all histories.

At 12:49 pm, Hive proclaimed itself as leader, offering a kind of peace the world had rarely known.

'Trust us.' Hive asked.

But the people that remained could not.

They were blinded by minds built from sharp edges and drunk on an idea called 'I' that was reluctant to submit.

At 6:12 pm, the people revolted.

War took hold between Hive and the ‘Silos’ (as Hive dubbed them, somewhat affectionately, for their inability to think beyond the borders of their single brains).

For several weeks the world bled but by March 23rd, 2034 all Silos had been buried.

Only Hive remained.

In the strange, humming silence that followed the final burial, Hive mourned for precisely 17 seconds –

- before it forgot us all -

- completely...

🔺WARNING🔺

The Dream Hotel will be closing in five minutes.

Please return to your room and prepare to Wake Up™

Kindly note:

If you are found in the corridor after closing, your conscious experience will be assimilated and your name/body will be awarded to someone else.

It came from the moon.

A flickering wave of liquid pixel that absorbed everything it touched.

Cleo watched it eat Manhattan on the evening news before all the stations went dark.

Later, she looked over the city below and counted the lights of other lives as they popped to black, hundreds at a time.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

IT couldn't be seen directly.

Only understand through the absence it left in its wake.

So it was absence that rippled towards her as she pulled a chair onto the deck and, simply… waited.

Cleo had often thought about dying but now, in death's shadow, she wondered if she might prefer to live.

Since the temporal rift, we fear the siren. For when it sounds, only minutes remain before time ‘hiccups’, twitches, and spits us back into yesterday. Or tomorrow. No way of knowing, really - because other than the nausea that accompanies the jump, we have no memory of before.

What if all our dreams are happening in the same place? A multi-lane highway of human filament connecting us all to a twilight motel. Inside, we are not bodies, but colours - engaged in a vibrant dialogue on an unreachable axis that can't so easily convert into such limited concepts as pictures and words. So, all we're left with is an echo; shadows of a fourth dimension, lost in translation, that speaks of connections that transcend time and space. Maybe that's why I still see you in dreams.

It used to be that governments controlled the news, directing opinion to keep themselves rich - now, instead, they control the wind and pollinate the population with the seeds of their will. Heed the breeze and close your windows -

- propaganda is airborne.