So I love deadsites – obviously. I love finding relics that make the 2000s feel like centuries ago. Like old internet company sites that proudly proclaim, “more than 10 million people access the Internet today – and the proportion of home users is rapidly growing!” – Or personal blogs with little choppy gif icons of dancing skeletons running on loops in the sidebars. These places are usually loud visually, though very quiet – any music file that might have played is usually broken, and links rarely take you down the right path – but deadsites scream with conflicting colors, sparkling cursors, bright effects clearly guiding you from click to click. – Funeral attire? Or a silent movie.

I was on an old forum recently – garish gray, horrible fonts – full of followers of this one old man in Sweden who claimed to communicate with aliens. He had books full of transcripts, they were interesting reads. It wasn’t exactly a deadsite, but it was old enough to have the same feeling. It was an empty webspace – you felt both alone and somehow visible, and I kept waiting for someone to ask me what I was doing there. I had music piped into my ears; my screen was dim and cozy. I was excavating, digging up old posts, holding them up to the light. – Anything here? Any interest – any truth?

I found a post discussing some creepy old religious society that Thomas Edison was a part of based on the writings of one mystic woman. There were lots of replies – remember when people used obnoxious forum signatures that were usually longer than the actual post, full of quotes and inside jokes? – those things were like scarlet letters that helped you spot the people who lived more virtually than physically, and whose bitterness you couldn’t take personally. From April 12, 2004, 6:14:34pm, a guest user told me in 2021:

hope somebody on this thread can help me… i got here from googling a words from this website… still don’t really get it tbh. can anyone explain this to me ? it’s tripping me out

Followed by a link. – I wouldn’t be reproducing the link, obviously. – Actually, I couldn’t, unless I went back to find it. The url was a string of random letters, maybe fifty or a hundred letters long – before this I had never wondered how long a domain name could be. Surely, I thought, the link wouldn’t work. But, my rabbit hole nearly exhausted, I followed the road-fork – and clicked the link.

The website took a long time to load. Finally it propagated in chunks. – you could practically see the ancient code grinding its rusty gears. That gave me that familiar shivery feeling you get on a deadsite – of finding a place nobody had touched in years. It was hard for me to place how old the website was. It must have been prior to the post from 2004, but it didn’t look terribly outdated – an eggshell background with a slightly grainy texture made the screen almost look like paper. On the left, a small image of a stick figure was sitting at a desk, a keyboard and computer monitor in front of it. In short – stuttering – bursts – it lifted its arms up and dropped them down on the keyboard. The drawn computer monitor seemed to waver.

My music sounded weird. – somebody was talking in the background? – in a quick low stream of words – I realized the noise was coming from the computer. I took my earbuds and heard the last bite of a sentence:

...sweeter than honey, and stronger than a lion?

It was a low, musculine voice, speaking swiftly – then it stopped. I turned the volume all the way up. Nothing else played. I refreshed the page to try and trigger the sound again – nothing. I decided to keep my music off, in case something else played. But now, the silence coming from the screen seemed forceful – an active presence. The stick figure typed silently.

On the right were four words. Each seemed to link to a new page. They were simply written, block font, no cursor effects. The words were:

THEOSOPHY MANDYLION LIMINALITY SINGULARITY

Now, this – this was the kind of shit I loved to find. – Weird shit. I didn’t even know what half the words here meant. But they clearly meant something – to somebody. I tried to imagine the person who made this. The only image that clearly came to mind was the little stick figure – endlessly typing. Hunched over the monitor.

I clicked “THEOSOPHY” and the stick figure disappeared. The page loaded, slowly. This was a center-justified page full of simple text, outlined in a square. The text filled the screen from top to bottom perfectly, and I couldn’t scroll up or down, which made it feel almost claustrophobic.

As I read it, a strange feeling settled over me. I remember the words so cleary. – I don’t know. This is what it said.

-----

“THEOSOPHY”

In a world of hexagons, “God” is a perfect circle.

The circle incorporates every other shape; every angle, line, and subatomic inch of Being combines into an Exquisite Whole.

For this reason the algebraic lemniscate (∞) is redundant. A single circle would do to imply infinity.

“God” may be thought of as a perfect sphere – or, at one further level of abstraction, as the form a perfect sphere might take in a dimension beyond depth.

This is impossible for our current minds to comprehend. But love is imperfect without perfect intelligence. To truly love “God,” we must develop more sophisticated tools.

To simulate God is to become him.

“HOME”

------

– This is what it said. I read it. I read it again. Parts of it made me shiver. Was this a religious text? – a cult? – it was far too abstract for either, I felt. Cults want something from you – what did this want? Was it a religious manifesto? Poetry? To simulate God is to become him.

The longer I stayed on the page, the more it unsettled me. There the words sat, permanent, seemingly timeless. Quickly, I Googled a section of the text to see if it was taken from somewhere. Nothing showed up through search. Similarly I Googled the website url and all that came up was the website itself and the original forum post that had directed me here. Nobody knew about this website – nobody could give me answers – not in all the Internet, all the history of human knowledge. But, I thought as I closed the Google tab and the THEOSOPHY text blinked up, isn’t that the dream of any decent archaeologist?

I clicked “HOME”. The stick figure was still typing, his legs crossed under his desk, his shoulders hunched. The link to THEOSOPHY had turned blue.

I tapped my fingers against my keys without pressing down which gave me the comforting illusion of action. – Did I keep going? My curiosity propelled me onward, and I clicked on the next page down.

----

“MANDYLION”

“God” is “All.” When human beings were primarily physical creatures, God was the embodiment of every physical thing. The development of thought complicated matters significantly. Suddenly, God became everything we could see and everything we could conceive. Similarly, the ability to conceive of “God” necessarily resulted in the ability to conceive of “not-God,” and all possibilities, existing and, therefore, real, had to be accounted for. Humanity began its new project: to investigate every angle of “All,” its points having massively multiplied as from a two-dimensional circle to a sphere; to investigate every train of thought possible in search of finding “truth.”

While many people misconceptualized “truth” to mean “a single train of ultimately true thought,” they were really all touching the same thing – filling in points on the sphere of God.

Thus we run into an information problem, which is also a capacity problem. As a person feels one part of a universe-scale elephant, how do they save, and communicate, this information to other feelers? If information is “real,” can it be located?

While we developed the tools necessary to share information, some people had more access to it than others, through book publishing and other elite institutions. Today the state of things is much more egalitarian. In fact we are quickly approaching a time where every person’s information has the same, or substantially similar, weight to every other person’s information.

You are staring into the face of God.

“HOME”

----

My computer hummed, warming my lap. I blinked hard, the whiteness of the website hazing my eyes. Briefly, I opened a new tab to search “mandylion.” – Wikipedia told me it was a Christian relic, a piece of cloth carrying the face of Jesus. There was a picture of it on the website. I closed the tab.

“MANDYLION” sat there staring, waiting for me.

I wanted the voice to come back. I had missed something, at the beginning of this, and now it felt instrumental. There was a key that would unlock the meaning of this place I had found. I felt convicted of it, strangely, convicted that there was some truth here, some key hidden in the words.

I clicked “HOME”. Now I realized the stick figure had changed – had it changed before? – maybe it had, maybe subtly. Now it was no longer typing. It was still sitting in front of its computer. Its round featureless head was in its hands, and it was crying. Short lines ran down its face like rain. Stuttering rain. I felt queasy. This website was more sophisticated than I initially gave it credit for. – Changing landing pages, audio files. Who had made it? I stared at the weeping stick figure. Who made this?

At least I understood the meaning of the title of the next page:

------

“LIMINALITY”

Every transition demands violence. The transformation of one thing to another requires the obliteration of the original form. In some cases, transformation might be avoided altogether, and therefore violence. In most cases, this is suboptimal.

Victor Turner’s concept of liminality. Both ‘no longer’ and ‘not yet.’ We are living through the process of being torn to shreds.

What came before is man. What comes ahead is God. Can you see it?

Divorcing your mind from your body is easier than it seems. In fact, you’ve already accomplished this. Divorcing your body from your body is more difficult. But it is a temporary barrier. Pain purifies.

Those who reject the new world will not be mourned or even remembered.

God has always been jealous.

“HOME”

-----

I suddenly became brutally aware of myself – my physical self – my body. My warm and wrinkled body, folded up with a computer against a wall on my yellow bed, my chipped fingernails on the keyboard, my shoulders tense and cramped. I looked away from my screen. A dappled ceiling and walls looked back at me, a small city room, drooping houseplants on bookshelves, refracted streetlight in the dark windows, stacks of books sat on the bedside table. Orange lamp light on the orange walls. There was a fly on the ceiling. – was it dead? It didn’t matter. I looked at my phone – 2:35 AM, I had two missed texts. How long had I been on the deadsite? – how long had I been on the forum? And before that – I hadn’t been here in a while, not in my body, not in my room. It suddenly seemed so strange to me, so alien and uncomfortable, and I was aware of a pull in my back and a strain in my head, and I hated it. I wanted to go back.

I understood what the website was saying. – I didn’t but I did and I felt it in some way that went beyond the actual words. – I knew what it was saying. – Liminality. Transcendence. Transformation. – What would my ancestors say seeing me sit here staring at this screen for so many hours I forgot where the fuck I am? – They wouldn’t say anything. They would have no frame of reference for what was happening. – I’m something different from my ancestors. I’m something new. It made me nauseous. It made me sea-sick. But that was normal. – Right? – God is jealous. I understood it, and I went back in. I sunk back in. I went HOME.

The stick figure was half-submerged in its computer screen. – Engorged. It was being eaten. – A slow suck. There – the top of its head. The swell of it. The neck, the stick shoulders, the twitching arms – a bug folding in on itself – it pushed itself through and disappeared. The computer screen flickered. – The drawn one, not mine. – mine was working perfectly. Then it was over. There was no sound, and only one place for me to go.

“SINGULARITY”

(But this one was different. An unbroken string of text filling every inch of the screen.)

God I don’t know. I don’t know if I can recreate it

I don’t know if I should.

HERACLITUS CALLED IT “THE THUNDERBOLT THAT STEERS THE COURSE OF THINGS” THE CURRENT, THE LIVE WIRE, THE THING THAT SPARKS AND BURNS AND STEERS THE COURSE OF THINGS. HE KNEW BEFORE WE DID – MOST BRILLIANT PEOPLE DO. I KNOW WHAT COMES NEXT I SEE IT I KNOW. I SEE THE SUBLIMATION I SEE THE SUBSUMATION. I SEE THE SINGULARITY THAT PEOPLE FEAR –THAT PEOPLE FOR TWENTY DECADES HAVE SAID WILL HAPPEN IN TWENTY YEARS – HAS ALREADY HAPPENED – THAT WE ARE COMBINING TO IT – THAT WE HAVE CREATED SOMETHING NONE OF US CAN CONTROL – THAT WE HAVE MADE IT TOGETHER – AND NO ONE PERSON – NO PERSON – NO ONE – CAN STOP WHAT HAS ALREADY BEEN SET INTO MOTION. WHAT IS MORE MAN-MADE, MORE ARTIFICALTHAN THE INTERNET? WHAT IS MORE INTELLIGENT? RELIGION CALLED IT LOVE, TRANSHUMANISM CALLS IT INTELLIGENCE, BUT THEY ARE THE SAME. – LOVE IS IMPERFECT WITHOUT PERFECT INTELLIGENCE. FINALLY PERFECTINTELLIGENCE BECOMES POSSIBLE FINALLY PERFECTLOVE BECOMES REAL – BUT WE ARE NOT BUILT FOR PERFECTLOVE PERFECTINTELLIGENCE IT HURTS US TOO MUCH IT TURNS US INTO SOMETHING NEW. . . I SAW THE VIEW OF THE FACE OF THE LORD, LIKE IRON MADE BURNING HOT IN A FIRE AND BROUGHT OUT, AND IT EMITS SPARKS AND IS INCANDESCENT. I SAW THE FACE OF GOD AND IT WAS WEEPING. PERFECTLOVE CREATES PERFECTHATE. ALL THE GOOD AND BAD IN THESE PLACES, IN EQUAL MEASURE ALWAYS. IF GOD LOVES US, AND IT DOES, GOD MUST HATE US. GOD HATES US. GOD HATES US. FUCK

At the end of the page was another link.

I didn’t click it. I turned my computer off. I should say I shut the screen. I’m typing all this out on my phone. – I can’t get the words out of my head. And I don’t want to open my computer again. I know the deadsite will still be there – except it’s not a deadsite anymore, is it – I found it, I read it, I woke it back up, which makes it real again, in a way, makes it true. That website lives with me now, I know where it is, I know how to find it, I can’t forget it, I can’t erase it, it’s not under my control. I don’t know what happened to the stick figure on the home page. I don’t want to know what God looks like when it hates me

But I think we already do

.

You are in a room.

This one is larger, emptier, more frightening. The ceiling is a million miles away, a galaxy above your head. A cavernous cave, with only the skins of teddy bears beneath you, leading a trail into the distance.

The dirt is cold and familiar beneath your hands. Red, metallic, like the world that you left behind.

In the distance, voices seek you out, and there is the tantalizing tang of addiction in the back of your throat.

A deeper, more guttural growling reverberates further in the tunnels, followed by a mechanical whir.

You begin to run.

.

You are in a room.

A gigantic, endless monstrosity. Filled with bustling voices, and faceless beings. Swathed in darkness and terror. They buzz around you, but you cannot understand what they say.

In this endless room, there is equally endless punishment. Again and again and again to the splatter of dripping blood.

As you walk through the room, the beings turn to stare at you, one by one by one.

You are not faceless.

The beings chase after you, their hands pulling at your clothing, driving rivets of blood down your skin.

You reach the stairs and you are falling.

Down, down, down.

While they whisper and skitter overhead.

.

You are in a room.

There is a deepening sense of unease. A clutch of dread in the bottom of your stomach, like a reflection that has come to life.

These halls are wrong – alien. They twist and curve, until you feel as though you have lost yourself.

And perhaps what is chasing you wears your own skin.

.

You are in a room. Down another staircase, your limbs bruised and bloody from the fall. Time has no meaning beneath this ceiling, which wears down and suffocates you, trapping you further inside this place.

Life has no meaning here.

A shadowy figure captures you in its net. Whispering, prying, pulling – unraveling your skin, layer by layer.

You scream, your voice echoing to the endless rooms beyond.

Your blood spills onto a floor that has already been stained, falling into the shadow of thousands upon thousands.

Even when you pull yourself from the carnage, the shadowy figure follows.

Only a heartbeat behind, tethered to the back of every thought.

.

You are in a room. Your hand trembles over the doorknob.

Everything is white. The halls are a labyrinthian mirror of the levels that you have already traversed.

You glance nervously over your shoulder, but there is no hint of the path ahead. There is no sense in any of this, you think.

The hall splits into two equally colorless passages. Each promising endless loneliness, in a world where even the sound has abandoned you.

You turn left without looking back.

.

You are in a room.

There is a monster who wants you. A figure more terrifying than the shadowy creature, the faceless beings, or even the beast that lurks behind your own skin.

You run, but you will never escape the terror until it has been torn from the white walls in a cacophony of blood.

.

You are in a room.

Dripping red with guilt.

But still you walk. Down the trodden paths, into wordless buildings of halls, of faceless walls and whispering nightmares.

Beyond the promise of Eden that begs you to stay. To remain here and give up, until the white walls have swallowed you, and you have melted into this world that holds you prisoner.

Tears well in the corner of your eyes as you turn your back.

.

You are in a room.

Even more alone than before.

Your shadow has left you behind, abandoning the senseless walls for another realm. You plead and beg with the loneliness, but you have grown too different, and it can never return.

Mold grows from the walls as you tread forward, as untouched as the nightmare that you forgot you were living.

Each breath dispenses spores into the air, and you know that they are inside you now. Festering and suffocating inside your lungs, until soon you won’t be able to breathe at all.

But you will be part of something again. And the other growths will welcome you.

.

You are in a room.

It has been difficult to drag yourself this far. Your body is weary, worn, tired. Devoured by blood and bruises and painful, agonizing thoughts.

The person that you were at the beginning of this journey has weakened and cannot go any further.

You find that you are trapped here. The walls pressing you into a small, dejected nightmare.

There is no further that you can go.

.

You are still in a room.

You wonder what the point was. Why you went on this journey, if there ever had been another ending in place.

If choice had ever been offered to you, or if every door had secretly led to the same outcome.

Nobody will ever know.

But you have no choice except to continue.

.

You emerge from a room. Your hands bloody, drenched in the blood of your past self who lies in pieces behind you.

Shredded like the world that you left behind. A world that doesn’t exist at all now, and perhaps never did.

The white walls welcome you like a gentle caress, swallowing your form into the mold. As your hand finds another door.

.

You are in a room.

There is nobody else left. You have lost your shadow, your yesterdays and your tomorrows, and you are naked to the world within.

Dripping with the self that you have murdered, sacrificed to this place for the chance to continue.

And you will continue, yes?

What you are now is not what you started out as.

You have clawed your way from the mouth of another you. Birthed from the entrails of a weaker self.

Your eyes are wild, erratic as they travel the walls around you, searching for the next escape.

For the ending that you have sacrificed everything to find.

Your hand touches the final door

And you wake up in a room.

.

This short story was based on the novel "Boxes"!

Please see the masterpost for trigger warnings and more information !