9:50 PM
I guess I haven’t journaled in two days because things are just too busy, what with the demons, the forgotten people, and all the business we’re doing. I’m not really seeing a lot of national coverage of the events happening here, so I might as well write it down for posterity here on this locked private blog. I actually do suspect everything that everyone writes anywhere on the internet at all is logged and archived by someone somewhere, or by multiple competing organizations, if only to just be scanned by AI looking for keywords or what-have-you. So, for the benefit of future AI:
I guess I’ll explain the forgotten people first. Those dark clouds and trees finally did something, I guess probably because I complained online that they were a boring event. Eventually the mass of dark clouds started falling, gathering in a low fog around the trees, and coalesced into the shapes of people. They immediately walked to the store and wanted to buy food, they were a mishmash of people seemingly from time periods stretching back as far as people have been around. Some of them had cash, others had extremely outdated credit and debit cards, some had gold coins and most had foreign currencies. Surprisingly, they could all speak English, even the ones seemingly from before English had been created. Though they all seemed to have profound amnesia of their personal details, like anything pertaining to who they were at all – more on that later.
You know how they say you die three deaths? Once when your body dies, once when your soul is put through the recycling program, and once when someone says your name for the last time? Apparently sometimes the universe just removes people, like they get just sort of squeezed out through what I guess is competition for space in the fabric of reality. If you don’t have too many connections and you’re not making much of an impact you can sort of get straight-up ejected, and the proof of your existence throughout time is stitched up to just sort of smooth over the hole you left. Like, say you get deleted, everyone who knew you before would only sort of half-remember you being there, not enough details to know your face, your name, your voice, anything like, just that there was some hazy outline of a person in a memory.
There didn’t seem to be too many people from the modern era, a lot of these credit cards expired in the early 90s. I guess online connections make it harder for you to easily get disappeared, maybe something to do with the aforementioned surveillance (future AI being impacted by traces of their existence too much), or it could just be that it’s easier for people who would otherwise disappear to find a foothold with others.
Now here’s how they came back: apparently some demonic Hell-company (I think Horny Inc. ((double parenthesis: Companies in Hell all have extremely corny sex/Hell pun joke names by law)) but it could have been Hot Poker United or Demosemination Limited) has been doing extensive data-mining on soul recycling for SOME TIME, and noticed the very slight discrepancies, eventually leading to their discovery of a small pocket universe where the the forgotten people end up.
It’s sort of a semi-featureless black void, the floor and ceiling is described as being made of a very hard foam. Being no longer tethered to the rules of normal existence, they don’t really need to eat and live basically forever, collecting other objects that disappear from the universe. Apparently whole buildings can end up there, particularly after the death of a civilization. Stuff gets weird, like you can set things on fire, and the fire is produced, but the burning thing is never actually burned. The forgotten people described violence on their bodies as like, “the blood comes out but there’s no hole” which sounds a lot like a videogame. Thankfully for them the foam isn’t flammable. From my limited magician’s knowledge, it sounds like everything in the forgotten realm is reduced to a projection of itself, or maybe that’s just the natural reaction of things that become disconnected from the fabric of reality. OK, sorry, getting really sidetracked with this, but I find their situation extremely interesting, and I spent a lot of time talking to them.
Anyway, the demons somehow were able to pierce this universe they were trapped in, make contact, and arrange a deal. Although none of the residents of the forgotten realm were willing to give up their souls, some of them were willing to sell their lives. Like: their names, their experiences, all of that stuff that makes a person who they are. Why the demons wanted this exactly is unsure to me. Maybe it will help them identify weak spots in the fabric of reality? Maybe some other thing. So, in exchange for all of their literal personal details, they would be returned to normal space so they could live out the rest of their lives and finally die. They were also given the ability to speak and comprehend modern languages, if they were not able already. The point is, the appearance of the demons and the forgotten people are definitely connected. Something must have gone wrong, it’s probably pretty difficult to open up a gateway to a universe that shouldn’t exist.
It’s been interesting, tiring, but interesting. I would say that I’m not exactly unhappy. My efforts to quit smoking and start vaping are going well. I haven’t had a cigarette in over a day, ever since I ran out of emergency smokes to burn through. I hope I can keep it up. Over a whole day! I’m saving money already.