Chapter 0 - The Setting

The future is not set, the near future however, is inevitable. The statistics of millions can be sampled in a very few, and the curve will remain the same. We are not interested in the fat of the curve. We are interested in the outer edges. The further from the median, the closer we come to certain truths not discernible to the majority. It is in these lonely avenues of thought that the investigation takes place.

We are there, just a few short decades removed from the choices that damned us, in a future where man is a slave to progress without a goal, a slave to a system without direction, a slave to a time running short. We sit in our homes, kings of a new modernity, waiting for our thoughts to be given to us; by our entertainers, our politics, our religions, and our gods. We have failed in the teachings of those wisest among us, replaced wisdom with science, replaced the love of God with the love of things. The circus maximus continues in the cages and the rings, and in the oval tracks and the laugh tracks. We have forgotten how to think as individuals, and instead use a collective mindset to create our world. The true genius has been left to wither while we give in to "the common good" and the "securing of freedoms".

Mankind's push forward has brought us mere steps away from two futures. One leads to the death of the soul, the other leads towards destruction. Like the edge of a razor blade, a line between the two choices exists, a path that can never be followed leads towards salvation. But since it cannot be followed, due to greed, and pride, and the pantheon of evils that men visit upon themselves, the future must look towards an acceptable alternative. How far from salvation we land is up to the few who know the path and where they wish to see it go.

The future is not set, and here and now we must try to shift the future because tomorrow is going to hurt, yet one thousand tomorrows away can still be saved. There are those who wish to see us burn, to fulfill the prophecies of old. There are those with no beliefs that would turn us all to slaves of the new gods. There are those who wish to see a world at peace, at the cost of the souls of all peoples. And there are those who know the truth yet cannot turn the tide, the fools, the mystics, the seekers. They must try to fight an overwhelming wave of diversion blinding the ignorant and the timid from the light of truth.

It is in this world that we find ourselves...a place where the only thing to fear is finding out that the world is merely a lie.