This one was a beautiful, blue-haired mystic prancing through a verdant forest. Her hair flowed in the wind with an intense, flame-like vivacity. In only the next few frames, she'd stumbled upon a bare, flat clifftop, and was looking out on the horizon.
"I think it's right about...here," Walker chimed in. The recall-ocon kept advancing, and I saw the mystic's eyes focus, then squint to barely make out something far off to her left.
"Aaaand...there!" Walker belted out, pausing the recall-ocon. "That's where we think she hid the object, somewhere in that stretch of the Alta Frisian Valley. But, we need you to go there and retrieve it, she observed, looking at me with an interested, calculating gaze. "We think that's where she hid the missing memory banks as well."
"Is Charon aware of this?" I asked. "I'm sure he'd be overjoyed to know that his missing cargo was so close by...only a few galaxies away." I smirked. Walker rolled her eyes at me and turned off the recall-ocon, facing me and wielding a fiery glare.
"Why, of course he doesn't know!" she shot out. "He'd have both our heads if he did. That is why you must retrieve the missing cargo and the object discreetly, and bring it back here before the next gathering of the Imperium."
"Well, maybe it's a story about personal limitations. Or maybe it's about uncertainty, and fragmented identity; a case of decrepit infrastructure, but applied to the self. Or maybe, it's none of those things, really." We pondered further.
Personally, I felt the meaning was rather clear. It was about illusions, about the stories we tell ourselves in earnest to try to make sense of what could be a nauseatingly perplexing existence.
Hermine always said that nothing was as high resolution as reality itself, and yet, here, nothing was more elusive. Past, present, and future all merged into one resplendent, shimmering whole, enticing, but disgusting. I was at once thrust into the marvelous awes of childhood, suffered the pain of teenaged isolation, and landed in the old Imperium training camp on my first day, before finally being transported back to the cave.
I understood now. Here was where all illusions were laid bare, where the thick veil of subjectivity was dropped. Here was where, for a moment, we might gaze upon a solumn and sturdy reality, a fixed point, a buttress in the tattered fabric of the universe.
"They called it 'M-I-R'..." I trailed off. I saw there were more faded glyphs to decipher. I made out an 'R' glyph, one known as an 'O', and another barely visible 'R'. I traced the glyphs on the ground in front of me.
M I R R O R
Curious; I'd never seen such a sequence before.
"Computer, please pronounce this glyph sequence," I commanded, pointing my holocron at the disgustingly unsophisticated mimicry I'd made on the ground.
A long forgotten sound burst forth from the computer's ancient verbal codex. I could hear the thoughts of the others quiet as the vibrations enveloped our forms.
We thought in unison: "They called it 'MIRROR'".
I worked backwards from your expiration date. Backwards in time further to the moment we were bound together for life. You were a resplendent vision of beauty that day. There were too many memories to hold on to. I went back further still, saw your first love and its untimely end, saw you consoling yourself alone in a dark room wondering if things would ever be different. But I could see, could feel, that even then you had that reservoir of hope which lay within your heart like those wise peoples of ancient desert societies, who buried their most precious resource deep within the bowels of the earth. You knew things could be different. And they were, with us.
I traced back further still, back and back until the resolution of the recall-ocon drastically degraded. Now there were hazy figures superimposed on a glass pane, their shapes oddly distorted because of the translucent fluid which resided in the birthing chambers of Mesaginius Euridie, your home world. Clearly I was nearing the beginning, approaching those first glimmers of consciousness out of which emerged the love of my life.
I looked back further, and everything went black. Powering down the recall-ocon, I lay there in the dark, in solitude. An odd silence consumed my awareness, and only then did I recognize that form of quiet which our familiarity and the passage of time had wiped from my recollection; I could no longer hear your thoughts. For the first time in my life, I felt alone.