“I'm in jail? The Aphrodite facility?”

“Yes, and for the most important of reasons,” the man said.

He was a goddamned monk walking across an expanse of void-water. Rippling blackness pooling around his feet. This was an honored being, this was a myth. This was the Matreiya.

They were trying to kill him over and over. He couldn't die. But this wasn't him, just a shred of simulated reality that he was thrust in. He had no idea if he was alive. He could be dead, reviewing his last moments on some endless loop where his subjective sense of time was stretched past the vanishing point of temporal eternity. Perhaps it was the afterlife. If life, in the end, was disappointing, why not the epilogue?

“You know me?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You are Mick Jensen,” the Matreiya said.

“Yes,” Jensen said. He knew that he told himself. He hadn't forgotten.

“I can't come like this to everyone,” the Matreiya said. “But when I do, I try and speak to them between the experiences.”

“What is happening?”

“You did something. Something that physical world did not appreciate. The powers that be put their refuse here.”

“Here. Where is here?”

“You know it,” the Matreiya said. “It’s an old memory. You haven't passed the Lethe yet.”

“Aphrodite Station. The 12^th Sky Unit,” Jensen said.

“I've come to set you free,” the Matreiya said.

What's in a name? It was the way the world knew it. It was scrawled across all of your legal dcouments, on all the taxes you paid, embedded in your medichip. It lived in a million places, backed up incrementally and entangled in the cosnet.

"My Name is Mick Jensen."

He wanted to die, to erase, so space out in this digital projective playground. What had he done?