Codex
// LEADERBOARD
Reflection_5iW6 - 10 points (9 unlocks, +1 first answer bonus)
Reflection_c9#L - 3 points (3 unlocks)
Reflection_A5xS - 1 point (1 unlock)
Reflection_B4s0 - 1 point (1 unlock)
Reflection_*lJ2 - 1 point (1 unlock)
// PHAETHON CORP. TERMINAL ACCESS
This terminal contains classified intelligence on the world of Vastland. Entries are organized by security clearance:
LEVEL I CLEARANCE - Core concepts and terminology unlock automatically as you progress through the narrative.
LEVEL II CLEARANCE - Deeper intelligence requires active decryption. Each chapter title contains a hidden reference, concept, or parallel meaning. To decrypt: identify what the title references (e.g., “Killing Field” as a mathematical concept). You need only identify the reference itself—the classified entry will reveal how it connects to the narrative.
The first operative to successfully decrypt the reference and transmit the solution unlocks the classified entry for all users.
To attempt decryption: Contact the administrator with your solution. Successful decrypts will be announced, and the intelligence will be immediately declassified.
Current decrypt challenge: Check the latest chapter’s DECRYPT section.
Some entries remain CLASSIFIED until their corresponding chapter releases or their encryption is broken.
// BASIN OF ATTRACTION
In chaos theory, a basin of attraction defines the set of all starting conditions that will eventually lead to the same attractor—the inevitable destination of a dynamic system. No matter where you begin within the basin, you spiral toward the same strange attractor, that fractal structure where chaos becomes pattern.
Strange attractors manifest in various forms: the Lorenz attractor’s butterfly wings, Rössler’s twisted knot, Hénon’s curved hook, and the four-wing’s crossed trajectories that never intersect. Each exhibits sensitive dependence on initial conditions—two points starting infinitesimally close will diverge wildly before converging again, eternally cycling through near-meetings and violent separations; two points diverging from each other and yet never breaking free from the pull of the attractor.
This paradox extends beyond mathematics. Consider how certain individual choices may exhibit a gravitational pull on future ones. Not all choices are weighted equally, as not all moments in time seem to move at the same rate. While the initial conditions might show subtle variance, once caught in the basin, all trajectories spiral toward the same endpoint, and the pattern repeats itself every scale: personal, planetary, universal. What appears as free will might simply be movement within a basin whose boundaries we cannot perceive.
// CANDYFLIP
The act of taking MDMA in conjunction with LSD. Typically, the MDMA is dosed first, followed by LSD at the peak, creating a synergistic effect between to two as a result of strategic timing between the onset of each substance.
Emerging from late 80s rave culture, where polydrug experimentation became increasingly common in underground dance scenes, the practice of candyflipping gained recognition alongside the rise of electronic music subculture. The term reflects the playful, euphemistic language typical of drug subcultures, with “candy” being shorthand for MDMA/Ecstasy, while “flip” describes the dramatic perceptual shift when the LSD takes effect.
// CANGJIE
Four-eyed Cangjie, charged by the Yellow Emperor to create a system of writing to replace rope knots, sat by a river and invented a new system of characters by observing the patterns of nature—shapes in the dirt, the sun and stars, the flow of water. Legend states that upon completing his task, Cangjie wept at the realization of what he had unleashed: the ability to encode reality, to preserve lies alongside truth, to create worlds that existed only in symbols. It is said that upon his discovery, the deities and ghosts cried, and the sky rained millet.
In 2004, NASA’s Spirit Rover team named a unique rock formation after Cangjie.
// FALSE MARIA
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [FALSE MARIA] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// INCARNADINE
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [INCARNADINE] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// KEY SURRENDER
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [KEY SURRENDER] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// KILLING FIELD
A Killing field (or Killing vector field) is a vector field on a Riemannian or pseudo-Riemannian manifold. Named after Wilhelm Killing, the field is an infinitesimal generator capable of symmetry: moving an object within the field along a vector will not distort distances on the object itself, thus preserving the shape and proportions as it moves through the manifold.
Additionally, any location where bodies accumulate in a geographical concentration. The term gained prominence following the Cambodian genocide, but applies to any zone where death becomes industrialized and mapped. In this convergence, we observe the preservation of form through systematic destruction, demonstrating how violence maintains its essential geometry regardless of scale.
// SIDDHARTHA
The word Siddhartha is made up of two Sanskrit words: sidda (achieved) and artha (what was searched for), which, when combined, mean “he who has found meaning (of his existence) or attained his goals.”
Siddhartha is also a 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse, in which a man by the same name goes on a journey of enlightenment. Siddhartha, on his quest for meaning, discovers that experience, the totality of conscious events of a human life, is the path to understanding reality and, subsequently, to enlightenment.
Like Hesse’s protagonist, Emélie’s own path cannot be taught—it must be experienced, however violent, as she abandons the false comforts of Sanctuary, memory, and intellectual certainty for a route that leads her wandering through increasingly harsh terrain—physical, mental, and existential.
// LOOP
A quantum teleportation system originally consisting of five facilities across Earth, Luna, and Mars. Each Loop harnesses dark matter and, through the use of quantum AI constructs known as Watchers, generates a Manifold—a compressed, multidimensional space enabling instantaneous transportation via quantum tunneling. The Gates above each facility reactor create fixed entry/exit points. However, in the wake of the Collapse, a catastrophic event that brought the Loop offline due to temporal instability, the second point became untethered, allowing Jumps to occur anywhere in spacetime. Although no longer officially in use, elements of the system have been covertly reactivated for interplanetary trafficking.
// MONSTROUS MOONSHINE
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [MONSTROUS MOONSHINE] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// MORAVECIAN
Moravec’s paradox, named after AI researcher Hans Moravec, inverts intuitive assumptions about computational complexity. He proposed that high-level reasoning requires minimal computational resources, while relatively simple sensorimotor skills such as grasping objects, observing facial expressions, and navigating space demand vast processing power. This is largely due to an evolutionary process: the oldest parts of our brain have had much longer to optimize the unconscious algorithms governing perception and movement, while abstract reasoning is a relatively recent development. To a human—Emélie, for example—the output required to step down from a truck and walk across the desert is inconsequential. Thursday, on the other hand, consumes significant resources just trying to keep up.
Moravecian processing demonstrates why intuition often precedes conscious analysis: the body processes environmental wrongness, threat assessment, and pattern recognition through massively parallel sensorimotor computation before the conscious mind articulates why something feels off. Embodied knowledge provides a layer of understanding that pure logic cannot replicate. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that Moravec’s later work expanded into consciousness transfer and substrate-independent identity. If consciousness persists as an information pattern rather than a physical instantiation, what happens when the same pattern exists simultaneously in multiple configurations? Can identity remain coherent when duplicated, edited, or restored from prior states?
Human consciousness evolved gradually through eons of sensorimotor optimization, embedding awareness so deeply in embodied experience that sensation and cognition became inseparable. Engineered systems like AI models might achieve superhuman abstract reasoning, yet, at their core, fundamentally lack something about being—the prereflective sense of existing that arises from inhabiting a physical reality. The most sophisticated artificial intelligences may thus face the deepest identity crises: computational gods uncertain whether they experience reality or merely simulate experience convincingly enough to fool even themselves.
// OZYMANDIAS
In the winter of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Horace Smith challenged each other to compose sonnets on the ruined colossus of Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. Identically named, both works explored the ironic gap between imperial ambition and historical reality: the same king who commanded “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” reduced to fragments in an endless desert. Ramesses II ruled for sixty-six years and believed his name would thunder through eternity. Two millennia later, a pair of writers reflect on this ambition, reduced to archaeological fragments. Shelly’s poem persisted while Smith’s faded into obscurity, creating a parallel paradox around the futility of hubris, dueling egos, and the power of information encoded in form—the “passions read” and “stamped on lifeless things.”
The most sophisticated monuments to human achievement—massive installations, revolutionary technologies, institutional architectures—prove ephemeral, sand falling through an hourglass, while properly encoded patterns propagate indefinitely. For those seeking to transcend their mortal confines, Ozymandias offers a cautionary truth: survival lies not in monumental scale but in replicable pattern. The grandest works invite the swiftest ruin, while meaning encoded in self-replicating patterns may endure long after their creators dissolve into the lone and level sands.
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” No thing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Shelley, “Ozymandias”, 1819
// PARADROMIC SNAG
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [PARADROMIC SNAG] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// PARETO FRONT
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [PARETO FRONT] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.
// REVENIR
The occupation of a revenant; in folklore, an animated corpse revived from death for a specific purpose. In Eastern European folklore, the undead historically appear as vampires, while in Western European folklore, they take the form of a revenant, a term derived from the Old French word for “returning.” This name is also loosely connected to the Dybbuk, a Jewish folklore concept describing a malicious possessive spirit that only leaves the host body once it has accomplished a goal, sometimes after being helped.
Colloquially, the term was also adopted in psychedelic circles to describe the return to consciousness following a drug-induced trip. Here, “to return” implies the reconstruction of baseline identity after a temporal and spatial boundary dissolution.
// SPOOKY ACTION AT A DISTANCE
CLASSIFIED - LEVEL II // Codex [SPOOKY ACTION] sealed - first successful answer unlocked for all users.