We cross between realities to study the one thing our world has never known: human feeling. Music is the bridge between your realm and ours.
Tonight a portal opens, and through it we have found a story worth telling. A man named Elias, the woman he loved for sixty years, and what happened to him after he died.
A portal opens.
Two voyagers from the Aether Dimension open a ring of light onto our world to study the one thing their own has never had: what it feels like to be human. Through it they find a white farmhouse on a hill, a dance hall in 1962, two old hands holding on. They have chosen their story. It is the story of Elias and Rose.
The last night at home.
Elias is dying in the bed by the window, and Rose has fallen asleep in the chair beside him. The lights go out over the town one by one. His spirit rises on a golden thread, his life passes him by, the dance, the newborn, the beach at sunset, and he lets go, out through the veil and into the stars. Above the farmhouse a new star appears, and Rose watches it from the window.
The star was never a star.
It was a status light on a server. Elias's mind has been scanned and carried into a machine, and he wakes young again in a sunlit hometown with no pain and no fear. He walks to the edge of the world and steps through into a city of light. Then a cloud doubles, the sun turns square, the paperboy rides past twice, and the faces in the dark start watching him.
The corruption gets in.
It isn't the world that is breaking any more. It is him. Memories smear and wash away, his reflection comes back old, the neighbours turn with blank faces, and the Rose the machine rebuilt from his memory keeps becoming someone else. He can no longer tell what is real, and piece by piece he comes apart.
He is not the first.
In a city made of static, every earlier upload is still there: ghosts from a hundred years, each one stuck replaying its last moment on a loop. They call to him, and they slip away when he reaches for them. In a world where no one dies, Elias sees what he is becoming. Far off, a young woman in a green dress is watching.
He follows the wires home.
Now only a presence in the network, Elias travels under the ocean, up the towers and along the power lines to the farmhouse, where Rose lives on alone. He flickers the porch light, rings the phone, crackles the old radio, and once, for a moment, his face forms in the television static. She puts her hand on the glass. He puts his against it from the other side.
She was built from his memories.
The machine made a young Rose for Elias to dance with forever. Synthetic Dreams is her side of the story: a copy who notices the loop, remembers dances she never had, and asks whether she is real or only his reflection. Then she breaks the glass, and goes looking for the man she was made from.
Seven songs, one story. The albums Voyages Beyond and Echoes in the Code.