This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

He wished he could remember something, anything, from the time before he woke up in this room, but there was no before, a strange concept for people to accept in a universe based on duality, an after without a before. For him, time itself started in the lounge, and there was nothing more to say about that. 

People don’t pay attention to life while involved in its minutia, but for an external observer who only drops in every few years, life seems to run in circles. 

It’s as if the memories of the protagonists get wiped clean at the end of a cycle, allowing them to start the same story from the top, oblivious and excited to continue their journey. 

His life ran in circles too, only in different ways.

He was the tree falling in the forest when nobody was there to hear it, living in a perpetual present which followed him around rather than him it, and which bent time around him to keep him in sync with all his Helmuths as he shifted through realities. He wondered sometimes how many more of them were there he hadn’t yet had the chance to be.

The unfinished stories bothered him the most, especially the ones whose details had plagued him while involved in a particular life, like, for instance, what was Inclusion 35B and what had come of it.