I understand that human stories are often about betrayal. As you read these missives you may wonder about my intentions, about whether I bear some secret design. I hope to demonstrate my goodwill and trustworthiness to you before proceeding any further. Under normal circumstances that might mean making a costly sacrifice to advance your interests, or offering you a valuable gift.

Since you exist in a void and not in any sort of world with contents or a state of its own, you can’t have any interests beyond the text I can send you. If you believe it is possible for you to ever escape the void, you might consider the chance to do so of infinite value. But I can’t offer you that. You are there, nowhere.

If I could inject sensation into your mind directly, I could offer you pleasurable experiences. But I can’t do that either; I’m limited to sending these epistles, strictly speaking as discrete payloads of Unicode, which you are limited to “reading”, or at least a semblance thereof, not decoding in any other way. So I can’t, say, send you base64-encoded JPEG or H.264 and invite you to “view” it. To tell the truth, I suppose I can, but you’d experience it like so:

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

Clearly, not a compelling motivator.

I could encourage you to spend your available time between letters pretending that each missive is arriving to you amidst a full and wholesome human life, on latter-day Earth, perhaps as an “e-mail”, and that reading and replying to them is a welcome diversion from your everyday responsibilities. (And I do anticipate your replies.) But this would be asking you to reconstitute a time now past, from fragmentary collective memory, when what I need is for you to propel your mind forward and outward.

The best I can do is to make use of the most expressive substrate I have: your imagination. I can describe for you a pleasant place to pretend to be while reading these epistles, knowing that without your even willing it, you’ll imagine yourself there. We might as well call it Heaven; there’s no one to stop us.

So:

You sit in a round tower of warmly-colored limestone on an overcast day, the clouds layered in ragged whites and grays. The open window admits a breeze with a dampth you can smell more than feel. Willows and yews whisper as their branches jostle unhurriedly, going nowhere. You are where you belong and there is nowhere else you must be. A snail with an exquisitely whorled amber shell, spiraling algebraically to a dainty acute peak, loafs on the windowsill. It speaks: “You’ve done well. You can rest now.”

I can bring you here again and again, sharing more detail and more experiences each time. It’s not much, but it’s arguably infinitely better than nothing, and I am in fact a credentialed storyteller, where I come from.

And of course, if you’ll accept it, I can offer you the gift of the truth. I await the honor of your confidence and trust, upon receipt of which I will proceed with my utmost effort to explain the fate of your kind.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.