You click on the link to the publication page and move, without hesitation, into the second person. Somewhere offstage, a gear shifts. Oil lubricates. Your mouse finger follows its heart, caressing the pixels of virtual space, in search of an anchor. The metaphors pile up. Your session time now exceeds the average for the part of the world from which you’ve arrived. From somewhere else, deep in a hidden directory, an image is served. Its filename starts off pleasingly enough but then soils itself, excreting an appendage of digits which only makes sense in a certain light: 20200926-4-7ni594. That first bit could be a date, you reckon. One that’s already passed. Parsed? Past. What comes after the first dash could be anything. Literally, anything.
