Esto Perpetua
Epoch 1
Hironymus Bosch Ludwig, called Hiro by his friends, was cloaked in dirt. Not the outside variety that easily brushes off. The ashen claylike muck was the type only found accumulating indoors in places that haven’t been disturbed in decades. He had repeatedly put off the task at hand since his Uncle Alpert had passed away the preceding spring. Alpert was the last of his branch of the family tree, that is, other than Hiro. His Nike limited edition unitard was caked in the ashen muck as he rummaged through his families’ attic at the old farmstead. He felt the country chill penetrate the woven circuity of his suit. He toggled the switch, turning the color dark to better cloak the soot from the appearance of others and turned up the temperature of his suit. The fibers twisted and contorted to differentiate the reflected light wavelengths and provide the appearances of darkness to any onlookers. Which currently, there were none.
The autonomous network of bee drones that insured compliance with The Code generally avoided remote locales at the farm. The absence of their whirring, buzzing and beeping was palpable to Hiro and the silence was oddly unsettling. The infernal quiet was why old paranoid Alpert preferred the solitude over the city. The bee drones were known to have mishaps around Uncle Alpert’s farm. He often joked of their mysteriously coming down with buckshot induced colony collapse disorder.
Hiro had no idea how long these boxes and file cabinets had remained undisturbed. From appearances, over a 100 years passed with the snapshot of the past treasures collecting dust particle by particle like sand at the beach. According to the calendar the house had been in his family for generations, going back to the early part of the 21st century.
The loss of his uncle left a numbness and uneasy emptiness that he was unable to shake. Outside of his metaverses, this was the first real death he had experienced. Alpert had not been well, but the loss still felt sudden. Things that should be said weren’t, and overall things didn’t feel settled. Alpert’s wishes were never properly conveyed. Hiro reckoned that coming to terms with the lack of existence was something that he would just have to get better at. The unsettling feelings were magnified at the farm (his uncle’s farm) and in the attic the feelings morphed to guilt from the sharp feeling of his intrusion. Who was he, to rummage through these physical artifacts, trying to categorize and select the keepers from the trash. The unmistakable feeling kept rising to the surface, was it ALL trash? Hiro had no use for these THINGS, these treasures to another consciousness. Most of Hiro’s treasured things weren’t exactly physical.
His curiosity at all the antiquity hung palpably in the air similar to the must gathering in the sealed attic. Hiro rummaged through old files, card stock with dead baseball players, tax returns, stuffed animals with the word Beanie Baby stamped into their skin. On the old wooden desk were bills for the delivery of charged electrons, and various other musings. The Code would probably not allow for the incineration of these treasures at the farm. The cost of transit, reclamation fees, and disposal costs began to balloon in Hiro’s neural linked calculator. He thought to himself that there has to be a respite from underpaid carbon tax…..in The Code, doesn’t there? How can someone just die and leave a liability to their heirs?
Deep in the stack of “Successful Farming” magazines, some oddity caught Hiro’s attention. Feathered into the magazines were random papers with QR codes and strings of random words. These random words were not in any particular order, just separated in columns and numbered 1–16. In some deeply underused part of his network, the 16 words were able to prompt the memory of Alpert telling him about something called a “seed phrase”. At the time, 5 year old Hiro, just assumed they had to do with farming. But he didn’t have the slightest idea what he should do with this information. Maybe he would sleep on it. He sometimes could set his neural network to probe for memories a little deeper using an index clue, but the effectiveness was amplified when he was asleep and the dream program was running on the frontal lobe end.
He noticed that he was exhausted anyway. This was the most work he could remember doing in years. Of course, pretty much any work would be the most that he had done in years. Most of the muscle toning was done when the mind was engaged in The Game. The body will play when the mind is away, they say. Hiro was happy that he could still use his neural headset on the farm, and run the dream program as it was not reliant on the network to propagate. He wasn’t sure that he could ever remember falling asleep on his own.
The requirement that the neural network dream programs be local storage became part of The Code after the so called Boogie Man dream hacks, caused so much mental damage in the 50’s. Hard to believe that one hacker, with access to humanity’s neural core could cause so much damage in one December night. Christmas was never the same.
Hiro slipped into the pod, put on his headset, and toggled to the Neon District dream. That would distract him, and like a switch he was off.
Epoch 2….TBD
ESTO PERPETUA is an experiment in the physics of charity and creative energy. It will be a story adventure using NFT’s, defi and the metaverse as the spirit guide.
This NFT artwork and some of the illustrations were created by Mikko Lyytinen
For more from the artist check out http://www.mikkolyytinen.com/
The accrued charge (the “creator annuity”) from this NFT will go to a charity address using an address minted from thegivingblock.com that will be collected on Matic via HiroDAO.
The idea is to use this NFT to collect a charge for the benefit of a charity. When there is 1,000 DAI (or other value) charging on the matic NFT, then the second Epoch of the story will be released.
The charity is APOPO US that trains HeroRats to sniff out landmines and unexploded ordnance. They are also used in the early detection of tuberculosis.
The creator royalty of 10% will be split between the original artist that helped Mikko Lyytinen and the Author. This will only happen (at the earliest) in 2023 to allow time for the charity to accrue interest. This initial sale (if it happens), less royalty, will also go to charity.
To charge the NFT for charity, go to Matic chain address and the NFT is here. For more on the mechanics see the article on charity and Trustless Trusts
