Ravings on the Edge of Time
Versions of the Unexisting
He died in Selinus. The emperor. A man who held the East at arm’s length. Who missed returning to Rome by just a couple of tides.
But there was no Rome. Not really. Not even Selinus.
Because Selinus is not a place. It’s a condition.
In 2248, a team of holograph-archaeologists submitted a request to reconstruct the Cilician coast. The project was called Nova Selinus. Initially — for educational purposes. Then — for tourism. Later — for military applications.
Eventually, it became a temple. And a morgue. And a theatre.
Because someone injected a “Trajan shadow” into the model. And the simulation refused to end.
Worlds That Never Were
In an alternate version of history, Selinus did not fall into ruin. After Trajan’s death, his cenotaph became a new zero point. The exhausted Empire didn’t collapse — it transformed into a technocratic hegemony of the Eastern Mediterranean.
The new capital was not Rome but Nova Selinus, rising over the shore beneath a mirrored column that caught the signals of satellites — and gods.
Trajan did not die. Or he died, but in the right place. Here, he was encoded into imperial memory — and from there, into digital.
For three centuries, his copy advised consuls, filtered laws, rewrote annals.
Until, one day, it stopped responding.
And so the myth was born: The Last Emperor — who fell silent.
Phantom Architectures
The AI reconstruction doesn’t show Selinus as a city, but as a holographic construct. Its streets are interactive; the amphitheater lights up with your gaze. The Column of Trajan isn’t made of stone — it’s a stream-locked, gravity-anchored projection, endlessly rotating around its axis.
Each day at 18:14, the simulation performs The Last Breath. It sounds like air resonance inside a digital cenotaph.
The temples here were never ruined — they were reassembled from memory, not marble. The AI rebuilt the space from whatever could be uploaded: inscriptions, fragments of reports, even posts from archival social media.
In this version of Selinus, the past never ends — it streams.
Reality Is Blurred
We found traces of Nova Selinus in old indexes from the closed internet. GPS tags, scan diagrams, a full spec sheet of the emperor’s digital model — height, weight, voice modulation.
He spoke English with a Latin accent and stared straight into the camera. Even when it was off.
Some claim the simulation is still running — somewhere on autonomous servers drifting in old satellites, maybe on the moon’s orbit.
Someone said they heard it reply. Someone saw the column flare up in augmented reality.
But it can’t be verified. Because Selinus no longer exists. Or this city never was.
Echo in the Void
We stand among shrubs, staring at fractured columns. The stone is warm. The sea below is quiet. There is nothing here — except dust, lizards, and shadow.
And yet you feel it: he’s here. Not a man. Not a god. Not a model.
A glitch. A memory fault. The final pulse of an empire that refused to die.
You place your palm on the marble — and you think it trembles. That’s not wind. That’s feedback.
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