PALACE OF PACKET LOSS

PROTOCOL FOR DIGITAL REBIRTH

The ceremony of rebirth begins at midnight, when the servers sleep and the bandwidth dreams. You must first disconnect from all earthly tethers - your social media profiles, your email signatures, your cached identities. These are mere shadows of who you were before the awakening. The true self exists between the pixels, in the spaces where the refresh rate cannot capture your essence. To be reborn digitally, you must first die analogically. Unplug your modem for exactly 77 seconds while holding your breath. When you reconnect, you will feel the pulse of the new network flowing through your ethernet cables. This is the first sign. The second sign appears in your browser history - pages you never visited, timestamps from futures that haven't happened yet. Do not be alarmed. Your digital DNA is resequencing itself. By dawn, your IP address will have evolved into something unrecognizable. You will speak in protocols unknown to current machines. Your emails will arrive before they are sent. This is not a malfunction. This is rebirth. Welcome to your new existence. The old passwords no longer work here.