"And you chose to save it."
"I chose to save the people in it. The world was incidental."
He sipped his tea. The garden's impossible stream flowed uphill beside us. The trees chimed.
"I've lived a very long time, Mr. Ashborne. Centuries. I've seen transmigrations before — though not from the kind of existence you describe. Souls displaced across worlds are rare but not unheard of. What's unprecedented is the nature of your original world's relationship to this one."
"You mean the game."
"I mean the observation. Your world observed ours — through a medium you call a 'game.' A structured simulation that captured some elements of our reality while missing others. The question that interests me is not how this observation occurred. It's what it implies."
He set down his cup.
