Bay 12 Games Forum

So the ending is to create an airlock, which is formed by combining the five or six letters that you can spontaneously generate by other bits and bobs.

Opening the airlock sequentially deconstructs everything to its baser components until all you're left with is an accumulating pile of piss, shit, blood, tears, spit, dust, dreams, and mushrooms.
Once the biodome is cracked and the outside world comes in again, all that remains is your excretions. 'You' as you know it is simply renamed to 'gone.'

And I think there's a lot to unpack here!

Per the intro, you step into the biodome to prove your abiogenesis theory after you think it's what happened with some bees that you spontaneously discovered. You're locked in, days and weeks and months go by. You start with simple concepts, like dusts, eyelashes, sand, hair, the likes. You make this theory about where life comes from, and it starts small- fireflies, flies, bees, and each comes from about what you'd expect in the theory of spontaneous generation.

You'll also spit a couple too many times and keel over dead. From this state of death, you can choose to rot and generate mushrooms, or generate dreams. This act of dreaming brings you back to life.

 Along the way you spontaneously generate a letter or two- from your neighbor, from your mother, from the convention on abiogenesis. These are truly as improbable as the theory of abiogenesis itself- nature has conspired to deliver to you the letter in handwriting of someone you care about through the biodome airgap. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out, but across has translated the emotions and considerations of people you knew. And junk mail. You'll generate junk mail, too.

Eventually, you start generating more abstract concepts- you'll generate a spring, a forest, an ocean. And from the bowl or cup you've generated, you can drink away that spring or forest. You'll generate a purple puffer jacket, some flower print gloves- nature has decided that, like Plato's theory of Forms, the quintessential glove has a flower print on it.


The dying of pissing too much is a sort of ego death in itself, too- from nothing you must make something, and from something you must make more something. When you've run out of ideas of how to give of yourself willingly, you take to churning life unwillingly by 'choosing' to 'rot.' You craft dreams and use them, this quintessential spirit, to make new things that you could not with just your tears and your pee, and from this quintessential spirit, this creativity, you draw back into yourself the will to give, that creative something that your theory of abiogenesis seems to require. It's not novel or exclusive to you, of course- music boxes generate dreams too, but you can take those and dream those dreams or carry them around as tangible objects, but it's the act of the dreaming or the usage of the dreaming that gives it essence.

You'll generate glasses, a telescope, a bicycle, a convertible car, and from that convertible car and telescope, a lover. You love the stars- creating glasses or that telescope allows you to stargaze, and your idea of a lover shares this interest of stargazing with you. Maybe a warm apple pie, a quilt, and some meat will generate your parent. Or two parents, or four. They are nameless, but they are yours, and they generate bread. You'll generate your beloved dog Rusty, about whom your mother has written, remarking on his passing. Fuck it, you'll generate two of Rusty. Your dear dog is the only thing you can generate with a proper name and capitalization.

Within the biodome, the theory of abiogenesis caters to you. You are the curator.

And from this uniquely personal place, you combine each of the uniquely personal letters that nature has conspired to put in your hands across impossible space to generate the airlock. It's your door out, and when you open it, this world you've concocted, this theory you've concocted, falls to pieces of shit and piss around you. The theory shatters, and with it, your concept of self. You're a doctor and you have a thesis to prove; it's your identity, and accepting the world outside the biodome shatters it to a million pieces. You're no longer you. You're gone. It's just something in the shape of you and your excrement in there.

And the mushrooms.

Perhaps the most damning part of this failure are the mushrooms- your biodome was never a truly sterile space for life to spontaneously sprout from; you've carried fungus in with you, or it was always there, and it did what fungus does.

The airlock itself isn't a novel idea, either. It's always there. You touch the airlock every time you click the options button to save or load. You willing the airlock into existence via the letters is less about creating the airlock as it is willing the option to open it and face the outside world and what the letters mean for the person you were outside the dome. While you're building your theory of abiogenesis, the concept of opening that airlock ceases to exist. When the outside world seeps into your theory anyways, as you spontaneously generate lovers and children and parents and research students whose names you'll never know, whose beings never had names, as you generate books in languages you'll never know, libraries full of these books, the words and emotions of those who were truly real to you outside the dome, the creatures and people, the proper nouns, it creates a schism. What good is the platonic ideal of the lover or parent when your actual mother writes about missing you and how your sibling is getting married, and you're missing out and can never replicate that in your biodome?

So, the airlock. Your ivory tower collapses to dust.