Ning: (leaning forward, voice edged with wonder) How did you come across this text? It feels like something from an antique shop.

Vidya: (with a soft laugh as her lips curve in amusement) Astonishing things can come from old bookstores, garbage dumps, and thrift shops. The world hides its revelations among its discarded refuse. Cities are full of ghosts disguised as data. There are many interesting forgotten diaries beneath corrupted drives.

Ning: (narrowing her gaze while staring at her tea cup) Ah, our civilization is a great recycling bin, and the past and the future often get compressed into one file. Dust and diamonds, side by side. Sooner or later, everything ends up there, overwritten between the entropy layers.

Vidya: (raising her cup slowly, inhaling the steam of her green tea) Exactly. Everything is just matter in varying stages of decay. None of it is lost, only rearranged. Do you think, centuries hence, our presence will hum faintly through any data stream?

Ning: (looking quietly into her tea, voice like a thread of light) Perhaps the only truth of life is one of continual transformation. Entropy is a sort of grace. The ephemeral is what gives meaning to the eternal. Every fading moment asks us to love more fiercely, to live as if our atoms were brief music before a long silence.