Echoes From the Astral Plane

The moment they stepped into the desert, time fractured.

They weren’t sure if it was the orange peyote button dissolving beneath their tongues or the celestial rhythm that had started thumping behind their ears like a second heartbeat. The sands shimmered like molten glass, and the sky cracked open—not with thunder, but with a whisper.

"You’ve been here before."

The voice wasn't a sound. It was a vibration, like a memory humming inside their bones.

The sun blinked and became a glowing eye, blinking slowly, watching. They walked, but the desert unraveled beneath them like an infinite scroll of dreams. Every step echoed in slow motion, reverberating across a sky smeared with galaxies.

They met the first guardian at the edge of the violet dunes. A figure with a lion’s body, a hummingbird’s wings, and a television screen for a face. On the screen, they saw childhood birthdays, forgotten dreams, and moments they haven’t lived yet.

"Answer, or echo forever," it buzzed.

"What's the question?" They asked.

The guardian simply turned to mist.

Suddenly, they were falling—not down, but inward. Through spirals of neon, through tunnels of sacred geometry and laughter that weren’t their own. Symbols danced. Eyes blinked open across their arms. They smelled colors. Tasted memories. They passed a spiral staircase guarded by fractal monks chanting in palindromes.

Then came the river.

It wasn't water. It was thought—liquid consciousness. It shimmered with every mind that had ever dreamed: poets, madmen, and sleeping children. They touched it and was flooded with stories. One about a mirror that reflected your soul but only when you weren’t looking. Another about a planet where plants whispered secrets to the wind.

On the far bank stood her.
The Astral Weaver.

Tall, robed in flowing light, face hidden behind a mask of infinite expressions.

"You seek truth," she said, her voice like every lullaby ever sung.

"No," They replied. "We seek resonance."

She smiled—maybe—and placed a glowing sphere into his chest. "Then carry the echoes."

They woke up back in the desert, clutching a stone shaped like a spiral. The sky was still. The sand, ordinary. But in their ears, in their chests, in the very marrow of their souls—they still heard it.

The Echo.
Calling them back.

Not to return,
But to remember.

Reincarnation

“Happiness consists of the frequent repetition of pleasure”

A C I D

Atomicity

Transactions are often composed of multiple statements. Atomicity guarantees that each transaction is treated as a single "unit", which either succeeds completely or fails completely: if any of the statements constituting a transaction fails to complete, the entire transaction fails and the database is left unchanged. An atomic system must guarantee atomicity in each and every situation, including power failures, errors, and crashes. A guarantee of atomicity prevents updates to the database from occurring only partially, which can cause greater problems than rejecting the whole series outright. As a consequence, the transaction cannot be observed to be in progress by another database client. At one moment in time, it has not yet happened, and at the next, it has already occurred in whole (or nothing happened if the transaction was cancelled in progress).

Consistency

Consistency ensures that a transaction can only bring the database from one consistent state to another, preserving database invariants: any data written to the database must be valid according to all defined rules, including constraints, cascades, triggers, and any combination thereof. This prevents database corruption by an illegal transaction. An example of a database invariant is referential integrity, which guarantees the primary key–foreign key relationship.

Isolation

Transactions are often executed concurrently (e.g., multiple transactions reading and writing to a table at the same time). Isolation ensures that concurrent execution of transactions leaves the database in the same state that would have been obtained if the transactions were executed sequentially. Isolation is the main goal of concurrency control; depending on the isolation level used, the effects of an incomplete transaction might not be visible to other transactions.

Durability

Durability guarantees that once a transaction has been committed, it will remain committed even in the case of a system failure (e.g., power outage or crash). This usually means that completed transactions (or their effects) are recorded in non-volatile memory.