More of an end credits, really. 0.5 leads straight into ‘Tomorrow’, but 0.6 follows up quite a long time afterwards. After the Simulation, after the Revolution, after the Satellite, after… everything.
I felt like we still needed an explanation for how Jack and Susan got back together. And a kind of emotional buffer to round out the 0.x series so it plays together as a unit, whether or not you listen to the core trilogy or the 5.x series. And in fact this one does have an internal palindrome structure too, so it bookends nicely.
Susan and Jack have both lost their conscious memories of each other, but something beyond the System keeps drawing them back together.
Jack and Susan broke the Simulation once but failed to escape. With their memories erased, they are still Agents of SYSTEM, separately developing their music careers. But the geostrategic game is constantly interrupted by simulations of nuclear war.
So much for a triptych. Quadriptych?
(There is a trilogy structure here: 0.1, 0.3, 0.4. 0.2 is the odd one out, being more dreamlike and adjacent to the fiction of Novas).
Jack, still working as an Agent for the Company, continues his search for Susan across multiple incarnations of the Simulation. But time is running out.
And since these things seem to come in sets, I felt like this was a triptych: two halves and a centre. The Moon in the middle; the story on each side.
Like the other three, it was an experiment, with a lot of ambient music. But it turns out I really like this one.
In the fiction of Novas, this is Susan’s dream sequence. She’s been having space dreams since her chronologically earlier appearance in 5.3.
Novas 0.1 was an experiment (as all of the Novas project is, an experiment in cyberpunk-aesthetic nostalgia trawling and radically remixed hypermedia on the ragged edge of online rights permission), but it was more experimental than most of these modules because I built it structurally, deliberately layered track by track as a palindrome.
I intended for it to have exactly ten tracks because that’s the parameters I set myself at the start of the project: units of ten or sixteen songs, no repeats.
But Novas 0.1 just didn’t work with ten. It completed a loop, of a kind, with Dance Dance Dance matching and feeding back to Squares And Triangles, but there was no thematic conclusion. No spark plug to it.
Then I found Baba Yaga’s Secret Combination (because they did a cover of Back in the USSR) and that was the missing piece. So after four years, I had to break a ground rule: it had to be eleven songs.
That’s when I suddenly noticed that it was the day of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch. (And also was set number 11 in my internal numbering).
