This is my response to the contest being put forth by @juliakponsford and @clayboyn, the creators of the The 7th Gate and the contest to win the first edition of it. I tried to make this comment-length, but I'm a long-form writer and was tempted to write the whole story ... in the end, I whittled it down to three quarters of a page!
Husband and wife Clay and Julia Ponsboyn have been traveling for a long time and no time at all, on a search started by the Ponsboyn inheritance.
What isn't possible with few notes and crypto keys from Clay's father and a supercomputer he built with technology “dropped off” at Roswell, New Mexico, complete with a blockchain on said computer needing only “proof of key” to provide access to the Six Known Gates of Humanoid Experience: Time, Space, Matter, Pain, Pleasure, and Pursuit?
The problem with humanoid experience is that too much is never enough … never enough when traveling through the Sixth Gate of Pursuit and discovering that just beyond reach is the Seventh Gate: Immortality, the Great Real Unknown Of Humanoid Experience in the Present Age.
The Ponsboyns decide to combine their ingenuity, their coding skills, and all their keys to follow a mysterious thread that leads through all the Six Known Gates, on one last and fantastic journey along the blockchain and through the universe in all its experiential aspects.
But both husband and wife begin to see ghostly images of a troubling vision … the Guardian of the Seventh Gate, materializing from the mists that shroud eternity to shadow the Ponsboyns' willful quest to know what no humanoids have ever dared to press into.
Is the Guardian a harbinger of the challenges of the quest, a ghost in the machine as the alien-enhanced blockchain struggles to maintain the human coherence of the hashed forms the Clayboyns must travel in, block by block?
Is the Guardian a warning and a protector against the Solar Consortium, which is seeking to wrest control of the supercomputer and its blockchain through a sybil attack -- an attack made without any idea of the potential consequences to the universe that would come from destabilizing the chain?
Or is the Guardian a representation of what the Seventh Gate was known to be in the old Earth holy books and legends anyhow -- that passage out of humanoid existence in the present age known as death?
Follow the Ponsboyns on their incredible journey to gain access to and pass The Seventh Gate!
Please drop a link in the comments so I don't miss this during judging, if you already did ignore this lol, I have too many notifications!
I did drop a link, but I'll put in another one now!