"I realized, the moment I fell into the fissure, that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse, of which I had only a fleeting glimpse. I've tried to speculate where it might have landed; I must admit, however, that such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions may never be allayed, and so, I close, realizing that perhaps the ending to this story has not yet been written." — Atrus, Myst, Cyan Software
Be warned that while these documents have been exhaustively surveyed for integrity, no effort has been made to purge them of memetic hazards. Researchers are advised to equip themselves with a Personal Infoscape Protective Envirofilter, class 4 or stronger, and proceed with caution.
Owing to the incompleteness of the record, the assembled metatextual corpus does not form a single directed graph. An index of the recovered documents follows, to aid researchers in their perusal and descent.
This concludes these recovered histories of the Mess. Surviving researchers are encouraged to document their own experiences at the Department of Time Stabilization's oral history project. The timeline you save may be your own!
— The Archivist