“It was his nickname for Clarity,” she said. “Back in the early days, we were debating names for it. Everything felt either too familiar or too desperately hip. He started calling it Purgatorium then. Made jokes about the ads, how we’d promise to take all of human stress and anxiety and put it on hold, a reprieve. It stood out because it’s an odd phrase, you know? Purgatory, fine. Purgatorium is Latin, though—it’s not the kind of word that just comes to the tip of the tongue.”
