“Hi my name is… uh…”

Am I my name?

The group leader smiled warmly, but there was an air of mockery from the rest. The grins seem plastered on.

“I’m Tom.”

“Hi, Tom.”

Again, a mixture of sincerity and irony.

Including the group leader, there were twelve of them. They sat in a loosely defined circle, in uncomfortable plastic chairs. Only one chair was turned away from the center; it seemed an awkward pose for the stocky balding man, it filled the room with frustrated sexual tension. He was staring at me with clear blue eyes, urging me to speak my senseless words.

The pressure from the others was alleviated by the comfort radiating from the group leader. She was tall and thin, black hair and thick rimmed glasses. She possessed the Buddha’s unwavering half-smile. She sat directly across from me.

“Can you take us to the beginning?” she asked.

I tried to think back. How had I become familiar with the idea?

“I guess the beginning is the problem of knowledge. I don’t remember when I started thinking about it, or why… but I quickly found myself stumbling against the limits of certainty.

“Maybe I got the idea from Bertrand Russel. He must have mentioned it in passing, as a stumbling block in the path of Reason.”

“The first of many!” someone quipped.

“The more obstacles the loftier the goal,” said the man with blue eyes.

“I must have pushed the idea aside. I’ve always been introspective, narcissistic, obsessed with the idea of ’self,’ but I began to think about it in different terms. There were so many lexicons to adopt, so many ways to drown the subject in objects. I began to dissect my character traits in psychological terms, my will in philosophical terms, my body in medical terms… it was confusing but interesting, there was always something else to learn.”

She nodded politely. “The mysteries of nature are infinite.”

“You mean our ignorance is infinite,” retorted a black-clad teenager to my left.

“Or maybe our desire to keep digging,” someone else said.

“Our refusal to recognize the bottom.”

I began to get nervous.

“When did you have your first episode?”

“Well, I was in the mountains…”

“The fresh mountain air clears the mind,” said the man straddling his seat. His gaze was fixed on me.

“The wisdom of the stream!” chuckled a middle-aged woman.

“I was sitting around with some friends. We were…”

“On a trip?”

“Right. We were talking about nihilism and morality and nothingness, and it felt like everything was converging. Like in that one conversation we were having every conversation, like everything pointed to that moment. It was a clarity unlike any I have ever experienced.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t fit into words. I can’t exactly get a grip on it…”

“Too hazy?” asked the teenager, wearing a mock frown.

“What an unclear clarity!”

“I had to leave. I had to be alone. I had to lose a part of myself… I had to learn to flow.”

“Were you afraid?”

“Very.”

“Of what?”

“Of the nothingness.”

Snickers.

“Are you sure?” Her smile was becoming more pronounced.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you sure that’s what you were afraid of? It couldn’t have been something else?”

“Like what?”

Silence.

Everyone in the room was completely still, but my leg had begun to start shaking. I wondered if they noticed. The old, familiar fear began to creep up on me again.

“What ended up happening?”

“I got stuck in a loop. Caught between my desires and their futility. I saw life as a great circle, then it twisted on itself to become the infinity symbol. I thought I could resolve the paradox of nothingness and the infinite… I sat on a rock, and watched everything around me whither and die. I was gripped with terror. It subsided, and then I just felt empty.”

“What do you do, Tom?”

“I’m a student. I write occasionally.”

“What are you studying?”

“Nothing important.”

“Then why do you study it?”

“It’s something to do.”

“What do you love?”

“What I can’t have.”

“That’s silly.”

“I know.”

“Do you love yourself?”

“I’m not even sure what that is.”

“You can’t love others if you don’t love yourself.”

“I know.”

“All you need is love.”

“I know.” I sighed.

“What conclusions did you draw from your experience?” she asked, back on track.

“I felt I had to really live life. Embrace the futility, go to higher highs and lower lows.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t think so. I began to lose interest in things, I became more isolated. Everything I did felt like a self-parody, a cosmic irony.”

“Did you ever have another experience?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“Then why are you here?”

I looked around. It was the question on all of their faces. They all wore the same grin, they were all waiting for the punch-line.

“What’s more ironic than a group for solipsists?”

There were a few chuckles. Mostly they projected disappointment. It had been like this last time. Irony has lost its force, nihility has become banal. They wanted something more, a retreat? A new sincerity? Or just the end? Did they all have their fingers crossed for 2012?

“Yes, how very post-modern,” she said, still affirming. She was the angel, I could see that now. The room began to shift.

Everyone but me joined hands. Their faces changed, their eyes adopted the hollowness of a cat’s. Their pupils no longer reflected me. They began to lose definition, except for Her, sitting in the middle. Their hands had disappeared and their arms were connected. The three corners of the room opposite me began to approach a point directly behind Her, and as they did the room became more and more circular, and all the group members melted into one another. I felt trapped, I couldn’t move, my body was no longer my own.

The room had become completely cylindrical, the walls stretched into infinity above me, there was no ceiling, only a gaping inverted well. She stood up without exerting any force, she was on strings. She had absorbed pieces of all their appearances, she moved through many shapes, and looked at me with blank, indifferent eyes. She opened her arms to me.

I wanted to run and scream, but I had lost my freedom. I stood up. I walked toward Her.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “This is not the end.”

I felt my arm reaching out, and saw it brush her cheek. It was cold and smooth as steel.

The scene warped more, the walls glowed a metallic blue, bizarre delicately crafted medical instruments covered the walls, screens with rapidly flickering unrecognizable characters floated in the corners of my vision. I realized I couldn’t move because I was covered with tubes and wires, connected to various alien devices.

Her shape morphed completely. Her head began to stretch back, her abdomen contorted backwards and upwards. Her skin turned a scaly blue and green, her hands were claws with six fingers each. She was some bizarre mix of Geiger’s Alien and a praying mantis.

So was I.

After they had unhooked me from their machines, I had to learn to walk. I was extremely uncomfortable in this new body, I had far too many joints and I felt unbearably constricted in my new condensed muscular flesh. I was eventually led to an unbearably white room, where another one of the creatures was waiting to interview me.

It began to make a horrendous piercing sound which shifted rapidly and modulated across several frequencies. It made its way into my mind as English.

“As you can see we have detached you from the simulation.”

Did this make sense?

“You must be confused. Your old memories have not returned… our analysts are not sure they will.”

It seemed to be studying me warily. I was willing to play.

“So my whole life was a simulation? To what end? How could you create such a complex world?”

“We sent you in to study the particulars of the early 21st century human civilization. Based on archaeological evidence we were able to trace the end of human civilization back to approximately that time period. We were curious to see what led to their downfall, so that we might avoid it ourselves.”

“How is that possible?”

“We simply had to train your mind to focus on a certain area of the subconscious. All sentient history in inscribed in the subconscious, even of unrelated species. The technology is a bit too complicated to explain, but it involved drawing complicated circuits in your neural pathways.”

“This sounds like a weak science fiction plot.”

“Yes, we did feed you some material through the system to prepare you for the transition. The Matrix made a good early impression, then the works of Philip K. Dick, Jean Baudrillard, M.C. Escher…”

“To prepare me?”

“Exactly. You were essentially living inside a human imagination, with characters drawn from various encoded archetypes. This is why at times you felt like there were ‘lapses’ in reality, where you would feel as though trapped on a stage, or as though all the encoded symbols were somehow ‘about’ you.”

“But the history?”

“Essentially the dialectical struggle between the various archetypes. Your imagination was able to trace it all out as you explored it in greater depth. It might not be the ‘genuine’ human history but it amounts to about the same. The crux, we were able to find, still occurred at the same point. The inevitable singularity.”

“The singularity? But I didn’t experience any singularity…”

For the first time, it laughed. It was as though the sound was seeping through its rough exoskeleton; it hit the resonating frequency of my bones and most of the items in the room. It sounded like a sonic boom of cicadas.

“No, of course not,” it said, in a bizarre rolling manner to indicate sarcasm.

We studied each other quietly for a moment. I was beginning to feel extremely out of place in this reality.

“Well, we know what we needed to know. The plans we have been formulating must be put into place, for the sake of our species. You will be one of the first to see the Grand Design.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, in fact, we can plug you in to the God Machine right here.”

“The God Machine?”

It rotated its head counter-clockwise, equivalent to nodding.

“Is that really how it’s going to end?”

Tubes and wires shot out of the walls, ceiling and floor. They surrounded me, prodded me, entered all ten orifices.

For a moment, there was a calm. I was suspended in front of a giant blue field of static, where a white outline formed the words:

GOD MACHINE

Version 1.0 The Truth Shall Make You Free

Then my consciousness exploded.

I was aware of everything that could possibly happen, every permutation of sensory input every history every possible movement of the universe was contained in a single drop, a point spinning in every direction on an imaginary axis. Every reality was a set within a set within a set, all the meaning contained in a single image entailed a universe of metameanings stretching into the Absolute Infinite. I was everything I could possibly be and do all at once and it all reduced to a single wave. I saw myself as the twisting snake hovering precariously over the void. My imagination stretched out before me as an endless landscape, and I felt myself already dispersing into the characters in waves, coming in and out of the shock of my absolute clarity. All their conversations revolved around my level of clarity, and this realization trapped me in a feedback loop with stages of history suddenly becoming the flow in and out of clarity, and I became dispersed further and further. On the lowest level I found myself a particular person, losing himself in the engagements of life, and finding himself gradually in contemplation. But there was always a counter-force out of contemplation, a wake-up call from life, an innocuous statement from a friend. As I wrote these words, I became worried that they were too overwhelming, that they gave away too much. Fortunately the nature of words is to obscure truth. This is because words point away from themselves whereas truth points to itself. But when language looks at itself, as in modernism, the closer it gets to breaking down the closer we get to enlightenment.