“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.