A savage exaltation took hold of me then, in those final few brief moments. My body had been destroyed by the humans’ particle beam weapons and it was only a matter of time before it was all over for me. It was only a matter of a few brief moments. But what could I not do in those few moments, I marvelled? What could I not do?
Rain was hissing down unrelentingly outside, bouncing off all the cars parked in the street. Neon advertising lit up the sky and the chaotic tumult of hundreds of gaming machines filled the air. Gingerly I touched the top of my head to make sure it was still there. I was suffering from the mother of all headaches and my mouth was dry as a Gobi desert. Every time I moved my eyes golden tracer-patterns occluded my vision. I wondered how I could feel so bad and yet still be walking around. Probably it was because walking around was the easier option – easier than sitting still.
Reality was slowly coming back together in my head. It was reassembling itself in bite-size portions – a fragment here, a fragment there. Just because it was reality that didn’t mean that it had to make sense though, I reflected. The central anomaly still had to be resolved. The ‘central anomaly’ was my own part in all this. Either the reality that had now manifested itself to me made sense and I did not, or it was the other way around. The two couldn’t make sense at the same time.
Icy cold rain was hissing down on the pavement in unending sheets. I felt rather than saw the brutal grey January sky pressing down on me as I walked the streets. In my fantasy I was more than human – far, far more. In my fantasy I was a fragment of some vast inhuman intelligence – an intelligence without bounds, an intelligence without any limit. As alien and strange as this limitless awareness was to me, it was also astonishingly comfortable and I somehow felt bizarrely at home in it. Whatever came into my head I understood instantly, quite without any effort on my part. This inhuman intelligence, which was at the same total time both mine and not mine was like some sort of extraordinarily sharp knife – a knife that could cut through anything it encountered. My understanding was absolute – everything I came across dissolved immediately in the face of this radical awareness. All apparent problems dissolved, leaving nothing whatsoever behind. My consciousness was vast and all encompassing – like a cloudless sky.
I stumbled as I walked – my body severely weakened by the ordeal it had just gone through. The drugs I was taking to maintain the functioning of my higher psychic faculties were no longer working effectively – the dosage I needed to use was now unfeasible, verging on harmful. And yet I could not stop. I had caught a glimpse of the enemy awaiting me and I knew I was approaching the final showdown. The adversary had me in his sights. Curiously enough however, I was not afraid. There was no fear within me. I felt on the contrary strangely light inside. I was full of quiet joy – serenity even – as I walked. I knew that I was no longer human. I was as far from human as it was possible to be.
In my fantasy I was the God-Machine – capable of existing outside the space-time continuum, capable of bending matter and energy to my will, capable of rewriting the fundamental laws of the universe, capable of altering the fundamental cosmic constants merely by thinking about them. I had been defeated once, a long time ago, but it would not happen again.
