57 | BIRTH
It took a moment before anything happened. As if the universe needed to draw a breath.
There was just blackness, and in the blackness, without the guiding hand of the neuro-browser, he was alone, suspended in the void.
Sam barely noticed the dot at first, just a tiny pinprick in the blackness. It grew and resolved itself into a tiny spiral of light; then that began to grow, larger and larger until it consumed all his vision. Still it grew, a massive vortex of stars roaring toward him or sucking him toward it—there was no way of knowing which. And then the implosion, the impossible implosion of everything there ever was, all at once.
He was a young boy on his first day of school in South Korea and a retired stockbroker in Amsterdam.
He was a Greek shipping billionaire, bloated, bored, and choking on excess and an elderly woman on her deathbed in Vancouver.
He was everyone and no one.
He was the world and they were him.
It was information beyond any hope of understanding. Assimilating. Processing.
The very cells of his brain seemed to quiver as he fought against the deluge, the tsunami of images, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, memories, knowledge.
There was no hope. There was no way.
No human being could withstand this.
This much he did finally understand amidst the torrent, and even with the realization that he could not possibly cope with the overload came the realization that it was already too late to shut it off.
Sam gave himself over to the neuro-network, knowing as he did so that the person he was would be gone—forever. The cells of his brain shook violently, faster and faster, then exploded in a fury of starburst and blinding light.
He did not resist. He stopped trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, to understand the impossible, to stretch out and touch infinity.
He let go, and the world flooded inside his head, and he screamed and screamed again and again.
He became the network. The network became him.