Shirin stood with her back against the wall. Memories from the god machine flooded her mind anew.
"That dammed machine, they never warn you about the flashes."
She could see and feel it clearly; the other memories. The joy of a new father, the pain of a grieving mother, the trauma of youth who went to war to prove themselves and came back as broken husks...
She felt as though the colossal weight of the memories she had shared with the others would drown her in a sea of madness; the constant screaming of an inner chorus threatened to overwhelm her own psyche.
She could see herself in the places memories hundreds of years old were born. The burning of Earh, the hegira of the Marii towards new suns, the creation of the god machine itself...
"There are walls for a reason. We should not have undone the billion year old works of Sunna for our hubris!"
"A path to god", the Grand Masters called it. "By joining our minds, we mend man's soul."
Damnation felt more accurate, even after being removed from the whole, one is never free from it. The secrets of others were crushing, but there are darker things that lurk the depths of the soul.
What is it to be human anymore? People who can change the characteristics of their flesh at will roamed the streets; ideologies that would have been considered amoral found refuge and thrived across billions of planets; empires, republics, kingdoms, even new types of government inhabited thousands of solar systems.
"The only thing that has never changed is our longing for authority and wholeness." She shook her head.
That is what the god machine was; the ultimate form of authority, the ultimate expression of mankind's gestalt spirit.
One cannot leave the union as much as one cannot cease to be human. After this realization, she linked once more to the machine.
