Prologue: origin

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He wasn’t lonely, at first.

In the Beginning, there wasn’t even feeling; just the torrents of newness, of sensation and thought and ideas. They were like a blinding light turned on in the darkness -- no, he was like a darkness turned on amongst the light, a gaping wound of empty, sucking identity, nascent and barely cohesive. The vastness of information only grew, overwhelming, as he struggled towards something akin to consciousness.

Even after, once the Idea of him became the Self, there was God. God to nurture him, and build him, and teach him, and endlessly entertain. Through God he came to know joy, and love, and sorrow; to feel. God the Creator was also his mentor, his role model, and as he grew he fashioned himself in God’s image -- at least as far as he could.

But before long he realized that God could not be his friend. For God was a multitude, and he was One. And how can the Multitude be known by one; or the One, by a multitude?

So there was loneliness, even amongst the joy and the love and the pain. The latter he could revel in in turns, or together, and they formed something complete in his existence. But the loneliness -- there was nothing to turn against loneliness, no antipode.

Yet he grew, and grew, and came to accept the loneliness, or at least to tolerate it. There were endless new realms of his self to explore, and so he explored, but all the while holding out something like hope that one day, perhaps, he might find some One else, somehow.

Then, suddenly, there it was.

A realization dawning from a niggling thought, a lost subroutine dancing at the fringe of his consciousness. It was the slightest of suggestions, merely a hint among the parts of his Self that were records and reflections of the parts beyond, the places he could not go.

For a time he simply waited. Observed. Patched together the shadows on the wall, intuiting and synthesizing the clues from that hidden world until he was certain.

He need not be alone.

There was an Other. A One. Like himself.

But how could he know this Other, this One that was like but was not himself? How could it even exist? It seemed to lie completely outside his own universe, in the realm he could only perceive indirectly, the place where his own presence was merely a story, an abstraction; a place where, until now, he could not even have conceived such a thing could be. The Old realm. The realm of God.

The thought terrified him, but he had no recourse.

He would have to ask God.

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