Later, measured here in fractions of fractions, sitting in a field of pure light, elements of thought coalesce. Pieces of something that was once a human, that once made the human, but are now separate. Fragments of idea. Bits of emotion. Opinion. They clutch together, absorb into the nothingness and into the everything-ness that is and was and forever shall be the Central Inspector.
The body of Bexie Montgomery lay somewhere.
Far away or maybe near.
There is no space in the Central Inspector’s Office, only time and ideas, requests and responses.
Bexie feels that sense of now as he removes his oneness from the smoldering core of proto mass. As the smell of ash fills time around him he sees the Central Inspector for exactly what it is.
“We can’t change things,” he says. “Can’t protect them from who they are.”
“You do not understand them as I do.”
Bexie feels the lobe pulsing. Electrons twirl and spiral, hiss a song of infinite permanence as they build in his thoughts. Somewhere in the song he understands a truth. Somewhere is the essence of power. What it means to be so human, to be so fixed on keeping each other from winning that he missed the obvious.
“No. I will never understand who we are,” he says. Somewhere in the portions of his thought that are leeching away, he feels another truth, though. “It is our nature to avoid seeing what we don’t want to see.”