Is it immodest to say we planned to become gods? We had no choice. We had reached the end of the Way, such as it had any end, and we could not go back…We had no choice but to make our own universe.

To do so, we had to shed all of our material connections. We had to impose ourselves on the foundation of all space and time, beyond and below energy and matter, beyond the touch of the plasma amnion.

I watched my companions wall themselves up in light, great rose windows of personality spreading and blurring at the edges, painted across the walls of the city, using the city’s mass as a temporary restraint against simply dissolving away. The light of each of us touched the light of all. We were drunk with oneness. It was an orgy of incredible proportions. All the remnants of our humanity distilled into a vast merging sexuality. We almost lost sight of our goal. We might have become stunned by our own self-immersion in recognition, love and pleasure, and plunged like a lovesick moth into the furnace…But we regained control, and managed to take the next step.

All that we were, now united, was a frail and very delicate tissue of thought wrapped in and around the remains of the city. We spread those tissues out to the particle winds within the Way, much hotter now with the furnace-egg so near. We toughened, condensed, and finally pushed ourselves through to a level beneath even that of light and energy.

We flowered into the furnace, imposed our will, gave it the impetus to expand by converting the remaining mass of the city into energy, tipping the balance. The unbounded egg began to swell and cool, its plasma amnion condensing and taking shape…

We became shapers of worlds. For a moment, we considered simply reproducing our own birth universe, making galaxies and stars and starting things anew. But we learned quickly that we could not do this. This universe was far more constrained than ours had been. Its roots were humbler, coming not out of the ground of superspace itself, but from the tortured extending of the Way. It would be smaller, less complex, far less ambitious. Still, we could shape it into a fascinating place, a universe that would absorb all our creative abilities…if we were careful.

It is far more difficult to be a god than we could possibly have imagined. We had assumed, from the beginning I suppose, that one conscious will, or a combined conscious will, could shape and control a universe. We focused our pinpoint of will and shaped and made, guided and tuned, in ways that of course I cannot begin to describe, because in this body I cannot remember them, or fit them into my thoughts even if I could remember.