For a time, it seemed all would go well. We rejoiced in our mastery. We were like a child in a vast playground. The universe became beautiful. We began to shape the equivalents of living and thinking beings, to be our companions, perhaps to hold our own personalities in time. We still yearned for material form. We were still influenced by our origins.

And then it began to fail. The universe ruptured, decayed, rotted. Its boundaries shriveled inward, eating and transforming what order we had established into sour, hot chaos. We had miscalculated. A single will could not create a stable universe. There had to be contrast and conflict.

We desperately tried to separate ourselves into opposing forces to repair the damage. But it was much too late.

The god we had become, failed.

We would have all ceased to exist, dissolved in the falling shreds of our failure. But we heard another voice. It was a less exalted, less ecstatic voice than ours, and it seemed far away. But it was much more practical and experienced, much more diverse. We thought for a time we had heard the voice of another god, or gods, but that was simply our ignorance. However advanced we had become, we were incredibly ignorant and naive.

What we heard was the voice of our descendants, reaching us from the end of our own universe. All the intelligent beings who had grown up and grown old with the cosmos we had been born into, had detected our failure, and felt us trapped within. They were no more material, no more distinguishable as individuals than we were, but theirs was a hardier, more practical intelligence. They had become the Final Mind, at once united and coherent, and yet made up of many individual communities of minds.

They rescued us. Pulled us back along the still-open cord of the Way, never quite severed from our furnace-egg.

Their rescue was not magnanimous. They had a use for us.

Is it appropriate to describe the emotions of a failed god? We were chagrined, deeply embarrassed. We measured ourselves against this other matrix of thought, and saw we were less than infantile: we were puerile. We were young wine aspiring to vintage. We had begotten vinegar.

But we were forgiven, and treated, brought back to the equivalent of health. We were welcomed into the community of thinkers, one and separate at once, who occupied the end of the old universe. They revealed many things to us.

I was reconstituted from the whole of my matrix, isolated—an experience worse than death, I can assure you, worse than loss of family or city or nation or planet. I mourned and went crazy, and they reconstituted me again, with refinements. Finally, after many attempts, they made me stable, and sent me back here.