After a nearly infinite number of years of this unhurried inhalation and exhalation, a scintilla of dust entered nothing.

Nothing swallowed this particle and a mote-sized convulsion, a miniscule choking, an imperceptible gagging on this speck, this impurity, this idea. Like a proto-Jonah it was engulfed but not digested, swam inside the vast nil, blinded by its darkness. Its inner absence. It became an untouchable inner navel within the black hole. That pinprick of mental noise deep within a quiet mind. A bit of grit inside the oyster of the protocosmos. The first queen of the first beehive, her perfect hormone-weather waking the drones and workers into sensibility.

Some might say that this was the origin of our conscience. What might grow into a moral reckoning. The itch of guilt or the deeper burn of shame. A pebble dropped into the deep end of the pool.

A tremendous force began bending the nothing within itself, a spring or a bow being drawn inward further and further, tighter and tighter to the point of breaking. When the bow was as thin as nothing itself, when the strap was as thin as sound, there was a great release. And from this violent freeing of energy hurtled a billion pieces of light with a thick protective halo of space around each of them.

Each dense portion of space unfurled and expanded like a lustrous flower opening toward the sun. Something opaque and endless thinned a nearly imperceptible amount. Somewhere else, a sheet of darkness began cracking, moving inward from its unseeable edges.

Eventually, through a series of violent clashes, Earth was born and glistened blue and green, and life began its cycles of formation, competition, adaptation, evolution, and extinction. There was and there shall be no escape from this great wheel, this inescapable machine. The land choked with lava, hot then hard. The evolution of the eye. Fearsome creatures from nightmares and dreams.

Unfathomable oceans of ice scraped their way across the surface of the planet, trapping and grinding everything to frozen dust and carving out vast scars and bowls.

Handprints on the walls of caves and spears sharpened. Primates walking upright. What we call hominids. Afarensis, africanus, habilis, erectus, and others. Axes. Necklaces and earrings.

Theft. Abandonment. The first murder.

Gods invented, feared, and prayed to. Sacrifices of all kinds. Animals roped and yoked. Virginity named and fetishized. Priestesses. The first kings and queens. Altars and the first permanent structures built. Architects and slaves. Grave goods buried with their illustrious owners for use in the unending afterworld. Copper, bronze, iron, silver, gold. Sword and shield. Horses and soldiers. Money and its malcontents. Seductions and infidelities.

The idea of crime. The invention of the criminal. Banishment and exiles. Other punishments to the mind and body.

Architects and inventors.

Churches and temples and altars.

Mazes and labyrinths.

The first prison.

Prisoners.

Part One: Asterion and a Peculiar Apparatus