It is difficult to relate directly the events of that night and the changes they precipitated. O’Hara and I have gone over them time and again, she under deep hypnosis, myself working in parallel with machine intelligences more large, deep, subtle, and quick than I.

Even if you were a machine and I was telling you this story directly, you would only see a set of outlines of it—outlines not in the organization sense, but outlines as silhouettes, simulacra of truth. In the total sum of those simulacra, you would know what I know.

Telling the story to soft humans, it is not so much that words fail. In fact, words are appropriate quanta because of their multiplicity of meanings, their radiational and reflective powers: when I say “heat” to you, free of context, the small word carries associations of anger, thirst, passion, pain, drowsiness, as well as whatever host of personal connections the word releases from your own experience, your own ideolect. (To me, until some other context is indicated, “Heat” is a kind of energy transferred from regions of higher temperature to those of lower temperature.) It is not words that fail but rather the structures that we, machine as well as flesh, are constrained to put them into: structures defined and delimited by human consciousness.

Because something other than that is at work here.

Allow me to relate the incidents of that night and morning as if these were O’Hara’s words; in fact, they are the distillation of millions of words and trillions of associated somatic measurements.

Dan’s snoring woke me up in the middle of the night and I weighed the comfort of the warm blanket against the discomfort of holding back and decided to go pee. I put on a robe against the slight chill, breeze off the lake, but left the hat and knife on their pegs. The walkway to the toilet was covered now.

The thing was waiting in the rafters outside the toilet. It let me go inside and relieve myself. When I stepped back out, it fell and enveloped me.

There was a sharp pain on the top of my head, like being stuck by a pin. I tried to scream but couldn’t draw a breath; the membrane was fast against my mouth and nose.

It spoke to me: Don’t cry out. I will let you breathe, but you must be quiet. The order was clear and specific, though it was not in English, not in words. I nodded, and a hole opened in front of my mouth. When I had taken a couple of breaths without calling for help, the membrane that clasped me from head to knees slowly relaxed its grip.