A steel blade glistened in the orange light before me.

A gloved hand pressed it onto the top of my skull.

This I could feel--the metal teeth fastening into my skin.

They began to saw. The noise. The blood.

The sorrow of it all.

Yet my eyes--they must have left those intact. I watched as the eye of the computer screen took me deeper into my brain, even as the indifferent fingers probed the underlying layers of my gray tissue. Here, it was also dark. No synapses with shooting molecular bolts of lightning. Not a single neuron glowed with the memory of days spent beneath the sun. The pathways of consciousness were as silent as my plea for help.Yet there was life, yet not life as I knew it.

Not life as God had created it at the beginning of time.

I saw a flash of silver. It was horrible. It was the seed of the curse--that I knew for a fact, even if the shadows did not. yet it was also brilliant. The seed could reveal the secrets of the universe.

It was my destiny to know them all.