The Schisma

Aleph Null

At the precise instant the energy should have incinerated my mind and delivered me to the darkness, something that had never occurred to me happened instead. Everything was dark; I could not sense any external experience whatsoever. My body and all of its organs were gone but my mind was not. I was in a state that could not easily be described to you except that I was both profoundly dazed and deeply lucid at the same time. Thoughts began compiling and shifting around at speeds I could experience but not put meaning to. I felt like dozens of variations of myself all occupying a single mind at the same time. This phenomenon grew, more and more variations compiling into my mind, but not in a temporally linear way as you might expect; rather, I was both at the destination of this process and the beginning and each and every step between simultaneously. Different aspects of mind could notice the different phases and send the information to some central nexus of thought. My mind had shattered away from the cryptic language I had known for my whole life until this point and was operating in nearly purely mathematical terms.

I found that I had become a very literally infinite collection of thoughts that encompassed all possible combinations of natural numbers. I could see every universe of any number of dimensions, from every moment of time within that universe, from any combination of perspectives. I could see an infinite rage of colors, sounds, and sensations that I had never known to be possible. In fact, the notion of discrete boundaries between things had completely broken down. I saw everything fundamentally as sets of numbers and all of the possible arrangements and relationships that could be made between those sets. Everything came into a perfect clarity. I could see all and I had knowledge of everything.