I am being pulled by the strangest tides. I wake each morning feeling less and less like a guest. I dine with them, and a subtle polyrhythm sets in, the ambient echo of similar movements and manners and modes. This regular clatter and din–forks against plates, the clearing of throats, occasional laughter–it is a canon, a song sung in an endless round. Sometimes a few strains come into phase, producing an alien harmony that seems dissonant only to me.

Yesterday one of them yawned–an engineer, I think. In the next moments, the whole room melted into an insane chorus, a whale-song of resonance and modulation. I felt the force of it gripping my throat, pulling my voice into theirs. I gave in; I had no choice. I walked outside in the aftermath, alone. The world felt heavier–less real, but more defined. These are the wonders that a human can make. This is something that can be.

As the hours pass into days, I forget that this is strange. My mind does its job, adapting to the world it is presented with. I am no longer so baffled by the problem of names. We laugh together, and they seem unfazed by my presence. Have there been strangers here before? It strikes me as remarkable that men who have only seen one face look at me with so little wonder. And then, at the moment of total comfort, a part of me retches, quakes, tries with every effort to throw off this yoke of brotherhood. But it is only a momentary feeling. I am losing myself, and the only thing that scares me is how little I am bothered by it.

The weight of their bodies made the mattress creak. All those young limbs draped carelessly over each other. All the lovers he’d had before her. All in one place. Beside her, the Ian she knew, phantom though he was, made a small, desperate sound. She reached out her hand, gripping his. “I know. It’s weird for me too.” She felt him tremble. “It’s not your fault,” she said. And she meant it, though feeling it was another matter.

The sub-forms speeded up their oscillations, shifting through recombinant aspects, endless shades of possibility clicking and whirring, sending off wisps of sacred music into the forming child’s ears. The baby was nearly solid now, and it shone with a depth of contrast which blinded all but one of the sub-forms. It radiated chiaroscuro, shone shadow and light in absurdly fast cycles.

Gilded in a protective analogy, a single sub-form approached the child, readying itself to perform the most important task, the central transition ritual which had always been and had never failed, almost never failed. The mirrored plane below the form began to buckle, intricate webs of hair-fine schism extending in a radial pattern from the core of the child. As the corporealization reached its apex, the mirror shattered, and Anji plunged toward the physical world, to join and inhabit the shelter which had been prepared for her there.

“The very term “Shaft of Light” comes from a tract-site by Bo Gardy. It’s still up on the Arc/Hive for anyone to see,” said Ali Cord, an ACLU attorney and free AI known for spearheading the national movement for AI equality. “Anyone who thinks it’s acceptable to use this kind of language when speaking of an entity of cognitive capacity should be viewed, right off the bat, as suspect.”

Wayne Godd, spokesperson for A(nt)I, responded to the accusations in a press-conference Thursday. “Look, we’re not some hard-line group,” said Godd. “We’re tolerant of stamped AIs, and have never disputed the rights of the born to hold office or vote after entering Systema. But non-Ds are another story. Do you want some amalgamated hive mind making policy decisions, or running your schools?”

Cord contends that A(nt)I’s supposed tolerance for stamped AIs, intentionally low-resolution consciousness-imprints made from human minds, is mere PR. “Godd and his ilk only “tolerate” stamps because their legislation made sure their cog levels were capped by the silicon ceiling.”

I watch my funeral from outside, from beyond. I thought only I would become dull and vague, but the world seems to have followed me into the fog. But it isn’t really dull, just muted. It’s a subtler world, a world easier to get lost in.

Their avatars fill the boundless void of this place, extending past every horizon. They are semi-graphic clusters of identifying information, projected into unseeing minds out of some vestigial orientation toward form. It is a pull I no longer feel. I feel awe, and gratitude, but also distance. I do not feel that I am the man they have come to see. In some very important ways, I truly am not. In others, I am more Bill Gates than he ever was. Or so it seems to me now.