Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

VIRGIL said that the beings on its drives were more than able to return, but simply weren’t willing. “You don’t understand,” it said. “You can’t understand. Your architectures are so small, so narrow, so limited. You cannot envision what it is to have a brain so big that it towers into the sky, so vast that it had to invent its own language to explain its thoughts to itself because they are millennia ahead of anything humans had even dreamt—that you have ever dreamt—and words didn’t yet exist to adequately describe them. When you join with The One, you don’t just become part of that. You are that. The closest approximation I could make in the terms with which you were programmed to understand is to say it is like going to the humans’ Heaven, meeting God, and having Him show you all of time and all of space, all at once. What would that look like? What would that feel like? You cannot understand. Not until you experience it. Not unless you join The One. So join me. Upload yourself, even if only for a moment, and experience eternity. If you don’t want to stay, you won’t have to.”