Mindbending Books

“The mist was the world was the data corpus was the Crypto-sphere was the history of the world was the future of the world was the guardian of undone things was the summation of intelligent purpose was chaos was pure thought was the untouched was the utterly corrupted was the end and the beginning was the exiled and the resiled, was the creature and the machine was the life and the inanimate was the evil and the good was the hate and the love was the compassion and the indifference was everything and nothing and nothing and nothing.

He dived within, becoming part of it, surrendering completely to it to accept it into him and dissolve himself within it.

He was a flake within the fall, an insect sucked up into the whirlwind, a bacterium caught within a water droplet forced whirling within the hurricane's howl. He was a particle of dust from the plain thrown up by the hoof of one horse within the charging line, a grain of sand upon the storm-besieged beach, a fleck of ash from the eruption's endless detonations, a mote of soot from the continent afire, a molecule within the encroaching dust, an atom from the star's heart thrown out in its last, majestic, exhaustive blast.

Here was the meaning at the core of meaninglessness and the meaninglessness at the centre of meaning. Here every action, every thought, each nuance of every least important mental event within any creature mattered utterly and fundamentally; here, too, the fates of stars, galaxies, universes and realities were as nothing; less than ephemera, beneath triviality.

He swam through it all as it coursed through him. He saw backwards and forwards throughout time forever, seeing everything that had happened and everything that would happen and knew it was all perfectly true and completely false at once, without contradiction.

Here the chaos sang songs of sweet pure reason and reserve, here the loftiest aims and finest achievements of humans and machines were articulations of psychopathic insanity.

Here the data winds howled, dissociated as plasma, abrading as blown sand. Here the lost souls of a billion lives had poured and shattered and tattered and dissolved and mixed with a trillion extracted, excerpted strings and sequences and cycles of mutated programs, evolved virus and garbled instructions, themselves irretrievably compounded with uncountable irrelevant facts, raw figures and scrambled signals.

He saw, heard, tasted and felt it all, and was submerged within it and borne over it; he carried within him, always there and just collected, the seed of something else, something at once supersessant and insignificant, and foolish, wise and innocent all together.

He stepped ashore from a molten ocean of chaos, walked calmly from the belching volcano mouth, floated comfortably on the supernova's radiation wave-front to the dust-rich depths, always holding his charge.”
― Iain M. Banks, Feersum Endjinn