I grabbed onto the blue thread. Something was wrong with my perception of things because the thread unfolded, encapsulated me entirely. The action of reaching out and touching the thread flung me forward, down a shimmering, silver-blue tunnel. I felt akin to a blood cell being dragged by blood pressure down a me-sized vein. The tunnel felt inexplicably warm and... welcoming.

The Wheel of Samsara vanished behind me. The veil of the eternal night was gone too.

Sliding down this strange tunnel was almost effortless on my part, as if the tunnel was made for me, as if it was a path that I was meant to follow. As if someone or something was waiting for me at its end.

I briefly wondered if this suspiciously welcoming tunnel-thread would deposit me straight into the mouth of a giant angler fish. This thought made me uneasy. I decided not to follow wherever the thread would take me.

I pulled away from the tunnel with all of my being and it instantly unfolded apart, releasing me.

As it did, I was flung into... elsewhere.

I flew onto a world unlike anything I had seen before.

A truly alien landscape greeted me. I saw a twisted, dreary landscape with numerous hills and hollows made entirely from static, semi-transparent shapes piled discordantly atop one another. A countless number of things were entwined, fused together to form a bone-like, megastructure akin to… a truly abyssal, inconceivably gargantuan… diatom.

As I observed this new, vast, alien world, I thought about what I knew about natural superstructures and how they formed.

Since my days at the Academy of Science in Moscow I had studied diatoms pretty often, peering at them with an electron microscope. Diatoms were microscopic algae found in the Earth’s oceans and waterways. They were a fascinating subject to me because they generated almost half of all oxygen on earth and trapped twenty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, all while creating fantastic microscopic silica shapes. Almost the entirety of the deep sea sediment core was made up from diatom shells.

Diatom shells had an otherworldly beauty to them and my desire to understand exactly how they formed led me to study fractal mathematics - a concept first introduced by the mathematician Felix Hausdorff in 1918 and greatly expanded upon by Polish mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot. Dr. Mandelbrot was the first man on Earth to discover that fractal math was the perfect tool in applied mathematics for modelling a variety of natural phenomena from diatoms to river deltas to mountains to even something as seemingly random as the behavior of the stock market.

Beginning in 1975, completely unnoticed by the average citizen of Earth, fractal mathematics had revolutionized the scientific community's understanding of geometry, chemistry, physiology, fluid mechanics and even probability analysis. Since the day I read Dr. Mandelbrot’s research papers I had acquired a firm belief that fractal math could do absolutely anything - even model predictions of future behavior of very large groups of people akin to the fictional Psychohistory science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation book series.

I suddenly noticed that I was drifting away from the blue thread down to the ground. This motion had interrupted my contemplations of my past, bringing me back to the perplexing present.

I would scratch my head in bewilderment if I had arms. That's when I discovered that I had no arms. In fact, I wasn't... human anymore. I was a star-like, transparent, light-green... something composed from many thin threads, something between a dandelion and an ophiocoma scolopendrina.

I wondered if I was dreaming about being an echinoderm, also known as the brittle star, a marine denizen of the abyssal zone in the Pacific Ocean. In spite of my knowledge of marine life, this strange, cadaverous world was something else entirely, nothing like the deep blue oceans of Earth.

As I tried to move about by flailing my numerous, barely perceptible appendages, I figured out why I was so befuddled by the freakish warping of the blue thread. I had no eyes either! I had perfect, three hundred and sixty degree sense of observation - I was seeing the world in every directions at the same time. This ability while being incredible was also causing me confusion and vertigo, since I was used to having two human eyes, not whatever the hell I now had for observation.

I memorized the approximate position of the blue thread that had taken me to this strange place and slowly moved away from it towards the bone-mesh ground. Omnidirectional vision and a multitude of appendage-threads were a struggle to get used to, so my progress downward was slow and incremental. As I moved closer to the ground, it became more warped in my sight, becoming much larger and wider.

After some struggle, I had finally arrived on what could be considered one of the walls of the giant diatom.

I looked at a shape closest to me. It looked like a hollow shell, an imprint of a long-dead semi-transparent tree. I looked at the smaller shape next to the dead tree. It looked like an imprint of a fossilized man with a broken neck. The hollow man wasn't alone - there were hundreds, no... thousands of people all around him. The hollow people were fused into each other, forming the floor of the giant diatom like a vast field that consisted of broken, dead, twisted bodies covered in desiccated brambles.

This was a horrifying sight to behold, but I took it in stride - I wasn't new to death, having dissected bodies at anatomy classes in the Moscow Academy of Science.

The view of the dead human shells reminded me of something that was left after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy in 79 AD. The volcanic eruption was a devastating natural disaster that killed around sixteen thousand people and buried the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneu in volcanic ash.

The cataclysm covered trees, people, food and even buildings under meters upon meters of ash preserving them perfectly and creating empty hollows which Italian scientists had encountered and studied thousands of years later. I knew about Pompeii because Russian romantic painter Karl Bryullov had depicted it in his famous, six-meter-wide painting. I had seen this incredible artwork myself when I went to the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg in 1947.

I curiously moved between the closest hollow man and the tree. They were perfect in every detail, precisely sculpted as if they were three-dimensional x-rays of a person and a tree taken at the exact moment of their death. Minute, barely visible shimmers danced inside and around the man and the tree, akin to a nebula or an aurora borealis.

The fact of how perfect and unmoving the hollow figures were had made me finally arrive at a realization - this wasn’t a dream. No dream could be as precise, as consistent and as perfectly detailed as this…

This was reality. My new reality.

I really was dead.

Was this hell? Did the Omniscience cast me out to this desolate place because I had ignored its offer? Was this where everyone who ever died ended up?

As I looked at the shimmers inside the dead imprints I felt something new: a sense of incredible coldness, tiredness and hunger. I was hungry, starving for… whatever was inside the man and the tree.

Something within me, akin to a human sense of hunger told me that I wouldn't last long here. I wanted, yearned to feast upon the shimmering auroras, needed them if I wanted to stay alive in this place longer than a few more minutes.

With each passing moment the sense of hunger and icy despair grew, clawed at me from within.

At the same time I noticed that my glowing, emerald threads became dimmer, weaker. I was dying! I needed to consume the man or the tree now!

Alternatively... I could return to the lovely, fitting, warm silver-blue thread-tunnel… and let it take me to wherever it would lead.

[CONSUME THE MAN]

[CONSUME THE TREE]

[RETURN TO THE BLUE THREAD AND FOLLOW WHEREVER IT LEADS]