Inert and unfeelng, bound by invisible shackles, tethered to darkness in every ordination of time or space, alone with the singularity of his mind. Ancient mystics would have called it transcendence, a liminal state, oneness with the mind of God, unity through dissolving, self-annihilation.
It was nothing of the sort.
Out-of-body experiences were a trivial thing, a second nature to this new psionic breed of humanity. Total environmental awareness, at all times, and to have that taken away...
Blindness, on a plane inconceivable to a living mind. Trapped in a house of memories, instincts, and ideations where every door was a mirror opening to another distortion of himself. Naked, in a world without eyes.
The triumph of solipsism.
Diogenes was going mad.
But madness was relative, and the universe no longer existed. He was not so different from God, in this newfound paradigm of existence. None would argue the point, at least.
A circuit of electrical life edifying itself into self-contemplation over the paradox of identity in a realm without definition.
Somewhere, he knew, his body lay slumped and useless, his brain, the divine impetus of this new creation, toiling on in dumb persistence, ignorant to the marvelous fractals within itself. Somewhere, Hell reigned with every conceivable abomination. And he found he did not care.
He had become limitless, unfettered, un
created in the most sublime sense. There was only his will, and its assessment of its own conception. There was everything, existent within a specific instance, a thought-space.
I am greater than myself, than which nothing greater can be.
Existence is impossible. I exist.
α = ~α
√-1 = √-1
.9‾ = 1
x/0
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last. The Beginning and the End.
God has no beginning, nor end.
God is all things.
If I am not God, I am nothing.
Nothing am I.
There is no thing that is me.
EGO ERGO NON SUM.
EGO ERGO NON SUM
EGO ERGO NON SUM
NIHIL
NIHIL
NIHIL
NIHIL
--------------
But madness, like the narcotic gasses used by those mystics of old, was fleeting.
Diogenes at once became aware of several things.
The first, that he was once more aware, at all.
The second, that he was in pain. A gale of fire had blasted him across the chamber and pinned him to the far wall, igniting his robe, left burning for however long it had taken his senses to clear.
With his psychic sight, he could see his own face, his naked form, burned to smoking, liquefying tissue. The tattoo on his chest protected the flesh there, but all else was char and ruin. He had only his mind.
Sin's brood had been taken aback, staggered by the furious assault of his companions who had evidently not suffered as he had from the catatonia they exhaled. But it would not last long. Those flames were meaningless to creatures who bathed in the magmatic oceans of Hell.
The missiles were readied, about to be launched, but in these winds, they would go wild. They had been a desperate plan, at any rate. The ordinance transceiver was a smoldering streak of melted plastic running down his chest, a broken Damoclean blade.
This assault was futile. No force of fire could harm an Incarnation like Sin. However her noxious brood might reel in pain, the Hell-Mother was indifferent to the battle raging within the delineation of her coils.
There was but one recourse.
Diogenes did not know if he had it within him.
Setting aside agony, calling upon an iron focus of will, he called up the Network inside his mindscape, inputting the psykhordinates of his master.
Diogenes drafted a frantic message.
Hell is revealed. The Satan-spawn and Her bastard brood. We are overcome.
A final surge of sparking axons to hurl the words into the ether. A meaningless prayer, to hope they found their mark, for vengeance if not salvation.
And a return to the nothingness awaiting him.