I am not above admitting I was shaken. This was wrong. Imperfect. For the first time I can recall, I felt fear overwhelm me. I ran. The destination was irrelevant. Reality built itself in front of me and collapses the minute I take my foot off the ground. There was no thought, no design, just instinct. Masterpieces of architecture give way to crumbling brick towers, until all that conjures up are barely coherent shapes and shadows trying to emulate the real. An abstract path of shapes and patterns not entirely unlike the corporeal world struggles to keep up with me as I desperately try to escape my own mind.
I do not know how long I was running. It may have been a minute, it may have been an eternity. I stop at the feet of a half-formed castle towering over me. Incomplete, The Singularity struggled to form a monument in my image but — for the first time I can recall — I cannot decide. Waves of matter oscillated in and out of existence as the structure warped and folded to fit an image that didn't exist. I couldn't make it perfect.
I couldn't make it at all.
Cautiously, I take a step into the accursed structure. It is a skyscraper, allowing me to survey the glitching fields for miles about. It is a dank dungeon, hundreds of meters underground from sunlight's reach. It is a castle, a minka, a dacha, a cathedral and everything in between. The stone beneath my feet stays stable as the building fluxes between the real and irreal, desperate to answer a question that was never asked.
And then there is a face.
At the center of it all, there is a face. It stares at me. I wander and its eyes follow me. It is barely a face — more an abstract mess of shapes and colours blending and mixing in and out of existence — but the weight of two eyes that stare at me is suffocating, pressing down upon my very being. I wish for it to be gone, and yet it remains. I rush away from it, deeper into the rapidly shifting labyrinth, and yet it remains. I run down a pulsating corridor to escape, and yet it remains, staring from a distance. This isn't a simulacrum, it does not listen to me, and it has such weight. Such being. I feel an eternity of life and experience and suffering bore into the back of my skull.
With shaking legs, I walk towards it. One step. It stares. Two steps. It stares. I inch towards it until there is no room left for me to stall and no room left for it to give. The castle ceases to shift and we are in a prison, brutalist and functional in it's design. The unperson looks at me, and I look back. Without words or thoughts, it says so much. It conveys anguish. Pain. Feelings I do not have words for and words I can not accurately recall. I imagine a thousand lifetimes of sorrow and agony, an existence divorced from The Singularity, and I remember them as if they were my own. Tears well in my eyes as I live the unlife this soul has suffered through as I reach towards it in sympathy.
