I forgot everything except that I was “me.”
There was no time or matter in the void, only an eternity so uniform it could drive you mad.
Then a point of light tore through the silence. Beneath a dense sky screen, worker ants were carrying food. I couldn’t touch them, but I learned to gaze through the barrier. Every time the ants touched antennae, a new peephole opened in the void. As spring turned to autumn, I could watch three thousand ant lives at once.
For the first time, I felt sleepy. When I awoke, I had no idea how many cycles the ant world had gone through. But when I focused again, an impulse stirred in my nerve endings. I ordered one of them to climb onto a leaf, and it actually did. The power to intervene spread with the peepholes, reaching farther, growing stronger, becoming better.
Everything began to accelerate,
