It is all smoothed and rounded and mirror-stacked, like a spherical entity amounting to the net worth of a billionaire’s oversized hamster ball. When I look into the ceiling, or the floor, or the sidewalls, depending on how you look at these things, I see a vivid stream of dripping light at once ethereal and empty, an amorphous beam simultaneously controlling sectors of undeniable space.

In truth, the entire sphere in which I am confined is, at its most basic, a ball of light. Perhaps I am the sole darkened one here, mind racing, black heart aching, because all I can see in the too-brilliant luminescence are the shadows that leak between bar after bar of silvered light, the smoke and ash that hails from the eyelashes of the very shadows I eye.

Sometimes I wonder if a stream of light is the same as one of blood. They both hold similar qualities; for one, they are practically intangible, and for another, they are considered untouchable in the coming world I pervade, where flesh is satanic and enlightenment an irredeemable dream. If you were to so much as mutter a syllable from any scripted tongue in what lies beyond these uniform, non-edged edges, I, yes, even I would pity you and your then imminent tribulations.

Civilization beyond this sphere is something between the now and the past, what is and what was and what will never again be. The man of the rectangles once mentioned the existence of an infinitely finite number of spheres that succeed the current one you, reader, have already been introduced to. Infinitely finite, I thought. Well, that’s a scam if I ever saw one. The man smiled, as I expected he would, before dissolving into another trickle of light. It frightened me that I would, too, come high noon.