I saw one form that was a little different from the rest—compact, almost
glimmering, like a multifaceted jewel, but of jet-black. It was like a
bit of polished coal. “What’s that?”

Alia sounded as if she was smiling. “Take a look.”

I didn’t know how to. But even as I framed the desire I felt myself
falling toward the jewel-like knot of knowledge.

I felt a surge of new understanding—a moment of insight, like a
breakthrough after years of study in some arcane subject, or the sudden
clarification when the solution of a puzzle becomes obvious. This glimmering
knot of understanding contained all of physics—and I saw it all. I
enjoyed a deep understanding of the fabric of the cosmos, from the minuscule
symmetries of the fundamental objects from which space and
time were ultimately constructed, all the way to the jewel-like geometry of
the universe as a whole, folded over on itself in higher dimensions—
although now I saw that those two poles of structure, large and small, were
in fact one, as if all of reality were folded together again on some more abstract
scale.

But even as I wallowed in this joyous understanding, a part of
me noticed features a physicist of the twenty-first century would have
recognized—even an engineer like me. Our basic map of the universe’s
composition was here, the proportions of dark energy, dark matter, baryonic
matter, as determined by our space telescopes; and I made out the
familiar milestones of the universe’s evolution out of the initial singularity,
through stages of expansion and cooling, all the way to the matter dominated
age that had given rise to humans. Some of our theories to
explain this universal structure had contained glimmerings of truth after
all, I realized. They were all partial, all gropings in the dark, each tentative
explanation like the light scattered from one facet of this ultimate jewel of
understanding. And yet we got some of it right, I thought with a surge of
pride, we primitives on our single, muddy, messed-up little world.

But that sense of pride quickly dissipated when I saw that this jewellike
structure of knowledge, this “ultimate truth,” was ancient. The total
understanding dreamed of by the physicists of my time, the limits of their
imagination, had not only been achieved, but long ago—and it had been
overshadowed by deeper mysteries yet.

But I wasn’t here for physics, but to confront mysteries of the human
heart—and the superhuman. Reluctantly I pulled away. I tried to remember,
to hold on to some glimmering of this ultimate understanding, but
already it was melting like a snowflake cupped in my hand, its beautiful
symmetries and unity lost. Already I was forgetting.

Transcendent, Chapter 58