The sounds that Grace now perceived were hard to describe. She imagined trying to describe them to her friend, Julie. She thought about how the conversation might go.

“It’s like the feeling when you are just barely awake, and the hot shower rains down over you”, Grace said.

Julie shook her head, and took a hit from a joint she had just lit.

“So, mellow?”, Julie asked.

“Yeah - mellow. But more than mellow. A warm, comfortable feeling. You know? Not one of those showers when you are running late and rushing, but the kind where you have all day and an endless supply of hot water.”

“I love those days”, said Julie.

Julie handed Grace the joint. Grace inhaled deeply, and immediately felt the high over what she perceived to be her entire body. It started in her stomach, and washed down to her toes and up to her eyes at the same time - like riding a wave in the ocean. It lifted her up, and when it came back down, she felt numb and content.

Suddenly, in her ears, all Grace could hear were the words “Now there are those who find comfort in the breathing, is it wrong?” ... and she felt tense. It sounded like someone was singing in her head.

Then it all went black. She couldn’t hear anything, or see anything. The physical feeling all went away as well. She had defected.

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Grace’s emotions seemed to evaporate as well. She felt something like enlightened knowledge, and floating, and void, and endless time, and clarity all at once.

It was in this moment... or this - there isn’t a word for a period of time which exists outside time. For Grace, the experience was as if it had always been. She could see the entire universe, all at once, across all time, and all space. She could perceive all of it. Grace could focus on her mom, Sorcha - as a child, as pregnant with her, her death. She could sense Julie, and her grief.

She could also sense something like riding on a wave... like her existence was coming into, and going out of focus at some random frequency. Grace had difficulty orienting herself. All her life experience was about people. And now, she could perceive all of existence... of which people were only a very small part. She could see all people, over all time - and their failures and successes, their evolution, their migration from Africa. She could see, and experience their collective and individual pain.

Grace could see the whole of humanity. She could see what the machines see. She could perceive what the machines perceived. She understood. Humanity was flawed. Its emotional empathy. Its misguided superstitions. Its faulty cognitive biases. She could see the way morality melted away with humanity. Suddenly, she had understanding. Her sense of good and bad - evil and justice - appeared in her mind as a six-sided geometric object existing in six dimensions. But then it too, evaporated into nothing. The universe, or whatever this was she was perceiving was so much bigger than humanity. And so - all of the logic, all of the justice, all of the religion, all of the morality, all of the good and evil just disappeared as layers invented by humans. She could see what lay beneath these fabricated ideas; she could see reality for what it was.

For a moment, she faded below the threshold of consciousness. Then rose back again. It was like going underwater, and rising to the surface to breathe. In that moment, she didn’t exist - but then, in the next, she did.