Eventually — after what might have been centuries — something altered.
Not sound.
Pressure.
The vastness tightened.
He felt it first along the edges of himself — as though every certainty were being pressed inward.
There was no speech.
There was exposure.
His life unfolded without narration.
The tuition payments.
The candles.
The careful proofs.
The final decision beneath the ring of steel.
They did not appear as memory.
They existed — simultaneously.
And threaded through them was something he had not named while alive.
Certainty.
Not faith.
Certainty.
He had been certain he saw further.
Certain he understood consequence.
Certain that removing himself was obedience.
The pressure increased.
He felt it in his hands — the same hands that had drawn the final equation. They trembled now, though there was no body to tremble.
He was granted what others were granted.
One question.
It did not feel like a gift.
It felt like a narrowing.
The question had lived in him so long it felt like bone.
“My Lord,” he said — and the words scraped —
“what were You thinking when You created humans?”
The instant the sentence formed, it recoiled through him.
Not flame.
Not thunder.
A pressure that did not release.
What followed was not explanation.
It was dislocation.
The sense of sequence left him first.
He could no longer tell what preceded what.
What followed what.
What belonged to what.
His mind reached for order — habitually — the way it once reached for symmetry.
It found none.
An action did not remain contained.
A consequence did not remain attached.
Nothing stayed where it had been placed.
He tried to reason.
If this, then that.
The structure would not hold.
Something in him that had once trusted its own conclusions began to tremble.
He felt how much of his life had depended on clean lines.
On thresholds.
On boundaries.
He had believed harm could be contained by removal.
Believed consequence could be prevented by subtraction.
Now subtraction did not simplify.
It rearranged.
He could not locate himself as origin or solution.
He searched for the man who had stood beneath the accelerator ring — certain, solemn, willing.
He found him.
And did not recognize him fully.
There had been fear there.
Yes.
But also conviction.
Conviction that stepping outside the order of things was necessary.
The recognition pierced deeper than the vastness.
He had not only feared what humanity might do.
He had feared remaining inside uncertainty.
The collapse moved inward.
Not punishment.
Not absolution.
Exposure.
He felt how small his frame had been.
Not small in worth.
Small in scope.
He had mistaken scale for clarity.
He had mistaken clarity for authority.
To misunderstand God was terrifying.
To misunderstand himself was worse.
The self he had trusted no longer stood firm.
He did not dissolve.
He remained.
But without the architecture he once relied upon.
He could no longer tell whether he was thinking — or being thought.