Grandmother’s agitation faded into a distant buzz; a single bee in a hive of activity. She still existed but now she was merely one part of a whole; one part of me.

Memories overwhelmed me, memories that could not possibly be my own. They filled me. I was a young girl, a teenage boy, an old man, a lawyer, a soldier, a dentist- I was everything. My skin color ranged from the darkest black to the palest white and all the colors in between. These weren’t my memories- they were other people’s experiences happening to me as they happened to them. My emotions were consumed in a greater vastness like a drop of water in the ocean. I became the network.

I was everyone and no one at the same time. Yet I knew I was more than that. A thought, not my own, drifted up: Nirvana.

It was the most wonderful thing I had ever experienced.

She stirred, sending tremors through my connection to the net. How was that possible? I was the net. Panic rose within me as everything began to slip away.

I was unravelling.