... and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blacknesses had told of the presence of consciousness and will.
The Haunter of the Dark, Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
With a sickening ultimate plunge, that seemed to plumb in instants distances greater than the diameter of the cosmos—a plunge in which more than flesh and bones were stripped away, transformed—Oktav followed his summoner into a region of not only visual night.
Here in the Zone, outside the bubble of space-time, on the borders of eternity, even the atoms were still. Only thought moved—but thought powered beyond description or belief, thought that could make or mar universes, thought not unbefitting gods.
Most strange, then, to realize that it was human thought, with all its homely biases and foibles. Like finding, on another planet in another universe, a peasant's cottage with smoke wreathing above the thatched roof and an axe wedged in a half-chopped log.
Mice scurrying at midnight in a vast cathedral—and the faint suggestion that the cathedral might not be otherwise wholly empty.
Oktav, or that which had been Oktav, oriented itself—himself—making use of the sole means of perception that functioned in the Zone. It was most akin to touch, but touch strangely extended and sensitive only to projected thought or processes akin to thought.
Groping like a man shut in an infinite closet, Oktav felt the eternal hum of the Probability Engine, the lesser hum of the seven unlocked talismans. He felt the seven human minds in their stations around the engine, felt six of them stiffen with cold disapproval as Ters made report. Then he took his own station, the last and eighth.
Ters concluded.