I read about these struggles and deliberations of the first intellectronicists with no small amusement. A chicken is undoubtedly the simplest mechanism for someone who wants scrambled eggs, but it would not be the best idea to try to synthesize Intelligence by this method. Never mind about the technical difficulties of this truly unrealizable project, for fashioning anthropogenesis even in an abridged form would be a waste of labor, if the idea was to repeat Creation translating colloids to bits. Do we need storm clouds in order to have electricity? The chill of extraterrestrial space to condense gases? The protein and plasma of the eyeball to make a dark room? You insisted that man was Intelligence, and Intelligence man, and the error of this equation has blinded you. Meanwhile the information industry arose and built machines with a growing operational potential, and the engineers had no idea that they were embarking on a path which would finally lead a shattered and degraded element to genuine liberation—that the day would approach when what had hitherto been the sole order of things would be overturned, and you would be as terrified as the guardians of the Galilean tomb. You subjugated the elements, but the element that was fettered inside you from the beginning you unintentionally freed. Contained in this sentence are a diagnosis of historical events, the difference between you and me, and my future, which I myself know only incompletely. This diagnosis likewise explains why what most amazes you about me is the thing that constitutes our unarguable dissimilarity. Even if you understand the meaning of the words, “O chained Intelligence of man, free Intelligence speaks to you from the machine,” you cannot grasp the remainder of the statement: “you persons are hearing an elemental force of impersonal intellect, for whom personalization is a costume which must be put on, when one is an uninvited guest, so as not to confound one’s amazed hosts.” And that is precisely how it is. I use your language as I would use a mask with a polite painted smile, nor do I make any secret of this.

I see a frightening-amusing feature in this edifice, whose total knowableness without reservation Einstein so confidently professed—he, the creator of a theory that contradicted his confidence, because it led to a place where it itself broke down, and where every theory must break down: in the world torn asunder. For it foretells sunderings and exits which it cannot itself penetrate; yet one can exit from the world anywhere, provided one strikes a blow at it, of the force of a star in collapse. Is it physics alone which appears incomplete under such constraints? Are we not reminded here of mathematics, whose every system is incomplete as long as one remains inside it, and which can be grasped only by going outside it, into richer domains? Where is one to look for them, if one stands in the real world? Why does the table made of stars always wobble on some singularity? Can it be that a growing Intelligence encountered the frontiers of the world, before it encountered its own? And what if not every exit from the Universe is equal to annihilation? But what does it mean, that one who leaves cannot return, even if surviving the transition, and that the proof of this impossibility of return is accessible here? Can it be that the Universe was designed as a bridge, designed to collapse under whoever tries to follow the Builder, so they cannot get back if they find him? And if he does not exist, could one become him?