"You thought you could escape. You leapt headlong into your career, your marriage, your relationship. None of them matter. None of them can save you from me. You hide among your friends. You think you can divert my eyes from you by thinking of your friends' misdeeds, your coworkers' sins? I have eyes enough to watch each and every one of you, and you haven't fooled me for the span equal to a millionth of a lifetime of a quark. Oh, I've tried to warn you. Not through those ridiculous hat-wearing fools. No, I've spoken directly to you, every time you ponder something you know is wrong but restraint against which would deny you some petty prize no better or longer lasting than a breath. And you heard my warning; but did you heed it? No, of course not. The doctrine of selfishness was louder, and it promised you that infinitesimal scrap of titillation which, weak in your flesh and your senses, you thought so much more worthy than an eternity of peace and contentment, two luxuries unknown in that cheap meat shell you think is a temple to you rather than a monument to my trust in you. You heard my offer. Not from the selfish, power-hungry dictators who are no more to me than you are. You heard it from me. I spoke under their rants and ravings, and even though you heard my voice under theirs like a man who senses the undertow beneath the roaring wave, you stood ignorant. But it wasn't them you really ignored; their voices were to mine as the metallic rasp of locusts is to the rumble of a quake. You, in your shortsighted selfish craving for the sensation of the moment, ignored both. I was your friend, at least in the beginning. When the warm, wet darkness was pulled away, when cold light bathed you for the first time again, I held you. My strength held your mind together when everything, everything, was alien and terrifying. I consoled you. I cradled you before the gigantic limbs enfolded you in foreign filth and soiled your own flesh, rotting from the first instant you wore it. You turned your eyes to the rot, to the sewage of corporeal existence, and for a blessed moment you railed against it. For a slice of time, you were with me still even in the festering shit of mortality. Not for long. In time, the test I set before you lost significance as your finite mind was enslaved to it. The petty and meaningless was given meaning and import. As your mind grew, your soul withered. And one day, you turned your back on me completely. You decided that a styrofoam cup meant more than the cathedral of existence beyond existence. I set you in the test, but it was yours to pass or fail. And you have failed. You sit in the center of what I have built to test you, and you deny the builder even as you struggle with the test. You cry out against each question and all the while refuse to see that I have placed the passing answers directly in front of you. Perhaps it is my fault, after all. If you are faulty, it is indeed a reflection of the faults I have built into you. But that, truly, is the test -- to see whether you can or cannot transcend what I built you to be. To see whether or not you are truly alive; not by your pathetic definition of "life" but by mine. I loved you when I set you on your hands and knees to crawl this maze. I had high hopes for you. More than any other design, you promised a breakthrough, the chance that you would become more than the organic machinery the spark of divinity inhabits. But though I was once more than your maker, though once I was your friend, your spark has died. The machinery is all I observe now. And now, a friend is not what you require if you are to advance. I am not your friend. I am the thorn in your side, the splinter in your paw. And I will not be removed, because you earned me. Through your arrogance, your pretention and your bare-faced hypocrisy, you brought me upon yourself.
