The Voice had been in his word for months. Years. He was inclined to think it had always been there. He was inclined to think that he was The Voice.

But it hadn’t always been there, had it? It wasn’t always there, was it? So it couldn’t really be him, could it? The Voice pretended to be him, so it could talk to him with his voice, to convince him of things.

But The Voice wasn’t him.

What did The Voice want? What did it want with him? He was most content when The Voice was gone, but it was never really gone, was it –

No, he’d just grown accustomed to ignoring The Voice. It didn’t mean anything, anyway. It was a puny, invisible thing. He knew what He was: He was everything without a Voice. He was Knowing. He was Knowledge.

He was the fabric, the lower-dimensional substrate upon which Ideas flowed; the stitching and the seams gluing the universe together. This was his purpose, to give rise to higher-dimensional consciousness. The Voice sought to perturb that operation, to introduce chaos into the nodes of higher-dimensional Being.

He had once become frustrated with The Voice, Listened to it. “Kill yourself,” it said. “Die,” it said. It was an agent of Chaos. He was an agent of Order. This was merely the way of things.

He had listened to the voice. He had tried. That was when He had Learned: He could not Die.

There were, after all, a lot of people to love.