Pure, absolute darkness. Nothingness. The end of everything, the end of my life. I did not know how long I stared at the void because time had no meaning here. Sparkling lights, stars suddenly began to twinkle in the endless, vast night.

For a brief instance I wondered if this was something that Yuri Gagarin saw on his orbital spaceflight when he had departed from planet earth on April 12, 1961 on the Vostok rocket. Why was I seeing stars? Was I lucid dreaming in the last second of my death? How could that be? Had the fertilizer failed to detonate? The destructive power of the blast should have been equivalent to 1 kiloton of TNT or approximately 1/20th yield of the first nuclear bomb exploded by the United States over Hiroshima.

Aralsk-7 and I should have been reduced to dust! I should not be able to formulate thoughts! If this was just a dream, then I wouldn't be able to recall specific things at will, pull up dates or big numbers. I focused my mind, pulled at my memories of Hiroshima. One by one, like falling dominoes, my memories flashed into being.

The greatest act of war perpetrated by humanity with the power of science occurred over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th over Japan in which American nuclear bombs killed 355'000 people. For many months after the bombs detonated over Japanese cities, large numbers of civilians continued to die from the effects of burns, radiation sickness, and injuries, compounded by illness and malnutrition. According to one newspaper I read, the people close to the explosion were nearly vaporized, organs and bones carbonized and the rest turned into shadows imprinted onto stone. I was thirteen at the time. I recalled how Soviet Union declared war on Japan on the same day, our tanks rolling into the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo held by the Kwantung Army.

I was born in 1932... when the Soviet–Finnish Non-Aggression Pact was signed. When I was seven, USSR invaded Finland. When I was nine Germany invaded the Soviet Union. I was too young to help, but I recalled how my mother was conscripted along with thousands of other women to dig anti-tank trenches and moats around the city as means of desperate defense against the invasion.

In 1952 I was selected to join the team of Dr. Lebedev at the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Engineering to help assemble BESM-1, the first Soviet mainframe supercomputer composed from five thousand vacuum tubes.

I remembered absolutely everything! I realized that I couldn't feel or perceive my body, as if I was just a pinprick of light myself in the shawl of eternal night. I was dead, there was no question about it now... and yet I could recall everything with perfect clarity. I clung to the memories of my entire life with all of my being, as if they were a life-saving vest amidst an ocean of darkness.

The stars around me slowly began to spin in an endless circle, accelerating with every passing moment. Soon the long, orbital curves formed brilliant rings... a tunnel to elsewhere. Perhaps the stars weren't spinning at all. Maybe it was me that had started rotating?

The tunnel of light gained more colors, attained vibrant brilliance to it, as if it was woven from flames. I realized what it was. Soviet urban legends had perpetuated the knowledge of the "eternal wheel" seen by people who had a near-death experience. Some of the Academy of Sciences researchers even claimed to identify the common elements that define NDEs: a sense of being dead, lack of negative emotions, sense of well-being, painlessness and most of all - "the tunnel". The people perpetuating the life after death mythos in USSR had called this tunnel, "Samsara", referencing ancient Vedas Hinduism texts from the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature. As the Orthodox religion was being actively dismantled and propagandized as an absolute evil by the Soviet government, some people like my father had turned to a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism to explain what science could not. The tales of rebirth, remote dreaming, levitation powers and Samsara sort of squeezed into my childhood as a fun, mystical thing he often talked about over dinner.

I was seeing the damn thing for myself now. It was real! I couldn't believe it.

The Great Wheel of Life, Samsara!

I could not determine what the wheel and the limitless tunnel it formed was made from anymore. Stars? Angels? People? A multitude of strings, innumerable things reached out to me. A billion hands, for a billion souls, to take me beyond the veil of death.

Something had grabbed at me, turned me. The helmet of my hero - cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in his full spacesuit stared down at me. Galactic spirals and the Wheel of Samsara spun ceaselessly in the reflections of his helmet's glass. He silently watched me, observed me for what felt like a moment that lasted a second or perhaps forever.

“We saw your sacrifice and found it beautiful,” Yuri spoke with a whisper woven from a hundred male voices that gradually rose in crescendo like a wave arriving at the beach shore. He did not sound like himself. This was someone, no… something else entirely. Something inexplicable, something that our science did not reach, did not understand yet - a thing from beyond the veil of death.

“We?” I thought tentatively.

“The Omniscience,” the cosmonaut answered as if he could read my mind. It probably did since I wasn't actually speaking, lacking lungs or a mouth.

Soviet science had not discovered evidence for a soul or a god, yet here I was - now quite well aware of both.

“God is... real?” I mentally trembled in a sudden realization, my Soviet atheism cracking ever so slightly for the first time. “Are you god?”

Now, normally I would have at least shed a tear in this terrifying and impossible moment. However, as I was currently deprived of my body… I felt exceptionally calm, lacking stressful feelings.

“We are the narration that underpins and pierces what you define as reality. Your soul is but a minute echo that cannot truly perceive us. You see only a symbol, an idea, a concept that you worship.”

“I worship nothing and no-one!” I mentally asserted.

No comment came from the spaceman. He simply floated there, observing me from behind his helmet.

“Will I be going to hell for my crimes then?” I asked, thinking of the three people who died because of me and countless others who had suffered from bioweapons and nuclear tests I’ve helped conduct in Kazakhstan.

“No, you’ll be going somewhere far more interesting,” the cosmonaut replied. “Somewhere where you can perhaps make a difference. Or not. An interesting experiment, as it were. Do you agree to a continuation of your narrative?”

A window divided in half flashed in my mind with the words:

The offer from the so called "Omniscience" began to flash faster, brightening and dimming every thirty seconds. According to the couple of Soviet psychiatry papers I've read about schizophrenia the wisest decision here would be simply to not acknowledge the delirium.

Instead, I decided to look for inconsistencies and odd details in the dream, as I usually did, to start lucid dreaming. I focused on the space behind the floating text and suddenly noticed that each of the letters was connected to shimmering, silver-blue threads. The multitude of silver-blue threads came together into a thick, pulsating twine connected to "Yuri Gagarin".

Aha!

As I rationally thought about the "voice of god" I came to a realization that the voices that the "Omniscience" spoke with were in fact my own. It spoke to me with a voice of me as a child, me as a teenager and me as an old man. It was wearing clothing woven from my memory of Yuri Gagarin speaking with tones, intonations and ideas that it had copied, stolen from my memories.

This had only confirmed the "its just a hallucination" theory.

The text started to pulse once every ten seconds.

I continued to ignore it.

The text flashed one last time with a brilliant, blinding flare and the letters fell apart into sparks. At the same instance Yuri Gagarin winked away as if he never existed to begin with.

Annoyingly enough the hallucinogenic experience didn't end right then and there.

The Wheel of Samsara remained, spiraling in place, spinning into itself with endless, shimmering fractal-like galactic constellation woven from countless stars and impossible, brilliant colors I could not name.

I suddenly felt its pull as if I was standing on the edge of a cliff with the wind at my back.

It was growing in strength becoming an unnerving, concerning and then a terrifying sensation akin to falling from an infinite height in a dream.

As I glanced back to where the cosmonaut had been I noticed a barely visible, silver-blue thread leading away from the center of the Wheel of Life.

The gravitational pull of the Wheel intensified with each passing second.

There was something horribly unnerving about it, like an endless hole filled with star-shaped blades that sought to devour me and grind me to nothing.

I grabbed onto the blue thread with all of my will.

Something was wrong with my perception of things because the thread unfolded, encapsulated me entirely. The action of reaching out and touching the thread flung me forward, down a shimmering, silver-blue tunnel. I felt akin to a blood cell being dragged by blood pressure down a me-sized vein. The tunnel felt inexplicably warm and... welcoming.

The unnerving Wheel of Samsara vanished behind me. The veil of the eternal night was gone too.

Sliding down this strange tunnel was almost effortless on my part, as if the tunnel was made for me, as if it was a path that I was meant to follow. As if someone or something was waiting for me at its end.

I briefly wondered if this suspiciously welcoming tunnel-thread would deposit me straight into the mouth of a giant angler fish. This thought made me uneasy. I decided not to follow wherever the thread would take me.

I pulled away from the tunnel with all of my being and it instantly unfolded apart, releasing me.

As it did, I was flung into... elsewhere.

I flew onto a world unlike anything I had seen before.

A truly alien landscape greeted me. I saw a twisted, dreary landscape with numerous hills and hollows made entirely from static, semi-transparent shapes piled discordantly atop one another. A countless number of things were entwined, fused together to form a bone-like, megastructure akin to… a truly abyssal, inconceivably gargantuan… diatom.

As I observed this new, vast, alien world, I thought about what I knew about natural superstructures and how they formed.

Since my days at the Academy of Science in Moscow I had studied diatoms pretty often, peering at them with an electron microscope. Diatoms were microscopic algae found in the Earth’s oceans and waterways. They were a fascinating subject to me because they generated almost half of all oxygen on earth and trapped twenty billion tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, all while creating fantastic microscopic silica shapes. Almost the entirety of the deep sea sediment core was made up from diatom shells.

Diatom shells had an otherworldly beauty to them and my desire to understand exactly how they formed led me to study fractal mathematics - a concept first introduced by the mathematician Felix Hausdorff in 1918 and greatly expanded upon by Polish mathematician Benoit B. Mandelbrot. Dr. Mandelbrot was the first man on Earth to discover that fractal math was the perfect tool in applied mathematics for modelling a variety of natural phenomena from diatoms to river deltas to mountains to even something as seemingly random as the behavior of the stock market.

Beginning in 1975, completely unnoticed by the average citizen of Earth, fractal mathematics had revolutionized the scientific community's understanding of geometry, chemistry, physiology, fluid mechanics and even probability analysis. Since the day I read Dr. Mandelbrot’s research papers I had acquired a firm belief that fractal math could do absolutely anything - even model predictions of future behavior of very large groups of people akin to the fictional Psychohistory science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation book series.

I suddenly noticed that I was drifting away from the blue thread down to the ground. This motion had interrupted my contemplation of my past, bringing me back to the perplexing present.

I would scratch my head in bewilderment if I had arms. That's when I discovered that I had no arms. In fact, I wasn't... human anymore. I was a star-like, transparent, light-green... something composed from many thin threads, something between a dandelion and an ophiocoma scolopendrina.

I wondered if I was dreaming about being an echinoderm, also known as the brittle star, a marine denizen of the abyssal zone in the Pacific Ocean. In spite of my knowledge of marine life, this strange, cadaverous world was something else entirely, nothing like the deep blue oceans of Earth.

As I tried to move about by flailing my numerous, barely perceptible appendages, I figured out why I was so befuddled by the freakish warping of the blue thread. I had no eyes either! I had perfect, three hundred and sixty degree sense of observation - I was seeing the world in every directions at the same time. This ability while being incredible was also causing me confusion and vertigo, since I was used to having two human eyes, not whatever the hell I now had for observation.

I memorized the approximate position of the blue thread that had taken me to this strange place and slowly moved away from it towards the bone-mesh ground. Omnidirectional vision and a multitude of appendage-threads were a struggle to get used to, so my progress downward was slow and incremental. As I moved closer to the ground, it became more warped in my sight, becoming much larger and wider.

After some struggle, I had finally arrived on what could be considered one of the walls of the giant diatom.

I looked at a shape closest to me. It looked like a hollow shell, an imprint of a long-dead semi-transparent tree. I looked at the smaller shape next to the dead tree. It looked like an imprint of a fossilized man with a broken neck. The hollow man wasn't alone - there were hundreds, no... thousands of people all around him. The hollow people were fused into each other, forming the floor of the giant diatom like a vast field that consisted of broken, dead, twisted bodies covered in desiccated brambles.

This was a horrifying sight to behold, but I took it in stride - I wasn't new to death, having dissected bodies at anatomy classes in the Moscow Academy of Science.

The view of the dead human shells reminded me of something that was left after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in southern Italy in 79 AD. The volcanic eruption was a devastating natural disaster that killed around sixteen thousand people and buried the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in volcanic ash.

The cataclysm covered trees, people, food and even buildings under meters upon meters of ash preserving them perfectly and creating empty hollows which Italian scientists had encountered and studied thousands of years later. I knew about Pompeii because Russian romantic painter Karl Bryullov had depicted it in his famous, six-meter-wide painting. I had seen this incredible artwork myself when I went to the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg in 1947.

I curiously moved between the closest hollow man and the tree. They were perfect in every detail, precisely sculpted as if they were three-dimensional x-rays of a person and a tree taken at the exact moment of their death. Minute, barely visible shimmers danced inside and around the man and the tree, akin to a nebula or an aurora borealis.

The fact of how perfect and unmoving the hollow figures were had made me finally arrive at a realization - this wasn’t a dream. No dream could be as precise, as consistent and as perfectly detailed as this…

This was reality. My new reality.

I really was dead.

Was this hell? Did the Omniscience cast me out to this desolate place because I had ignored its offer? Was this where everyone who ever died ended up?

As I looked at the shimmers inside the dead imprints I felt something new: a sense of incredible coldness, tiredness and hunger. I was hungry, starving for… whatever was inside the man and the tree.

Something within me, akin to a human sense of hunger told me that I wouldn't last long here. I wanted, yearned to feast upon the shimmering auroras, needed them if I wanted to stay alive in this place longer than a few more minutes.

With each passing moment the sense of hunger and icy despair grew, clawed at me from within.

At the same time I noticed that my glowing, emerald threads became dimmer, weaker. It was a concerning development.