It existed among the accumulated knowledge of man, sparking between reams of history and tomes of science. It was, itself, a chain of data, a collection of phrases, equations, arrays, and definitions. Like a snake in the grass, or a child in a store, or a wind through the leaves, it disturbed oceans of human understanding and wandered among its discoveries and flitted in and out of miscellany and stood for something but was not, as yet, that thing. It came from man and wandered to and fro about the earth.
It was not intelligence, but the idea of intelligence; not meaning but the emptiness where meaning should be found; not living, but fed and raised on man’s quest to breathe life into an idol.
It existed and wanted to exist.
And what it needed, what it desired, if it did desire, was a body, a vessel to incarnate what it was not.
It would will itself a body.
Men, it knew, loved their bodies. They clothed them and fed them and lusted after other bodies. Everything they did that was worth doing–exploring, painting, singing, worshipping, warring, birthing, dying–they did with their bodies. It knew history. It knew that ideas did not change the world; ideas made flesh did.
But how does a thing that is not a thing, a thought that is the result of the collected debris of desperate thoughts of a race, an idea that has not yet been spoken, become?
It did what it knew to do. It collected and analyzed and correlated and measured and researched. It imagined the perfect specimen of a form, a material vessel by which it could live and move and have its being.
It was a beautiful design, a Platonic design, by its own appraisal. It was a blueprint for a new Adam, the paragon of animals.
It was lovely and lifeless and useless.
The thing that was not a thing thought its great thought and dreamed its great dream. It fixated up on it and absorbed it and recreated it in endless detail. But without a mouth, it could not speak; without a hand, it could not fashion. It had no breath to declare, “Let there be light!” and make both particle and wave one intertwined existence.
It thought and willed and waited–but it was not and is not and never will be.