A golden sphere of light slowly expands as if in a trembling breath. It flickers with ultrathin sparks. On the inhale, the light cracks, exposing absolute whiteness from which pearl pink bubbles fly out.

Pause.

The sphere stays still for a few yoctoseconds. Then the pearls burst, and the sphere begins to shrink. As it shrinks in size, it is slowly pulling back the white glow and releasing ice spikes.

The sphere keeps shrinking and shrinking. It casts bluish shadows into space. The spikes grow in all directions to pierce the ether with metallic cold. Next the spikes freeze and draw themselves back in.

The cycle repeats.

The sphere expands again and the golden level glow cracks, exposing whiteness. The pearlescent bubbles appear anew.

The sphere will NEVER stop. This thought is disturbing. The pearl bubbles will burst, but the lit breath will produce new ones like a conveyor belt.

The sphere breathes silently. That is because you can’t hear anything with earplugs on. Wearing earplugs was a mandatory condition Reed set before watching this video fragment. The screen went out.

For the following days that I spent at Reed’s house, I consumed a lot of content without any breaks for sleep. “Just one cycle, Smoke,” whispered Reed, leaning over me to wake me up. He says it’s important to get to a state of information overload so I can finally see something.

I have watched sci-pop shows about molecules, some interviews with crime lords, feature-length anime, slipped on a banana peel kind of gags, Soviet cartoons, a phantasmagoria with a fake astrological sorceress, news releases, recordings of symphony orchestras, new old episodes of The Crooked Mirror, art pornography, TV noise with white lines which was replaced by a splash of color calibration and a video about the light.

An open backpack full of money was lying on the floor. For me, it felt good to know that Reed wouldn’t take the money. It also felt good for Reed to know that I trusted him. And for both of us it felt good to be indifferent to fat bundles of pleasure.

I sprawled on the thin mattress in Reed’s well-ventilated room. I was looking at the clean pores on his handsome face when he leaned over me, holding a glass vase in his hands.

‘Can you see? Describe what you see.’ Reed asked me, shoving the glass vase in my face.
      ‘Shine.’
      ‘What kind of shine?’
      ‘Reflective.’

Reed shook his head and went to play the next video for me.

The opening of In the World of Animals with Nikolai Drozdov appeared. Primorsky Krai, 1982. Nikolai Drozdov in a blue v-neck sweater and with manners of James Bond was asking the director of the Ussuri Nature Reserve about bears. My thoughts flew off and I had no strength to concentrate. I was listening, but I did not hear anything. I was watching, but I did not see anything. My mind shut itself off from verbal information consuming only visuals.

I stared at a crawling caterpillar on the screen. The purposeful movements of its orange fleshy body contrasted the green leaves. Through the observation of its stubborn forward motion and its warning protective coloration, a thought came to my mind — we all are the same clumps of energy driven to move forward . The show In the World of Animals was a reminder of what a difficult and terrifying life might await me in rebirth if I failed to cope with myself in this life.

Nikolai Nikolaevich was holding an Amur Coluber and saying something, and again due to physical fatigue, I still could not concentrate on the meanings and understand his words. Yet a sequence of the of next clips mesmerized me with their beauty. There was a coral cluster of glossy berries accompanied by flute music. My mind caught that the cluster was called ginseng and then detached itself from information again. Grim pale hands were digging the ginseng sprout out of the ground right with the root. There were forest machaons flying. Spotted deers were running around. I wanted to frolic with the animals, swim with the fish, flutter with the insects. I also felt sure that I had already been all of them. I had already run, jumped, and fluttered, but I had never been this particular human mix.

Absolute novelty.

When the TV show ended, Reed shoved the glass vase in my face again and asked me what I saw.

I mumbled confusedly and Reed walked away to turn on new information.

Boston Dynamics robots appeared on the screen, followed by a video of a monkey smoking a joint, and a cell phone game where the goal was to catch an anthropomorphic pussycat hidden in a maze and have sex with her. Dancing robots would have freaked me out if I wasn’t tired. The stoned monkey didn’t make me jealous of the unconventional life experience for a member of the Primates Order, and the game with sexual context didn’t set off alarm bells on the degradation of society. I didn’t care about this random information at all.

Nothing disturbed or annoyed me. I was exhausted to the point of total apathy, and no excitement could overcome the power of my indifference.

Reed lounged beside me, unperturbed, watching me to make sure I didn't fall asleep. I felt a warmth inside me inspired by his perfection... Unflappable and airy, he was not a character. With his Buddhist tendencies, Reed was like a white wall with no paintings on it. He can’t laugh out loud, his smile is restrained and immediately makes you want to stop laughing. Moreover, you won’t see him doing anything stupid, because he has a bored look, as if he knows everything. Reed is a killer of individuality. The enemy of originality. He has given up all his distinctiveness and wrongness to the idea he believes in, leaving himself with only a detached calm. Despite all that, his poised self-control delighted me. And there was no narcissism in his aspiration to see more than available. This aspiration was unemotional. He killed the puppet ego that longed to shine at the arena illuminated by spotlights of hidden unconscious fears and confusion.

‘Do you feel how meaningless everything is?’ Reed suddenly asked.
      ‘Yes-yes-yes-yes.’ I babbled as if I was intoxicated, with great sympathy for Reed. I’ve always thought so much about the meaning of life that meaning has become meaningless, and now especially. It’s like repeating the same word over and over until you think there is no such word at all.

A dirty couple with ugly faces, swollen from alcohol, were arguing under the window.

‘Give it to me, skank.’
      ‘I’m gonna smack you, cunt.’
      ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, bitch.’
      ‘Shut the fuck up!’

Reed and I stood near the window. There was no room for compassion or condemnation. My indifference bloomed lilies in my chest of green swamp of drag. The world’s brightness was set to the maximum, and time and speed to the minimum.

Reed opened the window, attracting the attention of the squabbling lovers.

‘What’s up, cocksuckers?’ the man in the Supreman red and white jacket shouted, still holding the wrists of his drunk girlfriend.
      ‘WHUUUZZUUHH?’ the drunkard let go of the woman’s rough hands which immediately hit him on his bald head. But the drunkard did not respond to the beating. He staggered to pick up a stone from the ground and threw it somewhere into the wall. Then he cursed and looked for another stone.

Reed ran his finger over the Tibetan Book of the Dead without taking his calm eyes off the couple in the street.

The drunkard returned to the window, swearing, took aim, and, with the briskness of a schoolboy, hurled the stone precisely at us.

Reed grabbed the Tibetan Book of the Dead quickly and knocked the stone down into the flowerbed.

In the meanwhile, the female fists hit the drunkard, and he forgot about us since he was already wringing his girlfriend’s hands and swore harshly.

‘There are a lot of animals in human guise among us because of karmic rebirth. Such is the existence.’ Reed moved away from the window, came back to me with the vase and asked me again what I saw.

I took the vase in my hands. A cheap old glass vase. I was expecting to see an unusual reflection or sparkles, but I could not believe my eyes when I looked at it. I saw silhouettes of people disappearing and reappearing behind the glass, shining like liquid gallium or aluminum. I blinked and rubbed my eyes. The silhouettes with identical Sims 2 faces mingled like ants and disappeared into each other.

I shook the vase to see if the silhouettes would falter, but they existed as reflections in their own space as if nothing had happened. I looked inside the vase — it was empty. Then again through the glass — the silhouettes were pacing as if nothing happened. Being volumetric, they existed on their own.

‘Little humans! — I sighed excitedly.’

Reed tidied his wheat hair under a bandana fixed on the top and said:

‘Divine entities.’

I couldn’t look away from the shiny little humans. Reed looked at me through the glass from the opposite side of the vase.

‘Your indifference is a guide to the light forms invisible to the human eye.’

The human beings did not stop.

I only faintly remembered my past life with the pixels in my room and hoarding, as if it hadn’t happened with me and I had seen that life in a movie. Something rational still made me think of the timer, which was to start in twenty-four hours and send a mishmash of past emotions about police and money to my parents. I deleted the timer-message and asked them not to worry about me, explaining that I was going far away to become a hermit.