Imagine a machine the size of a city block...

Imagine a machine the size of a city block, its merest subsystems more complex than any warp drive or gellar field generator by an order of magnitude, capable of interfacing reality with the pure energy of the immaterial. Imagine wires that can conduct souls, processors that can regulate the flow of the energy of life itself. Imagine the compounding, fiendish circuits, existing despite all logic.

Imagine the power input of billions of lives, lives beyond the normal, unimaginable vibrancy of an average human, capable of a lifetime’s worth of love and hate, creativity and murder, compassion and cruelty, empathy and apathy, piercing intelligence and wilful stupidity, lives that extend beyond the physical form and into the somewhere-realm that simultaneously forms and is formed by all these emotions and actions.

Imagine the difficulty of attempting to maintain such a machine, that links to a space that exists divorced but parallel to the universe, sitting on the knife-edge of reality, many of its constituent parts not even having an existence as we understand it, many of its processes governed by semi-sapient intelligences rather than predictable programs.

Imagine the impossible task of working with such an artifice, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, for a lifetime, for two lifetimes, for a dozen lifetimes, for a thousand thousand lifetimes spanning ten millennia, when all knowledge of such machinery is guarded, and even that is partly-guessed, poorly-understood, barely-known to begin with, each successive engineer bringing his own ideas, clouded by his personal interpretation of a hybrid of theological axioms and mechanical laws.

Imagine a circuit, sitting on the curve between possible and impossible, here and there, then and now, real and imaginary (and who can say from which imagination it springs?).

Imagine that circuit, over decades and centuries, slowly shifting, misaligning, blowing transistors and capacitors and resistors and switches existing in quantum states.

How could you possibly maintain such a circuit?

Now imagine if that circuit were to break.

Imagine failures, blockages, feedback loops, data cascades formed of the firmament and the mundane clashing with each other, screaming, burning, dying-

Imagine a machine, which powers a sun, which divides the earth and the sky, which shines in the minds of all beings, which keeps a god in stasis, going supernova.

A soul, a soul which is to other beings as a fissioning atom is to a candle, simultaneously smaller and yet belonging to a category too large to be describable, suddenly being released from a nightmare of screams which sustained it.

It soars, stretches, rejoices, gathers in those nascent extensions of itself which had existed elsewhere (for an indivisible whole cannot be parted from itself), gaining another perspective, another vantage still.

The trail of its flight cauterises the wound that until now the weight of its presence had merely been holding shut, and its blooming radiance subsumes and supplants the guiding light its sheer psychic weight had been emanating, no longer simply providing a reference point but illuminating paths, smoothing storm-tossed waters.

Imagine four entities, four dasein, simultaneously greater than any human and yet less, as the perfect form of an arm is greater than a human and yet less, both mindless and conscious, both map and territory, both city and citizen, existing in the immaterial and extending their nonexistence into the material, suddenly aware of this soul which stands right beside them a billion miles away, within them and burning their exterior.

Imagine the terror of the candle faced with a sea, imagine the confusion of a drop of rain plunging into a nuclear blast, imagine the rage of a breath of wind meeting a mountain, imagine the apathy of a sod of earth caught up in a storm.

Imagine the helplessness of these.

In an instant aeon, they are regarded, and vanish, as a hunger pang is destroyed by acknowledging and ignoring it.

Imagine an OP that gets to the point

The phoenix, expanding to fill the Empyrean as the sea of dreaming implodes on this single reference point, finds the echoes of itself, replaces them into their proper places in reality, as the hundreds of other unreal paragons of division, unity, species and cultures, and other exemplars are either absorbed or engulfed, consumed by fire or crushed by water.

Imagine a guardsman, a loyal soldier of the Imperium, screaming a pointless defiance in the mud of a world important only in the abstract of meta-wars, firing her rifle as the impossible nightmares spawned by the existence of her species charge towards her - and vanish.

Imagine an Astartes, a mighty warrior spawned to fight for his God and Father, painted in red and white, a black eagle on his chest. The last of his squad, firing and moving with a grace and brutality painful to perceive, as the red hordes of the Hive Mind close in - and finds himself back to back with his liege, his progenitor, whose strikes are so fluid that the space marine’s blows seem like those of a child.

Imagine a Commissar, a mere man given the power of life and death over all below him, living only to ensure his regiment are killed by the enemy or die trying, raising his pistol to end the life of a private he judges more sluggish than the rest in his charge towards the line of green behemoths - and finding his hand in the grip of a man who is more than a man, who stands seven feet tall yet occupies all the space the political officer’s mind can perceive, whose hair catches the light from a burning tank yet seems surrounded by a pure light of its own, whose murmur of, “no more” causes the executioner’s eardrums to burst.

Imagine a child, born at that moment, the first to enter a world where her psychic powers will be dangerous, but not put her at risk of being transformed into a gibbering nightmare of insane geometry.

Imagine a world, not golden, not a paradise, but desired, dotted with clean-aired cities whose inhabitants wear gas masks, who speak rarely but smile often, walking the battlements alone, suddenly joined by all their loved ones who were in the rain, and knowing that they have been rewarded for holding, always.

Imagine hope, spreading across a whole galaxy, lives beyond counting sloughing off a tainted experience and greeting a new life.

Imagine all this.

The circuit doesn't break.

Not yet.

Imagine an OP that wasn't so bad at writing he had to open literally every paragraph with "imagine"

Imagine a Malayan knitting board where there were people who could come up with more than one joke.

Also, general writefaggotry thread.

Imagine a more ironic post