“here before me was a vast sweep of empty space; just the closed door and me, and only the stars sprinkled across the midnight sky to see what I did next. Did these cold, distant lights watch with any vestige of the humans they had once been, those special, chosen, favoured ones that had brushed too close to the divine? what would they make of my solitary defiance? my betrayal, the moment of my becoming? would they cry out against me? or did they bathe impassively in the dim bowl of the sky, all traces of who they had been burned out of them years before?”