“Though time separated me from this other self through the years, memories and emotions integrated us along a different dimension. Through our camaraderie in this other dimension, his flesh and blood united with my switches and circuits, his excitement with my disgust, as mystics with their gods through meditation and contemplation. But my consciousness refused to bow down to spatial-temporal or biological laws. Refused to embrace the excitement and disgust as if they were diamonds amid ash. Not only that, the linkage had induced pain sharp enough to oppose time’s erosion, to bloom into a mature and lasting suffering, to remind the future I how this present self opposed that past ego. Memory, like an obsession, refused to die without a struggle against the will.”