I woke up in a daze. The shuttle door was opening with a whoosh, letting the white smoke out into the bright blue sky. It looked like I was home. But something strange was happening to me. As my eyes moved over the objects around me, I felt every image in my field of vision making my brain struggle, like a word on the tip of your tongue you can’t quite reach. As I made my way back home, everything looked strange to me, as if my head wasn’t on quite right, as if I were viewing everything from an angle, somehow unfamiliar and slightly off.

As the days passed, strange images and visions began to fill my dreams. A vast, empty plain, the sky pure white. A flying woman, changing suddenly into a reflective sphere. Words surrounding me, undulating slowly, as if breathing, moving in and out of my field of vision, combining, recombining. More and more, these images began to seep into my waking life. At first, I thought I was going insane. As time passed, my memories began to coalesce, and then to seem more real to me than reality itself.

The day I finally understood what had happened to me, my friend Alete sat me down on a park bench. “Ben, you’ve been acting delirious!” she told me. “Maybe you should see someone.” I explained that I was fine, and that I now saw a greater reality than she or anyone else knew. She just stared at me. So I told her.

“I remember closing my eyes as the shuttle left the planet H.235, and then waking up in white fog, seeing nothing around me. When I looked down, I couldn’t even see my own legs. How long I stayed in the whiteness, unable to move or make a sound, I do not know. Suddenly, my mind was filled with new knowledge. From nothing, I felt myself taking on an unbearable weight, and passed out. I awoke in the same whiteness, but with the new information settled more comfortably in my mind. I had a purpose.

Using parts of my mind I never knew I had (had I really had them before now?), I formed some white fog into a canvas, and filled the canvas with a pleasant landscape image. Then, I inverted the field, condensing the fog outside me into the canvas, and creating the landscape all around me. I was now surrounded by mountains, a solid-looking lake, and some strangely false trees.

The leaves didn’t look quite right, the bark was too blotched, and I’d gotten the proportions wrong. What looked fine in a painting was terrible in three dimensions. I looked at the trees and wondered what made real bark look so different from what I’d imagined. I felt compelled to push yet another new mental button, and data swirled into my awareness.

I knew that bark is an aggregation of organs and tissues external to the vascular cambium, including phloem and thickened tissues from the secondary plant body, as well as epidermis, cortex and phloem derived from the primary plant body. The trees began to look more real. I knew the proportions, the leaves’ structure and thickness.

I looked at the lake, and was filled with fluid dynamics, their properties immediately transferred to the water. The scene was now almost real. I added air pressure differentials to create a light breeze, and formed some hawks in the distance after a dizzying spectrum of anatomy, muscular structure, and networks of basal ganglia. This act of God-like creation filled me with nausea and exhilaration, making my head spin into another blackout. After pulling myself together again, I opened my eyes in the white fog.

The time reserved for my training was now at an end; I began to receive instructions immediately. First, I was to create a fishing scene on a lake much like the one I’d already constructed. I was to pay special attention to the carp, because the client was desirous of catching some large specimens. Immediately after, my mind was turned to Baghdad in its glory, and the story of the 810th Arabian Night, to be rendered in explicit detail. And so it went, a seemingly endless array of assignments, from fantastic citadels in space to scenes of ancient bloody war in the Balkans to pleasant and elaborate fantasies.

The aliens who trapped me wanted to be entertained. To this end, they constructed a sensorium that allowed the stimulation of all the known senses. They had the ability to obtain and represent knowledge instantaneously through their linked minds. But this was not enough. Their replications of their regular experiences did not entertain them more than the experiences themselves. Their civilization had technology and wisdom. What they lacked was imagination. Perhaps it had disappeared with time, no longer useful. Perhaps they never had it at all. But through their infinite knowledge repository, they knew where to borrow it.

Time appeared to fly. Was there time? I could not be sure. Everything moved so quickly, but I never seemed to get tired, never needed anything; and I still could not find my body. I could create one, of course, but it didn’t feel quite right, so I disappeared it immediately each time. I became so adept at creating worlds that this no longer moved me. I took my duties and abilities as a given. But one thing never stopped amazing me, no matter how many times it happened – my seemingly instant knowledge of any subject to its finest detail.

The global mind I now had access to, the same one the aliens used themselves, was a real store of knowledge, not just information. Even if I knew nothing about a subject, a single thought in that direction brought me an understanding of the appropriate facts, mental maps, formulas, and narratives, all apparently designed for me alone.

The pleasure of creating whole universes was mild compared to my delight in being able to truly know anything I put my mind to. I knew what it was like to have infinite wisdom! I knew my joy at that sensation would never end… until I heard a metallic voice say “Thank you for your time. We hope your satisfaction was sufficient compensation,” and the world I was currently creating (a precise plot of a Mandelbrot set in exponentially increasing dimensions) faded to a white fog.

I woke up in my ordinary existence, as if no time had passed. But as my memories returned to me, I began to long more and more for that world of infinite knowledge and limitless possibilities. Now as I walk the streets and feel the walls on both sides of me pressing in, limiting my movement, I think only of the time I spent in forever, bathed in white.”

I sighed. Alete said nothing. We sat together, watching the green hills reflecting in the lake. The sun came out from behind the clouds, illuminating the scene in bright, almost unreal colors. The air above the lake glistened. Suddenly, Alete pointed ahead with a delighted cry. In the neon blue sky, a rainbow was shimmering into existence. As I stared at it, my mood began to change, and a strange kind of joy pierced my heart. Hundreds of thoughts were coming to my mind. I was on the edge of understanding. I felt myself a magician, and realized I was not alone. There were billions of us. All I needed was to figure out how to connect...

Reference: From the Introduction to the book “Integration-Ready Architecture and Design or Software Engineering with XML, Java, .Net, Wireless, Speech, and Knowledge Technologies”, Jeff (Yefim) Zhuk, Cambridge University Press