Welcome friends, visitors and wayward travelers..... This is a Bryce render for a science fiction novel I began to write but never got past outline form really. There is some postwork done in Photoshop to reshape and help with color..... Thanks for all views and or coments!!!!! Have a wonderful week!!!!!!!! The God Mind ------ excerpt-----Copyright Rob Custer 2009 How had it come to this? The stranger's hands shaking, fumbling for a connection that nerves refused to make. Hunted like a dog. Cast out from heaven and stomped straight into hell. The blood caked on his hands was his own. So many angry little objects had made a home in his mortal shell. It wasn't the pain so much as knowing that these wounds would surely prove fatal. So many things left undone... He used to dream about this place. It haunted him through much of his life. It never occurred to him that it would be the last thing he would ever see. But he thought of the mountains and the desert and the seas of his home world and longed for its relative safety. How different things might be if he was there right now. Not here, not now. I can't just give up... Damn if I'll go out crying. That was not his way. He felt for the wounds that had left him paralyzed for the last four hours. He had already removed the knives he could reach. F*&^%$# didn't even bother to take all their knives with them. How rude.! He laughed... Hard to believe that this s*&^ was real. He didn't really have two of those things still in him, did he? Still, he couldn't deny the pain. I am feeling pain, right?.., he thought to himself as he fingered the holes of the wounds. This was not supposed to happen. No one thinks they will ever be left for dead by the people that care for them. But there it was.... It had to be..... His cronies had betrayed him. No one has ever even gotten close before and now I'm laying here dying. Someone made a mistake. This isn't happening to me. How strange that even in death we look for something to hang our ideas on. Something to leave behind. "Oh, I'll leave something behind," he says aloud... " A stinking carcass,"...Caesar always did have a dark sense of humor. He began a process that few people know of or would believe outside of this world. Even on this world where magic is commonplace... this was strange magic. It must be time, he thought to himself. No matter how many times he had done this, it always felt like something new. How many times when he had first learned this magic had he tossed himself to the wolves.... so that he could feel his own death...Life is always uncertain, will the magic hold this time? Or would he drift to pieces like so many of his contemporaries. This was the process that sustained his core...no matter what form he should take on through the randomness of rebirth. How he wished for even more control over the outcome. He thought it funny how many people would do anything to learn this secret. He thought this because he knew what would happen if those people did learn the secret...Nothing...... Nothing happens because those people are part of someone else's core. In the worlds he traveled all were dominated by very few individuals. That's not to say that he believed people were unimportant. It just means that they were always part of something bigger than themselves. Nor did they want the same things out of their existence. However there have always been those who have broken through all the illusions. In fact we read about them all the time. Core-beings. The wizards of the multiverse. The reason; the how and the why behind how things get done. Sometimes he wondered if he wasn't getting played like he had played so many in so many worlds. Sometimes an enormous spirit can split, and in the world of the living the result was usually of the bloody kind. ***********All characters, ideas, etc.. Purely fictional************