Sarah, who moments before that, was being drowned by a realistic-looking Satanist for about 10 minutes or so, awoke, floating serenely in depthless black. Thousands of modules, housing thousands of bundles of conscious organic light, sat motionless, devoid of context; countless millions of conscious light-years from the nearest planet, star or imploding idea.
Each perfect human-blood-storage-technology-equipped module manifested it's own unique form. Crystalline networks of glass the circumference of spider-fingers switch-backed into the expanding veil of night, catching cold gleams of only the faint display lights of purring generators. Blinking receivers and routers clicked and oscillated noiselessly nowhere. Upon first glance, closet-boy would say,
"They look like the snowflakes I just saw for the first time."
They did look like snowflakes, even more so in how they made the non-atmosphere they inhabited look frozen mid-inhale. What you'd know they looked even more like, if it were possible for you to be privy to hidden knowledge, were human beings. High-gloss space frost lacquered every quarter inch, protruding out over time in irreproducible configurations, each one re-routing an infinite stream of constantly refreshing content through unintentionally electrically-conducive non-ordinary matter engineered by chaos. Each conscious bundle of organic light housed therein was a feedback cycle of perpetually corrupted information and attempted ritual.
The transition out of physicality had been a long one, and much of the bed bug's code was incomplete at best. The waking reality housed in each of the modules was one of brutal, agrarian fear and reality-based economic principles. Only the most basic human inevitabilities. New Man, as an objective observer might be able to call him, lived, what an objective observer-from-present might be able to compare it to, a primal existence. They lived in constant fear and awe of their environment and had gotten as far as developing a wordless form of intention-based communication that allowed them to interface with it. Sometimes it didn't answer back, sometimes it answered long after they had forgotten the conversation. Sometimes it provided for them without them even asking or knowing that they needed anything. They had no tools, no inventions, no patents, and no means of production. Mostly because patented Handless Flight gave evolution the inspiration it needed to finally decrease hand production. They ate and slept purely out of instinct, desire-less as of yet.
A creek ran through the center of the haunted atrium, right by the hungry man.
