"So here I am, in step with everyone now, and yet I'm still separate from everyone. I am still trembling all over from the agitation I endured, like a bridge after an ancient train has rumbled over it. I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth, might as well not even be there. Isn't it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness? It may be, after all, that I am not a phagocyte, calmly going about its business of devouring microbes (with light blue temples and freckles). It may be that I am a microbe, and maybe I am one of thousands among us, still pretending, like me, to be phagocytes... What if today's essentially irrelevant occurrence - what if all this is only the beginning, only the first meteorite in a whole series of rumbling, burning rocks, spilling through infinity towards our glass paradise?"
Yevgeny Zamyatin