“In four dimensions, events are ordered and shaped by time and circumstance, and a human’s perception of this ordering as an immutable relationship between cause and effect adds weight to the significance assigned to choices. Our quest for personal satisfaction, bearing this weight, labeled responsibility, is pitted against our social conscience, similarly weighted; and in the space between, like putty in their diametrical mold, our will is ordered and shaped.”

-Dr. Gerard Mann, ‘Discermination’
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That night, after returning home late exhausted from the session, I dream that I am back under, staring into the void with which I have grown familiar.

I begin to make out the faint lines that grow and become Chains of Events. They materialize and I prepare to be led as usual into a section of Chain, but instead of this, a voice speaks in my head—not an audible voice but a voice by merit of its otherness from my own thoughts.

“What do you see?”

The Chain of Events.

“Look closer,” the voice commands.

I find that I can move of my own volition, that there’s some sort of surface under my feet—though the void is infinite, it seems that a dimension has been removed, and I am able to walk across it as on the face of a painting, warily approaching a nearby section of chain. I don’t know what I’m looking for.

“Why do you think you are unable to alter the course of the Chain of Events?”

I don’t know.

“There is something that holds the Chain in place. Open your eyes to the Chains of Consequence.”

Staring more carefully, I am surprised to find that the chain is not smooth as I had supposed but symmetrically scored, and my focusing eyes now perceive myriad microscopic chains wrapped transversely around every part of every link in the Chain of Events.

“You see,” the voice continues, “when you look at the Chain of Events, you see the Chains of Consequence in its shape. The course of the Chain of Events is held in place by the Chains of Consequence. It can only be altered if the Chains of Consequence are broken…”

A claustrophobic feeling left over from the dream stays with me upon waking, haunting me for the remainder of that day. I can’t break the Chains of Consequence, nor can I stop seeing them everywhere I go. I am forced into the act of living by an absurd feeling of responsibility for the inevitable, predictable, and immutable consequences of every action; my awareness of this ability to make choices that direct the course of my own life, rather than filling me with a sense of my own freedom of will, only weighs me down. For what I really want and would choose—were I truly free—is to never have to choose but rather float through the experience of life interestedly and contentedly.

But instead, this feeling of responsibility, these Chains of Consequence jerk me from my bed far too early in the morning, and all I can do is curse and shamble on, down the path I am forced to choose.