In The Web

Poul Anderson, The Stars Are Also Fire, 25.

When Venator enters communion with the cybercosm, his awareness flashes through strands of the web:

deep sea instruments detect the chemistries of a black smoker and of the life dependent on it;

a robot repairs the drain of a Yunnan village;

a monitor watches the growth of fullerene cables in a nanotank;

a pseudo-virus chosen by a sophotect will prevent cancer in an elderly human being;

Traffic Control keeps millions of aircraft flying safely;

an intelligence develops the logical structure that will prove or disprove a theorem.

Beyond communion is Unity, which Venator has entered only twice before. This time, he becomes "...as it were a photon..." (p. 335) As it were? This must be a simulation, not the entry of his consciousness into a real photon? His photon arrows and flies through space-time curved and warped by mutable matter. His path is not single but infinite, along every possibility. The paths interact until almost only the geodesic remains. Past and future are uncertain. His particle is diffracted. Then a downloaded synnoiont helps him to see the quantum universe.