: All that is created will suffer .
: All will be born in suffering, endless grayness shall be their lot.
: All creation will tailor to failure and pain ...
: That is what we bring: a great crushing weight to press down youth and hope.
: No more will .
: No more freedom.
: Nothing but agonizing death and never good shall come of it."
: - Gravemind, Silentium

Ever think about free will? You can look at the world, you can understand what the universe is, and you can shape it to your liking. Without free will, you'd sit where you're sitting now, slowly staring at the computer screen and the wall and the things on your desk for hours on end, and then days. You know that you're hungry, but you can't get up and go to the kitchen. You're dying of thirst, your lips have cracked and your tongue feels like a wad of felt, but you can't even close your mouth to conserve moisture. You can't even move your eyes to read a line of text you haven't read a thousand times over.

You'd die, of course. Takes three days to die of dehydration, which is pretty damn horrifying, but you can't die if the Flood take you. You're just a mind adrift in a sea of meat and misery, perfectly cognizant of what's been done to you, but just a passive observer.

By the way, ever think about trilobites? Really think about them? They're really cool creatures, and there's just so many kinds of them. Some have claws, some have horns, some have differentiated legs, and that's because they were around for so long. They emerged in the Cambrian period about 521 million years ago, and went extinct about 250 million years ago. Now think about that. They were around for 270 million years, swimming or crawling around on the bottom of the ocean, and many species lived so deep they never saw daylight. 270 million years. Hatching. Eating. Crawling. Reproducing. Dying. At the end of Permian, all they left behind is fossils.

Now imagine living every minute of those 270 million years as a mind absorbed by the Flood, with less volition than a trilobite. You can't eat, you can't crawl, you can't even count the days as they go by. No poetry, no songs, no stories to leave behind. There's just you and the Gravemind, constantly whispering.

Of course, the human mind can't store 270 million years of memories. It can't even store one hundred. But if the Gravemind can surgically remove your capacity for free will, there's no reason why it can't modify you to remember every micro-instant of your existence. Hell, with a brain the size of a planet, there's no reason why it can't donate a few hundred cubic meters of thinking muscle to use as memory storage.

So, you are going to stew for a quarter of a billion years, and if the Flood is around and kicking by then, it ain't going to stop. You'll be all but alive in 7.6 billion years, give or take, when the sun will have expanded and swallowed the Earth. By this point, the Flood is pangalactic, so you'll survive. Maybe you'll even be here when the stars go out.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this ever since I read Silentium.