Until genius, strangeness, community and criminality combined in a remarkable gesture, and the whole place unified its many identities in an unprecedented melding, the assorted bad and good voluntarily surrendering the distinction between themselves to create a single mind of unheralded capacity in furtherance of a project so vast and arrogant that even persons whose physical shapes were spread across the empty night between stars, and whose perception encompassed atoms and aeons with equal facility, were beggared and appalled by its scope.