Assimilation.
To the uninitiated, the term conjures crude images.
The hungry wolf devouring the lamb, the black hole swallowing a star, the office worker who inhales three donuts in the breakroom before anyone else realizes they've been delivered.
It's seen as consumption, brute force, a process of making something less by making it part of you.
This is, of course, adorably, fundamentally, and cosmically wrong!
That's not Assimilation. That's just eating.
True Assimilation, the kind that reshapes reality and makes entities nervous, is not about consumption.
It is about understanding. It is the process of taking in information, an idea, a being, so completely…so intimately, that the boundary between you and it ceases to have meaning.
It is not making something part of you; it is realizing that you and it were always part of the same, larger equation.
