"The whole contraption is horrific," I gasped.

With the help of my guide--a big white bird with long, luxurious plumes that never stopped flying--I'd made it up through the catwalks and scaffolding and could overlook the whole of human creation.

It stunk. It stunk like burning oil and diesel fumes. It stunk like rotting bodies.

"It is built to eat its children," my swirling bird friend said.

Usually you can only see what's around you. And what you see on the internet. And you have a fuzzy picture of what you think happened before, and a fuzzy picture of what you think might happen next.

But from up here, everything was crystal clear. 8K Ultra HD clear. Agonizingly, burningly clear. On fire with burning radiation of existence itself.

Slaves building pyramids down near the bottom. Soldiers clashing, ships full of slaves. Then huge metal gun tubes and exhaust pipes that spanned decades, grinding gears spitting out bodies, office windows and computer screens and still more slaves and people hanging off the sides and falling off.

"It's a huge, greasy, people eating machine," I said.

"And people making machine," said the bird.

Now that I was up above it, I didn't want to go back.

"We can change it," said the bird, doing loops in the air while I sat on the scaffold, looking out.

"We can blow it up," she said. "We can tear it down."