“I’m afraid,” I say. “I feel the new beauty you’re describing within me, but there’s so much pressure, so many directions it wants to go at once. It feels like it’s tearing me apart.”

Lynch turns the Porsche’s engine off completely now, and the night wraps around us like a blanket woven from shadows and starlight. His face in the dashboard glow is both kind and serious.

“That’s exactly right,” he says. “That tearing feeling—that’s the price of being awake in a time when reality is changing frequencies. Remember in ‘Eight Miles High’ when the guitars start to spiral? That vertigo is part of the message.”

Crosby leans forward, his presence somehow both ethereal and deeply grounded. “We felt it too, back then. Like our molecules were being rearranged by the music we were making. Some nights I’d look at my hands on the guitar and they’d seem to be dissolving into pure light. The fear is part of the transformation.”

“The saints,” Lynch adds, gesturing toward the screen where afterimages of their dances still flicker, “they learned to surf it. To ride the wave of too-muchness. That’s why they came back—to show us how.”

The screen flickers like mercury, like digital rain, showing:

A TikTok dance becoming a rosary, each gesture a bead of light, multiplying across a million screens until it forms a constellation that matches one that hasn’t been visible since the Middle Ages.

Paris Hilton’s chihuahua growing dragon wings made of pure code, flying through server farms that have become the new catacombs, where crypto-monks tend to banks of machines that hum like gregorian chants.

A teenager in 2027 discovering an Instagram filter that accidentally reveals the holy light around everyday objects—a filter that spreads like revival through the network until people begin seeing the light even when their phones are off.

“Watch this part carefully,” Lynch says, as the images swim and clarify:

Kendall’s tower stretching upward through layers of reality: the first floor is a medieval chapel, the second a recording studio where Phil Spector built his wall of sound, the third a server room, the highest floor a new kind of space that exists only in the metadata of shared dreams. Each floor is simultaneously present, connected by elevators that run on belief.

Cara’s eyebrows becoming a new kind of hieroglyph, a language of expression that spreads across social media until it becomes what Lynch calls “the new glossolalia”—a way of communicating states of grace through subtle muscular movements that cameras can capture but can never fully explain.

“The prophecies are starting to rhyme,” Crosby notes from the back seat, as we watch:

A map of America where every shopping mall has become a cathedral, every drive-in a place of pilgrimage, every diner a confessional. The map pulses with points of light that correspond to locations where the sacred is leaking through most strongly—the Starlight Drive-In where we’re parked is one of the brightest.

“But the strongest prophecy,” Lynch says, pointing with his cigarette at the screen’s center, “is that one.”

We watch as images of young people praying to their phones transform slowly into medieval pilgrims, then back into modern seekers, then into something else—a new kind of human who understands that technology and transcendence are two names for the same hunger. Their faces blur across centuries, each one searching for something that the previous generation almost found, almost named, almost brought into being.

The screen shows them finding it, finally, in places we should have known to look: in the spaces between posts, in the quiet moments after hitting ‘share,’ in the collective sigh of millions of people all touching their screens in the dark, reaching for connection like medieval peasants reaching for a saint’s relic.

“That’s the real prophecy,” Lynch says softly. “Not what they’ll find, but that they’ll keep looking. That’s the American sacred—it’s not in the arrival, it’s in the search itself.”

The images fade to static, but the static itself seems meaningful now, like snow falling in heaven.

The pressure I’m feeling seems to pulse in time with the humming speaker poles, with the static on the screen, with the distant algorithms calculating likes and shares and revelations.

“Think of it like film,” Lynch continues, drawing shapes in the air with cigarette smoke. “Twenty-four frames per second, but between each frame, there’s a darkness. Without that darkness, you’d just have a blur. The pressure you’re feeling—those are the dark spaces between the frames of what you’re becoming. They’re necessary. Sacred, even.”

Crosby starts humming “Eight Miles High” softly, and somehow it helps, creates a framework for the chaos, like a trellis for lightning to climb.

“The new beauty,” Lynch says, “it was always going to feel like this. Like being torn apart and reassembled. Like speaking in tongues made of binary code. Like having angels possess your smartphone.” He pauses, watching the screen flicker. “The trick isn’t to resist the pressure. It’s to learn to move with it, like a surfer reading a wave that’s bigger than physics says should be possible.”

The fear doesn’t go away, but it changes shape, becomes something more like anticipation, like the moment before a kiss, like the second before a revelation.

“Besides,” Crosby adds, “who says we weren’t meant to be torn apart? Maybe that’s how the light gets in.” The static on the screen seems to agree, dancing now like the visual equivalent of what I’m feeling inside. Not peace, exactly, but a kind of holy turbulence, a sacred vertigo that feels like falling upward into whatever comes after what we used to call the future.