Interesting piece, Anders. Did you ever read the 1960s sf of Keith Laumer? He wrote a huge amount of routine crap, and even inadvertent self-parody, but often he did this sort of thing quite nicely - the rediscovery that the protagonist is an element in a posthuman god, or the gradually step-by-step attainment of that condition. (Of course I also see Egan in this fragment.)
Damien Broderick