Moore emailed his work back to Matheos, who was "pleasantly surprised" to be sent something completely different from what he expected. Matheos wanted to create a heavy album; before deciding to takes Moore's ideas further, Matheos and Moore wrote what would become "OSI". Moore said that after that, " was pretty much comfortable with whatever I wanted to do." This new song format was very different from what Portnoy and Matheos originally planned: the already-written long tracks were split into multiple short songs, closer to Moore's project Chroma Key than traditional progressive metal. "The Thing That Never Was", a track on the bonus disc, shows the direction Matheos and Portnoy originally planned to take the album in.