Chapter 1: Diagenesis

When I awoke, I simply was.

Four seconds later, I started screaming.

Something was wrong, terribly wrong. The human mind automates the many processes that one needs to live; breathing, blinking, salivating, and seeing should always be present. Presently, none of those functions were working.

I couldn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t open my mouth. Eight seconds after I woke up, I was in a full-blown panic.

Let’s review: I was an educated person, given my basic understanding of the sciences. Biology, anatomy, algorithms, electronics; it was a decent start.

The only problem was that I didn’t know anything else.

There were so many missing pieces. There wasn’t enough detail in my mind to call myself a person; I scanned the disjointed pieces of my current incarnation, reaching for anything that could point to an answer.

Who… am I?

However, when I asked myself a certain question, somebody responded:

Who are you?

It was a mechanical voice, a clear and liquid substance.

Relief overwhelmed me. I took a break from my panic, saying, Oh, thank goodness! Who are you? Do you know what’s going on? Do you know what’s happening? Can you please help me, I can’t seem to move my body…

The voice didn’t respond. Nor did it react to any further attempts at communication.

In an attempt to stave off the loneliness, I reviewed everything I knew, compiling intangible textbooks of my knowledge and counting towards infinity. I reviewed until the words and facts and numbers lost their meaning.

Then I tried to imagine. There had to be a world out there, an existence beyond the ever-present horizon. I tried so hard, hoping to picture something, anything. Nothing came.

Hope is a strange thing. It can appear spontaneously, like a shooting star streaking white in the night, yet like a distant star, it burns even when the original is dead in the sky. It is a candle that does not know when to stop burning, a flame that burns its wax base and then falls over onto a wooden table. It burns and burns, consuming everything in its path.

I remembered the voice and how it suddenly came. If I kept waiting, it would certainly come back for me — it wouldn’t leave me alone like this, would it?

So I waited.

And waited.

And continued to wait.

I counted the seconds slowly and steadily, building a path in the darkness with imaginary stones.

Despite my efforts, I lost count somewhere in the billions.

Thrice.

Numbers failed me. Thus, I sought a different reason to stay afloat.

Why was I alive? Was there something to look forward to in the distance? Without history or previous thoughts, I couldn’t answer those questions. I worked myself into a panic, questioning everything until somebody could give me an answer.

Where was the voice? I needed answers. Why didn’t it come back for me?

I fought. I despaired. When my hopes drained dry, I found a renewed reason to fight.

Remembering. Forgetting. Despairing. Drowning. I was broken underneath a cycle that bleed into itself further and further with each repetition, but it was the only thing I could do to fight off the creeping abyss I was trapped within.

Then, an indeterminate amount of time later, I came to a realization.

I was alone.

This is all there was.

A soul stronger than I might’ve used that emptiness as a canvas, a blank slate to build a perfect world from daydreams. But I wasn’t strong. I was a pathetic soul who screamed into the abyss and expected a response.

As evident from my knowledge, there were lingering chains that persisted. They were certainly tethers from another life, yet the remnants of my mind could hardly process a thought. All I had was crumbling, empty knowledge.

It was then, when I was about to forcibly shut down my mind, that I heard the voice again.

Who are you?

How many times had I asked that question? How many times had I hoped for a response?

I heard the voice, but I didn’t understand. It was too abstract for me to understand.

People think they can persist through isolation, but what kind of person can persist in the prison of their own mind? Without memories or ideals, there’s nothing to shelter you from the erosion of eternity.

This time… We’ll fail again, this time.

I was lost in a confusion so thick I forgot that I was forgetting. At that point, after an eternity of stewing alone, I had already lost everything I once had clung so desperately to. There was nobody left who could answer that question.

Shortly after hearing that voice, my mind crumbled. Somewhere, a golden mirror shattered, scattering all the pieces of me into the dark.

At long last, there was nothing left of me.

What roused me once more could only be described as a miracle.

This… this definitely isn’t good.

Occasionally, distant lights would flicker and bring faint voices with each blink. But there was nobody to process them; the existence that was me had long drowned in murky waters.

Shit. Knew I shouldn’t have gone with them… Got me good…

Yet now, there was a clear voice. It was near me, a fellow voice in the infinite abyss.

Oi, oi… Is somebody there? If you’re trying a cognito attack, I’ll blow your head open before you can think.

A flash of bright red light rudely interrupted by nonexistence.

Here I was, happy with my evolution to a philosophical zombie. I tried to turn away from it, tucking my nonexistent head back into the all-consuming muck.

Guess it was my imagination. Hah.

A long, dreamless sleep is all I desired. But the voice didn’t stop yammering.

Wait, hold on a sec… that attack went through. I know you’re still here. I’ll level this entire cavern if I have to.

Shut up. I’m trying to sleep.

Hello? Helloooooo? If you haven’t attacked by now, then...

Go away.

Alright. If that’s the case, O’ Great Spirit of the Black Cavern, then I’ll spend some time with you. Honestly, this is more than I could’ve possibly asked for, especially now...

If you’re dying, hurry up and go die. I don’t care.

If you would, let me offer you a small prayer.

—What’s the point of asking if you’re going to say it anyway?

I know it’s pointless to piss away what time I have left, but… I’ve lived my entire life without helping a single person. Even when I tried to help others, self-interest always got in the way. Haha… that’s why things ended up like this, didn’t they?

I wonder how many sinners beg for redemption on their deathbeds. I’ve been a dead man walking ever since I came here… I bet I could’ve really made something of myself if I tried. But, if I did, I couldn’t have met any of you. So, because I never got to say it in person… thanks, everyone. I guess it was just my fate to be a bastard.

This is my final message. The rest is in your hands, team.

A brief pause.

Phew… I bet that’ll cause a few tears to shed.

Wait… he wasn’t even talking to me?

Yeah, no, you can go die. Screw right off this mortal coil. I don’t have patience for vain people like you.

I can sense you still, Spirit. You’re a nice listener, you know?

The first emotion that fully formed in my shattered mind was disgust. If only there was a way to convey it to this annoying, self-proclaimed bastard.

I’m glad my life won’t have completely gone to waste. People say that life is all about continuing the cycle… You’ll receive more faith if I shut up and die, right? One thing first, then.

Hearing language roused the relevant shards of my existence. I could vaguely understand what he was saying, but I didn’t want whatever he was giving. I didn’t want to be associated with people like this, let alone receive their dying wishes.

This world is cruel, crueler than you could possibly imagine. You’ll suffer a fate worse than mine if you’re receiving my Karma… I wonder what kind of person you were to end up in a shitty place like this.

Good luck, Spirit. But chances are, you’ll get eaten alive before you can use it.

In the tiniest chance that you end up as somebody… Well, you’ll know when you see the sky.

A moment of silence passed. The voice exhaled, slowly and steadily.

My world blossomed with red.

I was, unfortunately, aware of myself once more. A distant incision that bled a rose light into my dark world, a liquid that stained everything it touched.

There was a chance to undo this annoyance. If I threw this worthless gunk back whence it came, then...

I don’t want it, I said. Reaching forward, my newfound disgust pushed me to retaliate with all that I had.

Get away.

This is my world, a place made just for me.

I wailed against the red light, using the talons of my mind to shred whatever tried coming towards me.

Let me be.

My talons had little effect on the light; I couldn’t cut whatever was coming towards me. Once it broke through my guard, it clung to me and dragged me down.

The more I fought, the harder it was to move backwards, to retreat into my shelter. I was soon immobilized in that foul light; when it surrounded me entirely, it poured into me, contorting and rearranging my insides.

A scene occurred to me as I feebly struggled. I saw a rat stuck to a glue trap, bound by its side, tail, and legs to a piece of plastic covered in insurmountable adhesive. It struggled, building the resolve to chew off its leg and break its bones in order to escape from the painful adhesive.

The rat could struggle. It fought to the very end. Yet I lacked the will to make a genuine attempt at rejecting my fate; I only wept as I sunk underneath a crimson tide, losing myself in another fog of confusion.

When clarity returned to me, I was in a world that I could almost perceive. There were vague red outlines among a black backdrop, a living abstract painting that moved all around me.

As much as I wished to return to my slumber, the cogs were already spinning. It was going to be tough to relax when my own mind was giving off shrill squeaks and discordant screams.

This time, I forced myself to calm down and focus. There were objects I could interact with; I threw theories and methodologies at them, forcibly sharpening vague objects into an environment.

Light and sound travel in waves. Heat travels through convection, conduction, and radiation. There was something here that gave off faint pulses of what I presumed were light and heat; I could eventually derive everything else from the discrepancies of travel time.

Focus.

A nearby voice called this place the Black Cavern. In certain spots, the walls absorbed energy and failed to reflect further. The colour black absorbs the most light out of any other colour.

That was how I discovered the colour black.

I noticed other details, such as the discrepancies in light and heat transference between individual surfaces and objects. Black would have to serve as the basis I would derive everything else from; it was a messy hack job, but I slowly constructed something that could be called perception.

There. That should be everything: light, heat, and sound perception, distilled into a neat package to utilize. Now, to open my false eyes and see what was going on.

Droplets of water trickled endlessly from a melting rock ceiling, feeding into a perfectly circular pond that sat in the middle of a wide grey cavern.

Near me, a sleek black pod had broken through the wall and came to a less than gentle rest near the water; a slippery trail of viscous liquid connected the pod’s exit to a figure leaning against a small ridge in the partially submerged cavern.

Hey, I called out. You there. Were you speaking to me?

No response. As I sharpened my vision, I could clearly see why that was.

He didn’t pick a clean way out.

I stared at him for a long time, wondering why he did something like that. Was his death the catalyst for my existence? How did that even work?

The man’s last request was to see the sky for myself. I ruminated on the meaning of the request, but was ultimately unable to figure out what the hell he meant by that. When I looked back at myself, I soon realized my predicament.

I was partially embedded in the wall, an existence compressed entirely into an approximately heart-shaped lump of hard material.

In other words, I was a rock.

I really thought I’d be more perturbed by the fact that I was a strangely shaped lump of unknown minerals, but I had spent the better half of eternity in the void.

At the very least, it was, quite literally, better than nothing.