Am I alive?

“Will you shut your trap?!” A few seconds passed before he realized something was terribly wrong. ‘What the hell is happening? where am I?’ He tried to speak, but no sound came. The only thing he perceived was his thoughts when he tried to speak.

Next he tried to move, but nothing happened. And now a terror is creeping his thoughts. ‘What happened? Why can’t I speak? Why can’t i move? Why…’ He stopped thinking like that, taking a breath to calm himself like he did everytime something or someone has been trying his nerves.

After nearly half a minute he was finally calm, ready to face this situation. ‘Okay, first I need to assess the situation.’ He tried to move again, but this time he did it methodically. He tried his feet, knees, entire legs, then hands, elbows and so on. But no part of his body responded, he could not even feel it.

Panic started rising in him, but he managed to once again calm down. ‘So, I don’t have any sense of touch, what of other senses?’ Evidently he has no sense of sight, he would have remarqued it when he tried to open his eyes earlier. And his other senses all fared the same: no touch, sight, smell, taste or hearing.

‘So, I have no senses then… But I am thinking, so I should not be in a coma then, right? What other situation would make me this way?’ He thought of divers ailments and injuries consequences, but found none able to do what he is experiencing.

At least until one thought came to him: ‘Oh fuck! Oh fuck! I’m a fucking brain in a jar! Someone extracted my brain and put it in a fucking nervous-friendly solution!’ It must have been at least 20 minutes since he came to himself, and having only this hypothesis for his condition made him not freak out, but enraged that: ‘some retarded bastard dared experiment this torturous idea on me?!’

He kept some doubts, after all it would not be easy to do that to him. And then he realized his mistake: ‘Fuck, I forgot to think about my last memories. How dumb am I not to think of doing that?’

And so he roams his memories, skipping the insignificant details. ‘I woke up, washed myself, ate and took the bus to visit Carl. We talked about how our families are garbage that remember we exist only when they need something from us, and after eating, in the afternoon, we started working on the thesis about the spaces’ fabric.’

‘We got into an argument, again, and then… I don’t remember well. I crouched? I… Damn, I had a heart attack?’ He tried remembering for some time, and the more he assessed his memory, the clearer he remembered.

‘My chest suddenly hurt like hell. I crouched and then flopped to the ground, losing strength quickly. Poor Carl, he tried doing a heart massage and broke one of his wrists.’ The realization that he died of a heart attack strangely calmed him.

*inhale*, *sigh* He breathed in deeply and sighed at his situation. ‘What can I do now?’ It took him ten seconds to realize the anomaly. ‘Wait, I can breathe?’ Even with no feeling of lungs he could still feel himself inhale.

So he did several times, the exhale felt incredibly weird to him though. ‘It’s like I am moving while I exhale. Do I have brain damage or something? Am I in a wheelchair or hospital bed?’ He imagined himself as some vegetable human, incapable of even reacting to simple stimuli.

‘Whatever, all I can do is breathe anyway.’ He took the deepest possible inhale he could. Breathing in as hard as he can, after 3 seconds he found it weird, after 5 he knew something was wrong. He continued to just breathe in without feeling any fullness of what should be his lungs.

‘I can breathe in infinitely? What the fuck?’ He continued doing just that for some time, but nothing changed, he even barely noticed he was still doing it after 10 or so minutes. At least what felt like 10 minutes to him.

The only way he could tell he was still inhaling was the fact that he felt air coming in. ‘Wait, how do I know it is air? I could just have a hole in my lung and a pump pumping oxygenated liquid in…’

But he counted this hypothesis out, what flowed in didn’t leak out. At least he didn’t feel so. And adding to that it felt almost weightless, so it couldn’t be a liquide. ‘Pumping air through then?’

He chased this whole idea out of his mind, after all it was him that chose when he breathed in or not. And to prove his point to himself he stopped inhaling. And a new sensation came to him, it was weird, something he never felt before.

‘The best way to describe it would be if I was a balloon and had more air pressure in me than there is around me. Is it because I inhaled for so long?’ He felt that he was missing the point, some discrepancy he couldn’t point out.

He reluctantly gave up the search for now, it wasn’t productive to just bang your mind on a problem for too long. Now he tried exhaling, the only thing he didn’t experiment with all his attention.

Now the result was even weirder than breathing in. He felt like he exhaled a part of himself out, in a panic he tried taking it back in, and the part of himself outside of whatever he currently is, reacted to his will. It came right back inside of him, forcing an inhale.

‘What was that?’ Was his thought, and he gave in to curiosity. He exhaled again, feeling himself not split, but… ‘diverge? Would that be accurate? Like a hand having 5 fingers, and then one of them dividing to then have 6 fingers?’ The exemple was not really accurate, but he couldn’t think of a better one right now.

After experimenting for a moment, he found out that he could inhale and exhale at the same time. But he ignored the discovery to think of the other one: ‘ I am starting to feel something… Some kind of fullness.’

And so he inhaled as much as he could for some more time, and little by little he felt right. ‘I am actually filling up.’ He felt his… self, the him when he breathes out, getting denser inside of him.

‘Do I want to continue? I don’t really know what my situation is, or even what I am doing right now.’ He thought about it, and mere seconds later came to a conclusion. ‘Well, fuck me. I can’t do anything else anyway. If I must stay like this until I truly die then I can at least do something to pass the time. Be it my imagination or reality.’

And so he continued his inhaling action for what felt like hours. He tried inhaling harder, but it didn’t work. He tried some rhythm and patterns in breathing intensity, but it only diminished the speed at which he took air in.

Finally, between 2 and 3 hours of doing only that, he came to a point where he started feeling something physically. ‘Am I waking up from this nightmare?’ Skepticism is important in science, even of our own deductions. So he kept some doubts about himself, but sadly no, he wasn’t waking up from a nightmare.

Instead he felt his new body, the form it took and what is currently touching it. ‘Wait, I’m a sphere? And what is that? Damn, I actually am a sphere in some grass. How the hell am I tripping this hard? I must be at the hospital, being super high with powerful drugs.’

He waited sometime, after all he is still thinking rationally, so he should be able to see the fluctuations in his hallucinations. But after some time he banished this hypothesis too. ‘Yeah no, I still have no sight and nothing is moving.’

After waiting a moment, and feeling bored already, he started breathing in again. This time he felt a difference. He could tell from where the air came in him. What he identified as the ground gave him this air more slowly than the air itself. ‘Well nothing really strange there.’

He continued inhaling some more, wandering if there was some other point where he would feel full again and discover something else. After the fullness sensation hit the critical point earlier, he felt like something shifted in him, and then he felt rather empty again.

So he breathed in, the speed at which he felt the air entering didn’t change at all, but he felt it better now. It was somehow more defined in how it felt, he could barely tell that it came in the form of strings stuck together.

He tried feeling more about it, slowing his inhale, and found that he could decide from where he takes the air in. But the less surface of his roundnew body he uses, the less he takes in per time. So he just continued taking air in from everywhere.

Next up he tried exhaling a little, and he discovered something really important: the air he exhales is indeed a part of himself, he can feel through it! Excited about the discovery, he manipulated the air outside of him to feel his surface.

When he arrived near the ground he thought the air would just stop at it. But contrary to that, it just passed through, barely hindered at all. And with his -air- inside the ground he felt something change about it. But before he could tell what changed, he lost the control and feeling of his -air-.

‘Do I have a time limitation on my control?’ He tried exhaling again, and controlled his -air- in the space above him. He waited for some time, but nothing happened, he could still feel and control his -air- even when it had been triple the time he controlled it before.

‘So it has to do with the ground then?’ He tried exhaling directly inside of the ground. Getting his air through the ground by the part of him in contact with the ground. He waited a bit and the same thing happened: he lost both feeling and control.

But this time he found a detail: he lost control before feelings. And the only thing he wants to do is experiment with the phenomenon. So he does just that, trying to feel something while he is losing control. But after attempting it dozens of times it didn’t gain him anything.

The only little detail he found was that when he expended large amounts of -air- in the ground, it took more time to completely lose control, and when he totally lost it, he could keep feeling it for some time before it dissipates.

‘Not that useful then. Well, at least I should be able to touch around me to know what is around.’ And so he proceeds to do that, exhaling this -air- and forming a bubble around him so that all that is inside is the -air- of himself.

One thing he found out was that the further away he gets his -air-, the less he can control it. The other is that he must be in a forest as he can roughly feel 4 trees and some bushes around him.

‘So, if I am not too put off of scale… I can’t control my air when it is farther than 3 meters from me, leave or take some. So I am some kind of ball in the forest that breathes, controls and feels air?’

‘Wait, if I am not organic, which I am nearly certaine I am not, can I even say I am alive?’