Thump.

Aseptic silence disturbed.

Thump, Thump.

Steady unhurried stirring from nothing an echo in an empty space.

Thump, thump, thump.

Life has come, a stark contrast in space inhuman cold and vast.

Thump. Thump.

It slows this reassuring sound; stirring becomes panicked it is new frailty.

Thump. Stop. Stopped… Initializing.

Individual transfer OS coding.

Starting conditions, analyzing…

Starting conditions, set.

User confirmation required set true name Y/N.

1. @”%&*~# (redacted)

It was a strange and inauspicious birth, but it was a start. The vast empty space into which I was born was startling and then very quickly terrifying. While I had instantaneously gained an awareness of self.

“I think therefore I am”.

It felt weird to be so immediately aware but I didn’t know why. I was missing things that I had always taken for granted but I could only tell this by the phantom feeling of where they used to be I wouldn’t be able to describe what It was.

New things, senses I had never had before were screaming at me. In every direction there was nothing. A cold black void extending in every direction. Feeling noting beneath me I felt I should be falling but some sense that I couldn’t understand let me know I wasn’t moving. The silence was gnawing at me in the emptiness. Panicked I tried to look closer and closer out into the darkness but still found nothing, but as my focus grew I lurched forward. The positional sense that I couldn’t work out how it was working with no references to tell I was moving. It seemed to be telling me I was moving at a rather fast clip. But my sense of panic that had briefly been displaced by shock was returning having disappeared when I started moving. I moved faster like I was running from some monster that was drawing closer but my panic was just growing faster now. Without another option, I pushed my focus to the limit and passed out.

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Sometime later I abruptly gained consciousness. It was strange I hadn’t been caught as far as I could tell by whatever I had been panicked about chasing me. And for the first moment from waking for the first time I was rather calm. Having established all seemed well within myself that core of my being that I would eventually need to find a name. I looked out around me. Overall it looked much the same, a vast infinite space that was in no way differentiated. But this was no longer the case. Stretching from me out into the distance was a faint bar of energy. Thin and rather indistinct it spanned a huge distance as I perceived it, but having no frame of reference it was hard to tell. Both time and distance are hard to quantify in this emptiness.

Having studied the bar and how it extended into the distance for some time. I decided to use my new mobility to investigate and turned my greater focus, following in the direction of the bar I moved towards it. As I moved onto the bar I felt a new feeling of pressure not uncomfortable but an awareness of something pressing against me. Having stopped to examine this new feeling I noticed the section of the bar that I had passed over was now brighter more solid and less indistinct in its relationship with the surrounding darkness.

Excited to see that my actions had some way of impacting the empty vastness, I pushed on moving a little faster keen to see that I would find on the end of this bar. I came to a change in the bar where it visibly became more solid more like that behind me. It had been slowly getting brighter as I moved down the length of the bar but here it changed from a nebulous diffuse strip to a solid bar though with a circular cross-section as I looked now it could be easily distinguished.

As I went to move further along so I could look in detail at the bar I couldn’t. Well, I physically felt I could but every time I went to turn my attention onto the solid bar I found the panic that had been absent since waking was back in full force. Each time disrupting my focus. So long as I didn’t attempt to move further along the bar I was okay. Some stubborn streak that I wasn’t until then aware I had felt miffed that my investigations that a yielded such excitement were to be stymied in this fashion.

My apparently stubborn nature girded me as I struggled to push through the panic forcing it to one side as I pushed forward. I started to feel stretched my will and focus pushing me forward while some force pushed back against me. And me in the middle being pushed, pulled, compressed and rarefied between them all at the same time. Until suddenly with a lurch and a stop I had moved forward some tiny distance into the solidly filled space. That’s when it all went wrong.

I was stuck the panic that I had momentarily overcome to move into this position having crashed over me in full force and was even now washing away any sign of a rational through. I had to move I couldn’t stay here. To stay here was to die. I mustn’t die. Go back. Go back. GO BACK. I couldn’t go back there was no space to go back. Move or die, move or die. I must get away from here. I started focusing in random directions in some desperate effort to escape. My focus becoming more strained each time I failed some sense of myself being lost in every failed attempt.

Till I found it a slight gap a point a direction no more than a couple of degrees where the screaming panic became slightly less. Less all-encompassing and gave me the opportunity to focus and with another lurching hop escape.