Imagine:
You go to sleep in your bed, in your room, in your apartment. You spend two hours reading a book you downloaded online, because you don't have the money to buy one since you don't want to ask your parents for too many things, risking to cause a discussion. You then proceed to go to sleep at around half past midnight, and that only because your eyes cannot physically stay open for longer.
You sleep, and when you wake up, you're not in your room anymore.
That's what happened to Marta.
When she opened her eyes, she noticed many things all at once: first, her phone's alarm wasan't ringing, which wasn't unusual. Second, there was an awful lot of light streaming into her room, which was unusual. She always slept in total darkness, her blinds closed so as to not let light in in the morning. And she knew for a fact that she hadn't forgotten to close them this time, so something was up.
The third thing she noticed, once her brain had gone through these thoughts, was that something was hanging from the ceiling on top of her. Something red and big and... it wasn't actually hanging from the ceilings, no, it was connected to four wooden poles that were keeping it up.
It's a four poster bed, she realized.
Then: I'm lying on a four poster bed.
And finally: I don't own a four poster bed.
Slowly, because whatever the fuck had happened there was still no reason to get up fast, it had already happened after all, she lifted herself from the very comfortable bed and looked around.
"Yep, I am not in my apartment."
The room she was in would've fit better in a stereotypical fantasy castle: it was large beyond need, the walls painted a light, minty, green. The bed she was sitting on followed the same color scheme, with the covers being a dark green that reminded her of the color of oak leaves under the summer sun and the bed sheets being an even darker green that got really close to looking like a lilipad. The pillows, in contrast, were a bright orange, like freshly autumn leaves.
Beside the bed, on her left side, was a night stand in a baroque style with little angels carved in the borders, their small hands pointing at the drawers or holding them as they fluttered their tiny wings, mischievous smiles on their faces. The wood it was carved from was a deep dark red, probably acacia, or maybe cherry, she couldn't say, she wasn't an expert.
To her right stood a single door, tall enough to let four of her piled one on top of each other through. The same went for the wall in front of her, only the doors there were two.
"Ok, so, I probably ate something that had gone horribly bad yesterday."
Indeed, because that was the most logical possibility. Gods she sucked at this.
"Ok, no, my food didn't go bad. This hallucination is not caused by food poisoning. Then, I must've finally cracked and gone down the deep end!" she looked around some more, her eyes delighted by the beautiful colors of the room despite herself, and shrugged.
"Well, might as well enjoy it."
There was a good chance she was still in her room back home, that all she was seeing was just her demented mind projecting her idea of the perfect room on the world around her, and that as she began walking around she would bump into something and end up breaking her neck against her wardrobe or something like that. Which, you know? Not the worst way to go. At least she'd die while seeing something so beautiful.
She put her feet on the floor and immediately regret it as the cold passed from the tile to her, making her shiver.
"Socks it is!" she told herself as she went questing for her night socks underneath her pillow, where she hid them every time when she went to sleep and the covers made her feel too hot. She searched around... and her hand felt no warm wool anywhere. She lifted her pillow, expecting to see the red wool socks her grandma had knitted her a few years back for christmas, and found nothing.
"So, either the sock fairy finally decided to pass but didn't leave me any money, or I moved around too much in my sleep and now they're somewhere... on... the floor."
She looked around at the image her mind was projecting of the room, shaking her head: "Yeah, no, they're lost."
In the back of her mind Marta knew she should've been panicking, but then again, it was at the very back. Right behind that corner, in a deep, dark, place where not even a glimmer of light reached, behind a solid steel door with numerous locks, all to make sure those pesky negative emotions such as sadness and hate, together with the happy memories of people that were long gone, wouldn't bother her. Sadly, the door had long since cracked and now, every once in a while, the things she kept there emerged. They were the reason she felt so tired in these last two years.
Again, she tried to get out of the bed, and again her feet felt the cold tiles underneath, but this time around she just endured it.
"Alright! Let's go bump into a wall," she whispered to herself cheerfully, as if she didn't want some invisible observer to notice that she was talking to herself, maybe in the hopes that they wouldn't think she had, indeed, gone insane.
She walked confidently towards a tall window on the left side of the room, the clear glass covered by green curtains that let a bit of light through, expecting to bump into the wardrobe that sat exactly where she was going... but there was nothing but air there.
What? she asked herself.
And yet she reached the window and looked out, and all the while she encountered no resistance from invisible furniture.
"Hmmm... maybe I'm dreaming. Some kind of lucid dream? Or maybe I've ended up in a coma and I'm lying in my bed drooling like a dog while my mind built this place to keep me safe. Or maybe I still went insane and this is only happening in my mind. Although... would someone who's gone insane be reasoning like I do?"
She mulled that over for a few seconds, then shrugged: "Who cares. Not like I can do much to fix it. At least now I won't have to worry about... everything else. Huh, who would've thought that falling into a coma would be so liberating?"
Then she looked out the window.
And stopped for a moment, her mind going blank, her irises slowly beginning to widen as her mouth opened wide in horror, surprise and curiosity. For, outside of her window, instead of a blue sky filled with white fluffy clouds, or in general a sky of any type, or actually ground as well, was a wall of darkness. Total, absolute, all-encompassing, you-name-it, blackness. A part of her mind registered some other buildings around her and high walls like those usually found around big castles, but it was, again, in the very back of her mind.
At the forefront lay a single thought: Where am I? Am I dead?
She fell to the ground and crawled backwards as a sound like a banshee's scream filled the room. She realized it was her producing it, but she didn't stop. Instead, she screamed louder and managed, somehow, to get to her feet and begin running. She ran to one of the doors and opened it, a part of her surprised at just how easy it was considering their dimensions.
Then she ran and ran, because a part of her knew that the darkness wasn't just a construct of her mind, that it was something more. No, not more, less, much less, so much less that it was practically nothing. A void that could devour her in a moment if it were allowed. A Nothingness that hungered for all that existed, that desired to feed on the place she was currently in. That desired her. It called to her, told her to come just a bit closer, to let it feed, to let it put an end to her. Wouldn't it be oh so easy? She just had to let go, to take a short walk through these halls and step right out. Afterwards, there would be nothing to worry about anymore. No more discussions, no more tiredness, no more need to suppress her emotions at the mere memory of a lost loved one. Absolute Nothingness.
And she ran away from it, not just because she feared it, but also because she desired it. She had never wanted something in her life more than she wanted to listen to the Nothingness' call.
How long she ran? She couldn't have told you. What she did know was that, at some point, she heard a strangely monotone voice shout at her: "WOULD YOU PLEASE STOP SCREECHING AROUND LIKE A BAT?"
That was enough to make her stop right in her tracks. She fell to her knees, breathing heavily as she tried to calm down her racing heart.
"There. Better," said the same voice.
Marta did not, in fact, immediately look up towards the surprisingly reassuring voice that had gotten her to stop screaming like a madwoman. Instead, she spent an entire minute staring at her hands and the floor underneath. It was a beautiful floor, wooden, probably some sort of parquet, with tiny little grooves here and there that were a tad darker than the rest of the board. All in all, it was simple, a blessing for the eyes, and not at all dark like the Nothingness.
"So, you gonna get up and eat or keep staring at the floor?"
Her hands weren't so bad as well. They were smooth up to the fingers, where they became a bit rougher, the skin split from the cold and the little care she took of them, veins could be seen emerging from her flesh here and there and she couldn't help herself reaching out to one with a finger and caressing it. She never understood why, but it relaxed her. Her fingernails were kept short and trimmed, long enough to come in handy when she wanted to peel an orange, but not so long that she had to actually spend the time to do more than occasionally file them. They were, as always, pale, turning slightly blue when they got closer to her skin. A circulatory problem, her parents thought, but she'd never bothered to go get it checked out by a doctor since the worst thing it did was cause her to have cold hands. Although, this time around, they looked a lot darker than usual. Maybe the run increased the blood circulating through them.
"Floor it is then."
Finally, she looked up, feeling a lot more anchored to the reality than before, and took in the place she'd ended up in.
It was a rather small room compared to her... the bedroom she'd woken up in. Oh, sure, it still fit perfectly the palace aestetic, but at the same time it was much simpler, homier even. Like the floor, the walls were made out of wood, this one white, with a great carving of a group of people eating and being merry at a banquet extending from one end of the room to another. It reminded her a bit of Leonardo da Vinci's 'The Last Dinner', although in this case there were no shocked disciples around a Christ in the center, only various groups of people holding mugs of what she thought were beers or outright bottles of wine or other alcohols, with a few of them even toasting their friends with skewers of meats and fishes. They all had an air of thoughtlessness and enjoyment. For a moment, she felt a pang of envy, until she remembered that was just a carving.
There was a table on one side of the room, ready to seat eight people if they so desired, although that wasn't the centerpiece of the room. No, that was the massive central kitchen surrounded on all sides by a counter made out of basalt, sporting all sorts of cooking implements, from an antique wood oven to much more modern induction plates.
Currently, behind the counter, and looking at her, stood a robot.
That made her stop another moment as she stared at him.
"Oh, so the floor got boring? Well, I'm glad you finally decided to give some attention to something else in the room. Or are you going to gawk at me for a while before you decide you've had enough and start staring at something else, before leaving the room the same way you entered, screaming?"
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
... How could someone tell if they'd had a stroke?
"To answer your questions, yes, I am a robot, even though I prefer the appellative android, are we clear? Then yes, I can talk, and yes, I'm the cook here, and no, you're most probably not having an aneurism or a stroke, although I can never be certain with your fragile human flesh."
Which more or less answered all the questions she'd wanted to ask. But, since she was her and she wasn't going to let, of all things, a robot, sass her, she had to say something: "I am not so fragile."
The robot's shiny head, which lacked any sort of human features, only having two bright green sensors in place of eyes and some little holes just underneath where she guessed his (its?) speaker was... actually, didn't that mean he didn't qualify as an android? Like, didn't those have to look at least slightly human to be called that way? Whatever: he (yes, for now she was going to call the robot a he) spoke: "Can your bones not break if you're thrown from a great height? Will your skin not boil away if you accidentally spill boiling oil on yourself? Would you survive being left underwater at a depth of a thousand meters without any diving gear? Trust me, little bat, to me all fleshies appear fragile."
She got up on her feet and reached a nearby chair with a deep red padding that fit perfectly with the color of the wood underneath and contrasted well with the stone countertop.
Sitting down she said: "Well then, there's no need for sass. Waking up in a strange castle and witnessig an endless hungry void isn't exactly my typical wednesday."
"What is a wednesday?" asked the robot.
Marta batted her eyes a few times, her brain registering the simple question and wondering if she had misheard: "Wednesday? It's a day of the week."
"What is a week?" he asked as he turned around and started cooking something on a nearby stove, his body covering his actions.
Again, Marta stopped for a moment before answering: "Well, a week is a group of seven days. You do know what days are, right?"
"I do not know what you are referring to when you speak of these 'days', no," answered the robot very nonchalantly, turning away from the stove to look at her. She imagined that his featureless face was expressing confusion and wondering if she was crazy. Which, you know, still wasn't off the table as a possibility.
"Days are... they're twenty-four hours."
"What are hours?"
"Oh come the fuck on, you can't be serious, do you even know what time is?"
The robot stopped for a moment, before shaking his head: "I do not know what time is. You are kindly requested to describe it that I may update my database."
Marta opened her mouth to answer, then stopped and closed it. How could you explain time to someone who didn't even know the concept of its passage? When one probably couldn't even perceive it? The thing in front of her, it was a robot. Robots didn't age. And if he didn't already know what time was, then how... ?
"Is there something that happens inside you regularly? Like, do you have servers inside you, things that tick or send signals or impulses every so often with regularity?"
The robot nodded: "Yes, I do. My internal graphic processor performs ticks at regular intervals."
"Alright, the... space... between those ticks is time."
The robot inclined its head slightly in a very human way: "But the ticks are not a distance. Nor a sound. They do not have space between them."
Marta put her face in her hands and sighed dejectedly. Then she had an idea: "Alright. I'll beat a rhytm with my finger, and you have to tell me how many times you tick between one beat and another, alright?"
The robot inclined its head again, before looking back at the stove: "Sure, little bat. If this is some kind of way for you to prove your superiority over me, though, you will be greatly disappointed."
"Just... just do as I say."
"Are you ordering me around? Already? It's a bit nostalgic, I'll admit, but you are not my creator."
Creator? Was there someone else in this castle with her other than this robot? Well, probably. Surely, right? Someone must be around to clean the place, or at least, someone who had cleaned her room. That is, if this wasn't just all in her mind. Whatever, one thing at a time. Right now the best thing for her and her sanity was to teach this robot to understand time. Although, she did wonder: how could he cook without knowing how much time things had to be cooked?
"It's nothing like that, I promise."
Then she began tapping her finger on the countertop, trying to make sure one second passed between one beat and the next.
After she did this ten times, the robot said: "Between each of those beats, which, I will add, were definitely not equal in length, which means what I'm about to tell you is just a mean, my graphic processor ticked one thousand four hundred and fifteen times."
Wow. That... was a lot.
"Alright. Then, every... that number, is one second. Sixty seconds form one minute. Sixty minutes form one hour. Twenty-four hours form a day, seven days form a week and three hundred and sixty-five days form a year. Do you understand?"
The robot looked at her for a moment, his eyes fladhing green, before answering: "The information has been added to the database. You are being thanked, little bat."
"Please, stop calling me little bat, that's how you can thank me."
The robot turned back to his cooking, his hands moving towards a nearby spatula: "Then what should I call you? The information given to me by my creator states that humans prefer to be called with 'nicknames' and-slash-or their original names, but I know neither of those for you, so I was forced to create one for you, and seeing your natural propensity for emitting high frequency sounds from your mouth and your general hairiness, together with your black hair, I have identified that you look quite similar to the mammal commonly known as bat. Your height is also below average for your species, therefore I have also added the adjective little. Does this not please you? If you express the desire, I will just call you 'Fleshie'."
Marta's mouth hung open as she listened to the bot's concise and matter-of-fact explanation, followed a moment later by her looking at her arms and legs, which, under the clothes, looked indeed hairier than she remembered.
That's... strange. I wasnt exactly at my best in the last few weeks, but I never let myself go that way. Or maybe it really was worse than usual. I really hope this castle has a razor somewhere for me to shave.
In the end she shook herself away from the thoughts and turned back to the robot: "Yeah, no, just call me Marta. What's your name?"
"My name is Failed_Prototype_018," answered the robot immediately, almost hurriedly, "But I've since decided to call myself Ed-18. It is much more flattering."
"Wait, Faile -"
"Ed."
"...Alright. Ed. Now that you have a basic understanding of time, would you mind telling me how long you've been here? And is your creator here? Are there more of you? Robots, I mean."
"As already states, I prefer the term android. And for your other questions, I am the only one in this castle. Android, that is. My creator isn't here. He said he was going to go get some milk a while ago."
...
"How long ago was that?"
"Using your method for the calculation of the passage of time, which, may I add, fits quite better than counting a number of ticks while performing my duty as cook, he left to get the milk around two thousand seven hundred eighteen years, eight months, twelve days, fifteen hours, forty six minutes and nine seconds ago. Ten seconds. Eleven seconds. Twelve..."
He kept counting, but Marta didn't listen. She just stared open mouthed at the back of the android (because she didn't have any water to spit) until he bent down and opened a drawer, getting out a big white plate and dishing out the food he'd prepared. When he turned around and placed it all in front of her he began staring at her.
"Your breakfast is ready, Marta the Bat. You are required to enjoy it."
He kept observing her as, very slowly, she looked down from him to the plate... and scowled: "Wait, did you just call me 'Marta the Bat? What am I, some Batman rip off?"
Then she focused on the plate, and her scowl deepened, but this time it was also mixed with a chuckle: "And did you just style my breakfast into a bat?"
The plate was scrambled eggs and sausages, which was definitely not her typical breakfast food (really, it was too much effort to her), and Ed-18 had made a little bat out of it, with the eggs making up the body and the sausages the wings.
She began eating it... and was in heaven.
"Ed... can I call you just Ed? This is heavenly. I don't know what you did to make these so tasty, but they're one of the best things I've eaten in my entire life."
For a moment, she remembered her mother's cooking. The woman hated staying in front of the kitchen burners with a passion, or so she always said, but he was one of the best cooks she'd ever known of outside of TV shows like Masterchef. And, if that wasn't enough, she liked to experiment, made up new dishes, always tried new things, all because she said that she loved Marta and her dad. Those were the kinds of moments she missed from her past. Now though... she'd half expected to feel sad, or even guilty. She was here, in this misterious castle, stranded... someplace, yeah, definitely someplace, and not Nowhere, and eating some damn great food, and all she could feel was a sort of relief. Relief that, for now, her family and her life and her future weren't the things she had to worry about. Hell, if this matter resolved itself, there was even a chance that for a while afterwards she wouldn't have to worry about any of that! And maybe, just maybe, all the worry her mother and father would have to go through in her absence would mellow them out a bit.
"Yes, Marta, you may just call me Ed. Relationship status updated to: Close Friends. Reason: Given Nickname. I am now entitled to also give you a nickname, and it shall remain 'Little Bat', because that is what I desire, and you may do nothing to change, weak human. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha... Laughing is still beyond me."
Marta sighed, and kept eating.
Finally, she asked: "So, your creator abandoned you."
"No," answered the android way too fast.
"I mean... I'd say he did. He left you here for over two thousand years after saying he went out to buy the milk. That seems pretty... 'abandonative'... to me."
"The word 'abandonative' does not exist, human. And even so, two thousand years is not long. There must be some issue for him with returning from the Nothingness outside. We did have some difficulty getting here the first time through it, after all."
"Wait, so you weren't built here?"
"I was not. My creator has a workshop away from this palace, in another dimension. He is one of the greatest minds of his world."
"...So, let me get this straight: your creator built you, in another dimension of all places, decided that you were a failed attempt -"
"I am not failed. My name Failed_Prototype_18 is just an appellative, a means to define me as an individual, it does not mean anything."
"...Yeah. I actually kind of agree, your cooking is great. Anyways, he brought you here, away from your dimension if I understood your wording right, and here, in a place surrounded by this Nothingness, which is creepy as fuck -"
"It can and will devour anything and everything. This castle, too, shall one day be devoured," interrupted her again Ed. The information also caused a trickle of cold sweat to go down her back, although it didn't travel far, seemingly absorbed by some hair on her back (she really needed to shave), but she decided to ingore it on account of being unable to do shit about it.
"Yes, great, thanks for the information."
"You are welcome."
"And after he brought you here... by the way, can you go back? Like, walk out there and go back where he built you?"
"I would be devoured by the Nothingness, as I already stated. Do you have hearing impairment, Marta?"
"No, I heard you perfectly well, I was just trying to make a point. Anyways, he left you here, unable to leave, and then went away, saying that he was going to buy milk, and he hasn't come back for the last two thousand years. I'm really sorry pal, and I don't want to sound like a piece of shit breaking your hopes or the like, but the truth is he abandoned you."
"He did not," said the android, staring deep into her soul.
"Dude, it's two thousand years. Where I'm from that was enough time for..." she gesticulated with her hands grandly in what looked suspiciously like an explosion, as if that would explain anything, but how could someone sum up thousands of years of hitory for in a few mere sentences.
Well, Marta tried: "Dozens of nations were born and fell, hundreds, thousands, of kings sa on thrones and died or, more often, were killed, tens of wars were started and ended, even world wars. It's so much time."
Ed kept staring at her: "So? I do not see how that matters. It is only time. I have lots of it. I am a robot. I am, what is the word? Ah, yes, immortal. Just like my creator."
Marta scoffed: "Immortality is a myth Ed."
"Maybe where you're from, but my creator is surely immortal."
She opened her mouth to say something else, but the android, which had apprently still been working while conversing with her, placed a small plate of various diced fruits in front of her. It was a macedonia of mangoes, bananas and dates with small fig seed bits or whatever they were called here and there.
It looked surprisingly appetising even though she'd never liked someof those. Especially the mangoes, she'd always found them tasteless.
"My archives state that bats really like these fruits. Eat, fleshies need lots of vitamins to function."
Sighing, Marta dropped the argument and began eating. There was no real need to keep discussing with him anyway, he was probably in denial or something like that.
"Why do you keep going on with the bat joke? It was funny at first, but now it's not anymore."
Ed inclined his head in that way she was beginning to understand meant he was being questioning: "It is no joke. You look like a bat. At least, the face and the ears are similar enough, and the fur seems right, although I cannot see any wings."
Marta stopped with a spoonful of fruit in mid air and raised an eyebrow: "Are you calling me a furry? Really?"
"If by furry you mean that you have lots of fur all over your body, which I can see even through your clothes because of my superior eyes, then yes, you are a furry."
She chuckled: "Ed, I understand that you're an android and all, but that is fucking rude."
"It is the truth though."
"Oh, shut the fu -" she looked down at her arm, ready to lift up her pajama's sleeve to show him she was not, in fact, that furry, and stopped when she saw that he was right.
Her arm, the part not covered by the pajama, was covered in a thin layer of dark brown fur and looked much more flimsy than it had before, the meat that have covered it seemingly having disappeared, absorbed into the bones, which now were much more defined under the skin. She moved upwards, towards the hand holding the spoon, and saw that her fingers, too, were much more smaller and a good deal longer, her nails having extended and curved, turning into black claws.
For a moment, the only thing she thought of was this: how hadn't she noticed that up 'till now?
She tried to move her hand, to make her fingers contract and relax, and the long clawed appendage holding the spoon did exactly as she ordered it to, dropping the utensil with all the food to the ground in the process.
She stared in pure, mounting, horror at the appendage, at her... no, no, this couldn't.
But it did just as she...
No! That wasn't her hand.
But...
"Hey, why did you drop that? Now I'll have to clean up."
That was all the confirmation she needed.
She began screaming.
And ran out of the room, hoping against all hope that she was wrong and that maybe escaping from the room would leave behind that horrible vision, that maybe she could come back later and she would find, seated on a nearby chair, a strange batlike creature who would call her rude for not having noticed her up until the end only to run screaming when she finally did.
Meanwhile, Ed-18 stared at Marta's back as she ran out of the room screaming in a much shriller tone than when she'd entered the room, and then stared at the closed door for a moment, before sighing, a sound like water going down a drain.
"Well, I was right. She did run away screaming when she had enough. Maybe that's a human thing? Hmmm... Update Database."