Wherever I looked there was darkness.

The weight of my body was missing entirely, yet I could still move around.

It was impossible to determine with accuracy since there were no landmarks, but it definitely felt like I was able to move freely. The feeling was nothing like walking. Rather it was like willing my view to move in a certain direction. Similar to the way humans feel, when they decide to walk in specific direction.

Looking down, I noticed that the ground seemed to consist of a strange black material. While looking at it I noticed tiny waves on the surface. Wondering why I could feel nothing below my feet, I noticed that something else was out of place as well. 

A brief moment of contemplation later, I rotated my view 180 degrees and looked in the direction where I thought; I had seen a glimmer of light coming from.

In the distance, a floating orb of light cast an eerie glow across the dark surface of the liquid. The new source of light was ever-changing, colors, brightness even the shape of the orb seemed to change from time to time.

There was nothing else to investigate in this place, so I willed myself towards the chaotic orb.

Another surprising thing happened as I did so. There was no way to notice it before, because of the lack of landmarks, but when moving my view, it happened instantly.

The orb was big. Far larger than I had originally thought. Standing a fair distance from it, the orb still took up my entire view. The surface seemed to consist of some kind of gas. The gas had different colors and pockets of different colors moved across the surface at incredible speed, before vanishing below the surface.

Some areas of the orb where so black that it seemed like they continued all the through the orb and the tiny specks of light moving into these areas slowed down, and soon they disappeared entirely.  

Moving my view lower after deciding to study the strange planet-like orb further. I saw something that surprised me even further and piqued my interest. The black liquid from the silent ocean below the orb seemed to solidify into some kind of plant growing upwards towards the underside of the orb. The bottom was hovering, what seemed like a few centimeters above the black sea.

“Well, this seems like a terrible idea, but what is there to lose. It is impossible to check whether the orb is harmful without a body and there is nothing else in this space. Even if there is. I cannot move there”.

I willed myself into the place where I approximated the location of the center from the outside.

High above me a bright blue ball of light illuminated the inside of the orb. The inside seemed to be covered entirely by the strange black material, which was visible in some areas on the outside of the orb. Occasionally a speck of color would appear, only to blink out of existence after a moment. The room itself seemed to be perfectly spherical, with the blue light in the center. Tiny dots of golden light where frozen in the air around the blue core. They seemed to have emanated from the core, as they formed a pattern typically seem during a radial emission of particles.

“This looks like the mental encyclopedia I created, when I was in my teens. I lost myself in my studies and went a little insane from isolation. It turned out to be far more useful than I initially anticipated when I created this visual representation of my knowledge. Thanks to it, I managed to hold onto important information as I grew older.”

Imagining the usual interface for my mental database, I tried to access it. Instead of just staying as an imaginary interface as all laws of nature dictated it to, a half translucent screen appeared in front of me.

“This confirms it. I am currently unconscious, or dreaming. Did I fail?”

A mental command later and the screen showed my last moments, but the recording continued after I pressed the button that should have ended my existence. Apparently, the concrete ceiling came down and the recording ended shortly afterwards.

“I probably repressed the conscious memories, because of the trauma. Weird, this should only happen after a while. Did something happen afterwards?”

Focusing I tried to access the next memory, but something went wrong. Instead of showing it on the screen, a blue arc of lightning emerged from the core and hit one of the golden dots close to it.

The next accessible memory was a picture of two faces, one male and the other female. The quality of the recording was horrible. It was like looking through a thin layer of milky glass.

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“Impossible, the encyclopedia cannot store information from dreams or other fictional sources. I went through great lengths to prevent the creation of pseudo-memories.”

Many of the memories after that point were recordings of words and sentences in an unknown language. Without much context, but there were enough reoccurring words to at least identify some of the basic structure. It seemed to be somewhat similar to some Asian languages, but with far harsher sounds, as heard in German and Russian.

“This language is pure cancer. I hope I can avoid learning it.”

The most recent memory stored in the database was, a picture of a tiny hand reaching forward to grab the skirt of a woman. The quality of the picture was flawless.

“There are many possible explanations for why I am in the body of a child, but they do not matter right now. The likeliest explanation for why I am conscious right now is that the child’s brain is simulating an adult brain, by sacrificing time efficiency. This means that the child is probably in a comatose state right now, and time is moving much faster on the outside than it feels like in here. I need to restrict access to my old memories, or the child is going to go insane and get himself killed. I need to hurry.”

There were several options available to me, but the only option that preserved all my memories and my sanity, was to create the mind of a child by removing all the knowledge I gained while aging. I was effectively going to give myself a weird kind of schizophrenia.

Then I could gradually give myself more knowledge from my encyclopedia. When I reached adulthood, my brain would reach a similar state to when I died and the two personalities would surely merge on their own.

I moved out of the orb and looked at the swirling mass of colors that represented my own mind.

I had no idea what the different parts of the orb represented, but I knew that I would need a core if I wanted to create something similar to it. Since I had no idea how exactly any of it worked, I just decided to copy the core of my current mind.

A tiny blue ball appeared in front of me, it slowly drifted towards the black liquid under me feet. When it reached the surface of the ocean, the liquid suddenly surged upwards and engulfed the ball. Then the ball started gaining altitude again. It stopped after reaching a height of what seemed like half a meter above the black ocean, the ball now looked like a black orb barely visible in front of the black background.

I still needed to add selected knowledge from my encyclopedia; I did not dare add the unfiltered memories that were swirling around my original mind. I was afraid of what would happen if I let certain unrefined memories slip into the mind of a child. I would rather, temporarily lose all memories of what happened before I created the mind, except for knowledge I transferred from the database.

The first knowledge I added was the picture of my presumed father and mother, as I did so a single point of light emerged from the gigantic orb, flew over, and touched the surface of the black ball in front of me. The light disappeared into the black ball and it grew a little larger.

When I added the knowledge of the language father and mother were speaking, I realized something about the fabric mom was wearing in my most recent memory.

“Damn. I didn’t realize it before but it seems like civilization has regressed, or maybe I’m not even on earth anymore. Mother was wearing clothes made from rough wool and the craftsmanship suggests that it isn’t something created with modern means. Civilization is currently somewhere before the industrialization. I absolutely need to survive; I have no idea what’s going to happen the next time I die, and I probably won’t get a chance like this again.”

I added the knowledge of all my learning techniques, all my survival related knowledge and basic knowledge of human social behavior. My outlook on humanity was very pessimistic in my last life and I knew that the knowledge would probably affect my actions, but at least the pessimistic attitude would most likely keep me safe from humans that were trying to trick or harm me.  

Finally, I added restrictions to the actions I could take. I created a restriction that prevented self-sacrifice, since I seemed to have a tendency to get myself killed this way. The only other restriction I added was a little something, to prevent myself from raping anyone. I had no idea what kind of world I would wake up to, and I certainly disliked gambling.