As it turns out, death was quite a bit more active than one would think.

For time unknown, John floated in the inky blackness of nothing. Not having a corporeal form made it much more difficult to feel the passing of time. Not being aware of your heartbeat, the feel of the ground on the bottom of your feet, and other bodily functions led to a feeling of indifference in regard to waiting. John could still tell, no matter how ghost-like he was, that he had floated adrift for a long time. While the interpretation of long could be debated, John still had one sense of time that proved much more integral to the human psyche. He felt bored. The growing sense of boredom slowly festered inside of John. With every passing moment, as long as it may have actually been, the boredom grew.

John had never been the type to panic, but he started to realize that change would not come anytime soon. That realization became another emotion that is also a notable part of human beings. John’s boredom shifted to fear. Fear that his boredom would never end.

When faced with fear, it is common to undergo panic. Panic is an often-used defense mechanism in response to the object of fear. In John’s case, there was no outlet for his panic.

‘Everywhere I look, nothing, just nothing!’ The panic grew and grew. John frantically tried to reach out into the emptiness around him to no avail. Panic leads to a flight or fight response, and there was no where to flee, nor anything to fight.

Floating through what could be the most serene of environments, the disembodied man had created his own instruments of torture within his mind. The irony was, naturally, lost on said man.

Time passed in its own way for the embattled man.

Occasionally the panic receded, to be replaced with calm contemplation and boredom. Then panic reigned again, and again, and again. The cycles became routine for John. While the forefront of his consciousness was consumed in pain, there was a growing part of his mind that began to notice his existence for what it was.

‘I’m in Hell, I have to be.’

John was of course correct; his punishment was one of the most heinous. To be trapped in one’s own mind for eternity was not to be taken lightly.

John’s mind followed its cycle of torture and recovery for thousands of thousands of cycles before he could count them.

***

It was on the 3,413,101st cycle that a new change came to the monotony.

John felt something.

Truthfully, he had always felt it. The energy around him. It was a bit like feeling the blood in your own veins or the saliva on your tongue. Always present but never noticed.

As he was, John did not breath, but that is what he compared the new feeling to. The energy surrounding him was being brought in, cycled, and let out of his body. ‘Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.’ John slowly gained control over the energy. It started with holding his ‘breath’ so as to limit what came In and went out. He soon progressed onto changing how much he exhaled and inhaled. He found that he could overdraw more energy than he let out. The opposite was also possible, but was uncomfortable in a way very primal to his animalistic instincts. Unlike breathing, holding energy inside did not lead to it being consumed. It was just stopped. The only pain he ever felt came from emptying himself of energy without replenishing it.

John had never been a masochist, but he would be lying if he said he didn’t enjoy the pain to some degree. It was euphoric to feel again. After being deprived for so long, any sensory feeling was more than welcome.

It was thus quite exciting to find a new feeling that was not painful.

After having emptied himself of more than two thirds of his energy John attempted to draw in as much as he could to refill himself. What he found was that it was sucked into him with force greater than he was capable of when he usually tried to over fill himself. With the suction of new energy, John became more filled with energy than he had ever been, and it felt good. For the first time since John met his end in the world of the living, he felt pleasure. In a move entirely consistent with his personality, he made a decision.

‘I want more. As much as I can hold. I need it.’

The method John went about further filling himself was rather inspired. He went through cycles. He would take all of his energy and violently expel as much as he could before he felt his form start to destabilize. The more energy he expelled, the more he could draw in. He repeated his cycles until he hit a wall. His form could not hold any more energy, but it still came in, incessantly.

True pain washed over his mind. The previous pain was nothing in comparison to what he felt now.

Desperately, he tried to expel the energy he had to no avail. His form became tighter and tighter. The pain suffocated him, there was no will power left for thoughts. For the first time in his new existence, John slipped away into unconsciousness.

***

Rousing from his forced slumber, John mentally tensed in anticipation of his new torture. There was no pain. In his joy, he almost didn’t notice the change within himself. An object had formed. In the empty space he now inhabited. It was the only thing besides himself. His interest was at its maximum.

Using his sense of energy, he probed the crystalline ball in the core of his cloudlike being. It was him. From what he could tell, the energy that filled him to almost bursting had condensed into solid form. Naturally, John explored his new addition. By probing deeper into the organ, he was able to see the inner structure, and it was incredible. Complex patterns made up the sphere. They were actually vaguely familiar. They reminded John of ancient runes. The kind you would find on Nordic ruins and used in Viking rituals. While perhaps not exactly the same, they definitely held meaning. Like a language of sorts. It looked like there wouldn’t be any more reason to panic for now.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

As time passed in its unfathomable way, John studied the runic text within the sphere. There was no way to tell what an individual rune represented, but gradually patterns became apparent. There was a certain block formation of runes that was in two places only within the entirety of the sphere that must have held well over 1,000,000 runes. Besides the two outliers, there must have only been in the ballpark of 500 unique runes. Much of the text was formed from compounds of simpler runes. The first of the two special arrangements was in the very center while the other was on the edge of the sphere. It was easy to deduce that they represented the beginning and the end of the script.

Taking the center to be the beginning, that was where John once again started to look for patterns. Eventually, he started seeing the language as more akin to a coding language than a conversational one.

***

His next breakthrough was because of a whim. Having some rudimentary control of energy, John began to trace the script with his energy. Once a rune was fully transcribed, the power of it could be felt like heat radiating outward to John. There was a palpable power in the runes that was worth more than the energy used to write it. Eventually, the runes dissipated, but John was inspired by his discovery.

Interestingly enough, only the runes stuck around after being drawn. Any non-rune shape that was drawn was immediately dissipated. As John became more adept at transcribing different runes, the meanings of the runes could somehow be felt by John.

His ‘vocabulary’ slowly grew as time went on. The meaning of the entire script also started to reveal itself to John. To the best of his reasoning, the entire sphere was a type of data storage that held information on how to further grow. The specifics eluded John, but it was clear what he needed to do. ‘Ah shit. This is gonna hurt’.

Gathering his thoughts, he once again began his cycles. They took longer now as it seemed he could store much more than before his new organ was added.

‘Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.’ The familiar rhythm of the energy encompassed his being. It was meditative in its own way.

The sheer amount of energy flowing through John made his original form look like a pinhead compared to the bowling ball he was now.

The pattern of pain followed by pleasure heightened further and further until the familiar wall of tightness impeded his progress.

John embraced the pain as soon as it started, hoping to get the process over with as soon as possible.

And did it hurt. Unlike the last time though, it was manageable. Not pleasant by any means, but far better than the previous agony.

John just decided to mentally turtle up and wait out the pain. Hoping to see what exactly happened to his sphere when he previously became unconscious.

***

The pain lasted much longer than John thought.

Despite the pain, the time was well spent. While John had the mental equivalent of a knife in his thigh, he was able to witness what he had missed out on before. The sphere had grown considerably since his pain started. It has perhaps become triple the size of the original. Along with the sphere growing, John himself grew in proportion with the condensed mass of energy.

As the sphere grew, he also was able to witness the script changing, adding more and more runes in ordered statements where the majority seemed to be purely for what to do upon the next growth period. The other parts though, those were what John wanted to focus on now.

In his study of the sphere, John had discovered his own ability to think and remember was greatly improved from when he was in his fleshly body.

Using that improved ability to process information, the parts of the script John was unable to identify were all focused on with understood statements fading away from his attention.

To John’s reasoning, all his assumptions made the unknown statements look as if they are the first in the series of statements made to show… something. What that was unclear as of now.

Having finally met the limit of what he could compute, John set his sights on another project he had created in his musings.

John already had all the parts, so what was stopping him from making his own script to play with. The statements that John had traced all disappeared a little while after being created, but John had made a discovery that he hoped would end that little issue. As it turned out, the unique runic blocks that began and ended the script in John’s sphere did have a greater purpose. Those blocks were what stabilized the whole thing!

John began by creating just one of the blocks. Within a short span of time, the set of runes was dissipating.

‘Not entirely unexpected. How about two?’

This time, with two blocks, the two pieces of script stayed with no sign of dissipation. Using his more esoteric senses, John could feel the relationship between the two. They created a complete loop, so the energy was not poured out.

It took some mental finagling, but John soon found out he could shift the second block so that there was space for new runes. The moment of truth was here, now John would attempt to make his own statement!

From his study of his own sphere, John chose the statement that he recognized as being the most basic command to begin formation. The runes imposed themselves in the space before him. Then the energy began to fill them.

All around John, and even from within himself, he felt energy being slowly sucked into the runic script. That was all it did though. To his senses, John could tell that the runes needed much more energy to fill themselves. So, John could only wait for the runes to fill themselves.

***

Not much longer, John eagerly awaited the execution of his runic script.

The final bit of energy slipped into the runes and the reaction was immediate. The runes collapsed into a brightly glowing mass of energy, and in that mass began to emerge a new sphere. With rapt fascination, John observed the scripts begin to form inside the ball of energy. Things became clearer to John as he watched on. The formation process was able to give him insight onto what the orb wished to accomplish.

John needed to accomplish a third growth phase, and then something would happen. That something was huge. It would be a culmination of commands, and any process that requires such complex statements would have to be something important. Something that could bring a true end to his constant monotony.

Abandoning his newly made sphere, John prepared himself for hopefully the final time.

Cycling his energy in and out, John felt the familiar pressure approach once again.

‘Here we go again I guess’.

***

The pain was less than before. It still sucked for John, but the benefits were already forming.

In the space before him, his sphere sent out pulses. Like it was a signal, calling out for something. With a great flash, before his ghost-like body appeared the oddest of things. It was a screen. A blue screen. It also had words. Real, honest to god, words. Something John hadn’t seen in ages. The screen said:

Welcome to the system Johnathan Cribb!

Please standby for system administrator.