Sam came into consciousness in what he could only describe as one of your classic black voids that reject all possibility of experience. This was his first time in one, and he wasn’t finding the experience pleasurable. This was also the first time he had lost his consciousness to something other than sleep. At least, he assumed he wasn’t sleeping before whatever happened to him had happened. Ever since the accident, sleeping had meant having, on average, three different incredibly vivid dreams a night. And since he couldn’t recall having dreamt anything, that meant that he must have not been sleeping.

Although… it was not only dreams that he was having trouble recalling. And it was not only his memories that he found to be potentially missing in this new environment. Was everything around him black because that truly was the state of his surroundings, or was his sight simply gone? And what of his other senses? He couldn’t smell anything. Couldn’t taste anything as well, for that matter, but he couldn’t quite remember whether you were supposed to be able to taste the insides of your own mouth.

Of course, the worst thing, as far as lacking senses went, was that he was unable to physically feel… anything. He knew intellectually that as long as he was capable of thought, then at least some part of him was still there. The legs, obviously, were long gone, but were his arms and hands still with him? If not, that would present an even more serious challenge to his day to day, and ruin all the effort he had just spent, getting some semblance of habit back into it.

This must be what being a brain in a jar feels like, Sam thought. It’s not totally unpleasant, or maybe, it’s just the lack of bodily functions that’s making me think like that; preventing me from having what could probably be the biggest panic attack of my life.

Whatever the objective state of his body was, there was only so much to do in a state of complete lack of stimulus before your thoughts were directed to what brought on this new environment. And so, about five seconds after commenting to himself that he was indeed feeling uncharacteristically calm, Sam’s thoughts turned towards figuring out what the fuck happened to him.

The most obvious thing is, and let’s just put that one out there, I’m dead. And death is infinitely more boring than the catholic dogma would have us believe… So going by that theory, I died, somehow, despite still being in the hospital where you’d think a person would have a hard time dying. Well, unless you’re in critical condition, or old or whatever, I mean a lot of people die in hospitals, that’s obvious. But most of them have been in the hospital specifically to prevent them from dying. You’re definitely not supposed to die after you’ve already been there for quite some time and the doctors had just put physical therapy on the table.

Well, it doesn’t matter. I died somehow and now I’m here, and this is the afterlife. That’s the easiest explanation I can think of. But it’s pretty shit. Cause I don’t want to spend eternity with nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company. Or maybe… I died, and this is just the waiting room for the afterlife. But I guess that the waiting room theory can be a part of every other explanation I could come up with, so that’s kinda boring and unhelpful, as far as theories go.

Second possibility, this is a dream. And I’m gonna rule this one right out because we all know what lucid dreams feel like and this ain’t it. I mean, most of my lucid dreams revolve around me trying to fly five meters above ground like some sort of shitty Iron Man. And I’m definitely not as self-aware while dreaming as I am now. So, I’m putting the dream theory out to pasture. If I am dreaming, then it’s got to be some new kind of dreaming, like if someone drugged me or hooked me up to machines.

And speaking of machines… the matrix: An easy theory; cheap and common; the first weapon in a philosophy professor’s arsenal when it comes their time to teach epistemology to first years. But there’s still two versions of that theory: Either I’m getting into the matrix, which sort of comes back to our waiting room theory. Or I’m getting out of the matrix (which, again, can lead us back to the waiting room). But if I’m already out of the matrix, what does it mean? That I’m some piece of meat in a tube (necessitating the existence of said exterior tube) being kept alive by machines, and that the life I’ve always known has been fabricated? Kind of a bummer, especially since there’s no hot black guy coming to save me. Although, maybe he’s on his way.

Last option is aliens. Or just regular humans with some future tech, I guess. But isn’t that just the same thing as the matrix option? Functionally? Yes, pretty much. It’d still be me and my brain in a jar somewhere, but that will at least mean that my life as I’ve known it is real. And also, aliens are real. I’m kinda hoping that this is aliens and not just some boring humans, because that’d be less fucked up.

In all honesty though, it doesn't really matter how I got here. Well, no, that's not true. Obviously it does matter, but it doesn't matter as much as how to get out of here matters. Then again, you would think that by knowing how I got here and what here is, I would be better prepared for how to get out. But! And this is the real crux of the matter, you fucking piece of shit! None of this actually matters because I can't do a goddamn thing except yell at myself inside my goddamn mind!

Maybe if I reach enlightenment or something along these lines, It’ll open the way out. Which, of course, raises the question of how I got here once again. Am I supposed to lose my sense of self before entering heaven? Or am I just waiting for a bunch of little green dudes to have enough fun seeing me go insane?

And yes, if there really are aliens out there, and you are able to read my mind, I was being what could only be described as speciesist. If you didn't want to encounter my backwards and offensive point of view, you shouldn't have kidnapped and put me in a fucking TOTAL sense deprivation chamber! Assholes…

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

But again, and honest to god I feel like I've already said this a thousand times already. It doesn't really matter what brought me here. Nor does it matter how to get out of whatever this is. Cause as far as I'm concerned, there's literally nothing I can do either way, considering the fact that I have no fucking body! Fuck!

Who knew being stuck with nothing but my own thoughts with no way out would be such an uncomfortable experience? Well, I obviously knew that, cause I'm not a fucking idiot and I read about how being in a solitary cell in prison fucks you up. But at least in prison you have the pleasure of knowing that something exists, or at the very least seems to exist, besides your own shitty consciousness.

If he had indeed been kidnapped by an alien force capable of reading his thoughts, then at this point, it would have been clear to them that their subject wasn’t responding very well to his current treatment. Sam was, of course, aware of the fact that the hypothetical men, or women, in black could be deriving great enjoyment from his response to their violations of his most basic human rights and dignities.

And so, in order to preserve whatever dignity he may have had remaining (after all, it was more than likely that he had been seen naked and thus his dignity was already in critical condition) and also to try and maintain his hold on sanity; he turned to the poor man's substitute for therapy: meditation.

Meditation, as it turns out, is surprisingly difficult to do when you have no outside stimulus. Especially when the only way you've learned how to meditate is the focus on your breathing, which, guess what, you can't fucking do when the reason for you wanting to meditate in the first place is that you don't have a fucking body!

Still, Sam was never a person to be deterred by a challenge. At least after it was clear that there was no way forwards, backwards, or any other bloody direction except going at it the hard way. Now, due to being a mind ensconced in nothingness, and more importantly because he didn't have a watch, he wasn’t able to estimate precisely how much time it took. But he was, eventually, able to get into the meditation mindset.

Some more time after that, which, again, Sam had no way of measuring, but he would probably put it anywhere between ten or twenty minutes—his usual meditation time—to a billion trillion years, and Sam was finally able to regain his calm.

Now a normal well-adjusted person, would have probably thanked the meditation for that and moved on, but as someone that doesn't believe in the existence of that so called normal person, Sam was hesitant to attribute his improved mental state solely to his own efforts.

And so, he took stock of the fact that he was feeling so calm at the start of his ordeal and extrapolated from that the reason he was able to regain his calm just moments prior. His (apparent) complete lack of bodily functions, able to influence his brain by using whatever chemicals they use in order to make him feel things.

Alright, this is going nowhere and I for one am not going to spend eternity moping about why I am in this mess. This is one guy who's not going to end up like that dumb kid from that short story about teleportation. Was it Stephen King who wrote it? I think it might have been, but then again, it might not be him. I mean, he does write fucked up short stories, but does he write them in a sci-fi setting? See, this is just one of the times when it's useful to be more than just a disembodied mind in the void, and also have access to the internet.

But it doesn't matter, I'm over it. I don't need an actual body capable of the myriad of senses in order to pass the time, nor do I need the illusion of an existence outside of my own consciousness. I'm perfectly capable of keeping myself entertained with nothing but my own thoughts for company. And if I had the self-discipline to write them down, I'd have had pages upon pages of Dragon-Age fanfiction to prove it. Although, I usually do most of my head-writing while listening to music, or when I’m trying to fall asleep.

Well, there's a thought: can I still fall asleep? If I can, why not spend eternity between bouts of sleeping? Dreaming passively while sleeping in contrast to being awake and dreaming actively, like some sort of Neil Gaimanesque character.

Anyway, let's try it. We'll spend some time thinking about some shit and then hopefully we'll fall asleep. OK! An eternity of nothing but my own thoughts to keep me company. Here we go! Hmm… what shall I think about? Don't feel like thinking about anything creative though, so that kind of ruins the prompt. Movies? Video games? What's the last book I read? Kinda sucks that my memory's so fucking hazy. It was probably some boring bullshit book that I forced myself to read in order to feel more cultured. Like Tale of Two Cities. Yeah, I know… Obviously couldn't have been Tale of Two Cities cause I remember reading it and it was a long time ago, but I was saying it was like it.

Or maybe… it was some actual literary trash. Oh god, Can you imagine? What if I died and the last book I've been reading was some horribly written and somehow even more badly translated Chinese xianxia novel? Oh, fuck, that's probably what happened. I was reading something, and it was so stupid that it made my brain melt down. And now I'm in the purgatory for stupid people who die stupid deaths on account of continuing to read books despite them literally saying that beauty can be fucking objectively measured in a top ten list. Fuck's sake! Well, I guess that's not that bad in the grand scheme of things. I can think of stupider ways to die, like being anti-vax or drinking bleach to counteract acid reflux.

Wait, I was trying to think about what to think about… Goddammit, nothing comes up! It's because I can't remember what I was doing before, so my brain has nothing it wants to latch onto. Stupid fucking brain. Can't even come up with ways to entertain itself. Well, I guess I can aim to be cosmopolitan, as well as a hypocrite, and try my hand at ranking people based on their attractiveness.

Let's start with guys so that we'll have more to work with. Now the problem is that I'm mostly thinking about actors, but surely there are other famous people that are just as hot as Ryan Gosling, but just don't have the same mass appeal for me to know they exist. Fuck it, this whole thing is a moot point. If the list happens to only have actors on it, then so be it. It's the non-actor’s fault for not going into acting.

So how long should we keep this list? Like top ten is classic, but I'm feeling that if we want to burn time, we might want to enlarge that a bit, top twenty? Twenty-five? Dare I say fifty? Although, that could spell trouble when we want to move on to women. I mean, do I even know—

“Transfer operation complete, ready yourself,” a monotone voice suddenly broke thorough the void of nonexistence and stopped Sam's thoughts in their tracks. Only for the shortest of moments, of course, for his next thought was, Fucking finally! Wait, doesn't that mean that the waiting room theory was the correct one? That's some bullsh—