On a warm autumn morning with a gentle breeze blowing, an ordinary youth was cycling on his way to school. As it happened, the youth had overslept. He was in a rush. Having just started university a few weeks ago, he was looking forward to the lectures of the day, as well as hanging out at the bar with his newly acquainted friends, maybe even having a beer with that cute girl from class.

That was not to be.

Earlier the same day, a young man had dropped his child off at the school. He, too, was in a rush. His schedule was tight now that he had to drop his son off at school every morning. He would probably have gotten used to it in a few weeks.

That time had not yet come. He was tired, unfocused, and in a rush. So he took a shortcut across an unknown residential area in order to save just a few minutes, hoping to make it to work just in the nick of time.

Be it chance, or a twist of fate, the two would meet.

For just a second, the man stared into the youth's eyes..

And then he hit him with his car.

Colors. Colors is all I remember. I can't even tell you how long I spent there, I just remember there being colors. It was like a drea-.. No.. Actually, it was more like being feverish. Feverish to the point of hallucinating, except my head wasn't spinning, and I wasn't having delusions. It was completely thoughtless. All there was to it was colors.

Then one day, the colors vanished. I got my thoughts back, though everything still felt like a dream. At first, I thought about where I was. I tried to remember how I got there, and what had happened to me. I got nowhere. God knows I had the time, I was in there long enough to go through my life several times over. But whenever I got close to the end, everything would get hazy. I would have no problem with my childhood, though it was pretty mundane. Played a bit of sports, a bit guitar, and i could juggle. I liked building stuff with my hands. Just didn't know what to build. I had tried making things out of wood and metal, but it always just felt empty. I couldn't make anything useful that I couldn't just buy. What I wanted was to make something from scratch, something that didn't exist. But I had no idea how, or what.

I spent half a year not knowing what to do with my life. My parents had kicked me out, so I had to work to pay for rent. I lost contact with most of my friends. They had all moved to the same city for college, far away, so I quickly lost touch.

Except with John. He would chat with me every day online, talking about his classes. He was studying to become a software engineer. He would go on and on about how to make good software.

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I never really cared about computers. Sitting still and doing nothing just didn't sit right with me. I wanted touch, to tinker, to create. I was much more into creating circuit boards that fulfilled some trivial little task. A randomized dice, showing the results with LEDs, a home made speaker and mic set, logic gates, stuff like that. I enjoyed it, but I was always a bit bored when I did it. I hadn't even made anything in years.

Then John visited me just after Christmas. He showed me this assignment he had been working on as a school project. He had been given a micro-controller, a remote controlled model car, and the task of making it stop just before hitting anything. Basically, all he had to do was put a range detector on the front, and keep track of the speed of the car with a sensor on the wheels.

And the kid just ran with it. He made it shout out ``Danger, danger'' when it was about to hit something, and he made it automatically dodge obstacles that could be easily avoided by turning, which it would do while playing a recording he found on the internet of someone yelling ``Zoom zoom!''. The people he did it with was pretty annoyed that he couldn't just stick with the assignment, but he didn't care.

He showed me the code he had written. I didn't really understand it, but when I saw the look on his face as he explained how it worked, I found myself feeling envious. I wish I had the kind of passion he had. When I told him i wished I still had the energy or money to create something, he suggested I tried coding. He said it wasn't really that hard, and it didn't cost anything. There were plenty of free compilers and tutorials out there, and if I didn't like it I could always just put it down again.

After a while I agreed. For the rest of the month, whenever we were online we just kept talking about the different languages, and small projects I were doing. He gave me a lot of tips, and I think spending so much time explaining the things he was supposed to be studying to me really helped him. He had been struggling a bit after he spent way too much time on that damn race car, and apparently he was pretty close to flunking his first exams.

After summers end, I started college, software engineering the same place John goes to. I remember going there for at least two months, but as the days kinda started blending together, I simply don't know when it stopped. That accident really did a number on my head.

As I was going through my life yet again, something happened. It felt like a spotlight was put on me, and I was thrown in a lukewarm pool, and then pulled out immediately. I tried to move, but my body wouldn't listen. I tried looking around, but my eyes wouldn't open, and my neck wouldn't move. I tried to scream for help, but all that came out was a cry..

The cry of a baby.