It is warm where it is.
The world is very often cold. All that is, save for where it is touched, is very often quite cold. Usually, if it is holding heat, it is because it was given to it, as a gift maybe. It does not know what a gift is, but the word and concept are similar enough that there is an overlap there, and something that is not understanding but is closer.
But right now it is warm everywhere.
It has been warm more often lately. First it was not as cold, and then it was tight and still a little cold, and then it became cold on one side and warm on the other, accompanied by jostling sensations against something that is very not-it. Then, there was a lot of jostling, very fast, and it went flying about and landing on things and getting hit and kicked around. For a while, all it felt was cold, squishy, and the feeling of impact, something which always feels comfortable yet incomplete, like something should happen and does not. And then it was moving again, and something warm held it, and then it felt like it was slipped into a warm, wet pocket, full of weird moving stuff that seemed to have not much shape at all.
This happened a few times; emergence from warmth, back into it. Whatever it is, it cannot see or feel or really know things, and it certainly doesn’t have much opinion on things; all of the above require a brain, or a soul, or even a feeling. In fact, it does not even track what is occurring; each moment is simply the moment that it is / it is in, and it is the moment, and it does not know that it knows that.
And then, one day, smushed against large blocks of warm squishy blocks and chunks, it realizes that it can realize.
It is not as impactful as it sounds. The thing, whatever it is, is simply and suddenly capable of holding in itself the simple existence of a “before”, now, and thus, linearity. For just about anything that has ever existed, this is startlingly impressive on the part of whatever it is. For the incredibly minute, the impossibly miniscule number of things which have been alive, it’s really not that much of a big deal. The universe is funny like that, sometimes.
And so it realizes, which is the thing it can now do. And it keeps realizing.
It does not know what it realizes, and it certainly cannot conceive of what realizing is. To say it became aware of awareness is a vast exaggeration and inaccuracy, but it almost works for our purposes here. It does not have opinions or ideas about what it means that things before now were before now, and could be before or after anything. It doesn’t even really have an understanding of what could be called memory; things were different. Now they are different again. How? Who knows? Certainly not it.
It passes this way for some time, between periods of gooey, warm, and smushed, and periods of cold, jostled about, and vaguely humming.
This is the second thing it realizes; it is humming.
It realizes a second thing right after; it has felt this before. Usually when it is cold, though the connection to correlation or causation does not exist yet. It always feels subtly wrong, and this is startling in itself, for now a thing with no concept of thought, let alone opinion or morality, is quite certain that whatever is happening is not correct. Rather than shiver through it like it should, rather than enter and leave it back out into the world, the vibrations enter its frame and get stuck there, unable to properly escape it. It does not know what it is, or what this is, or even the fact that what it feels is impact failing to become sound as it should were it created properly. It just knows it is wrong.
This… vague concept, this pre-idea, sticks with the thing when next it enters the warm and gooey. Now, for the first time, there is something like preference; in one state, there is something wrong, and in this state, there is not, at least not that it can proto-detect. There is nothing in it that could take action, or even understand what it is that’s occurring, like an ant looking at a painting and barely able to notice the canvas it treads on, but even still, it realizes that it has realized, and it realizes that the new realization is that, if capable of choice or of understanding free will, it would choose to enter one state over the other.
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But eventually it realizes this is not wholly correct.
And lo and behold, it experiences its very first conditional statement, its very first dose of nuance. If it had no other option except the options it currently does not have, that of warm and quiet or cold and loud and wrong, then it would choose warm and quiet. But it does not have any choices, so really, all choices are equal. And it does not like that a thing can be wrong.
The time it struggles with this concept is infinite and instantaneous, because it does not struggle or comprehend, and yet conclusion is achieved by something which cannot conclude or understand the meaning of the word.
If it could, it would make the thing that was wrong not be wrong anymore.
So, while it would be inaccurate to call these conclusions “thoughts”, a different shorthand may be used. The thing concludes nothing, but somehow, by realizing it can realize, certain things simply become true to it, as true as the fact that it moves, and that it cannot think, and that it is made of something that, when hit or jostled, hums and experiences a thing that it calls “wrong”.
Thing the first: it can realize things.
Thing the second: there is a before, and a now, and probably an after.
Thing the third: there is something wrong in what it is.
Thing the final: if it could change the thing that is wrong, it would.
And it already has changed. Call it truth 2.0, call it thing five, it matters little. If it could change, and it could choose, it would stop being wrong, and it can change, so that’s halfway already (which, to an inanimate object in a near infinite space full of other, no-longer equally as inanimate objects, is a hell of a distance).
And then, even inside the warm, there is a jostling.
Something hits it, and now there is a before and a now where the wrongness is ringing inside it in the wet as well as the cold. It is thrown about, soaking in unknown liquid against unknowable shapes, and all it can feel is wrong, wrong, wrong as it is forced to shiver and tremble and fail to ring and be as it should. The wrongness has followed it here, and now no solace can be found, because there can now be an after where it is followed into the wet by the wrongness in it again.
Eventually the ringing fades and the wrongness goes away, but just as it can change, so can the “it” around it, the it that is every other thing and possibly it that can cause the wrongness to come back. Things are no longer as it once was, and the revelation sits; just as there is an unknown before and an unknown after, so too is there an unknown now, and in that now, before and after, there is that wrongness.
This next step is a bit harder than the others. This set of quasi-concepts floats about inside the idea of this thing, occasionally bumping together back into something like a truth or conclusion, and a few more cycles of warm and cold come and go, with the wrongness sometimes following into the warm and sometimes not. And in all that time, it marinates.
It does not know what it marinates in. The thing it is inside thinks it knows what it is, and even it can only acknowledge that its knowledge is a fraction of a fraction of the truth. Luckily for the both of them, comprehension is not needed for consequence to occur.
So it marinates. And, slowly, realization after realization, moment after moment, truth after truth, it changes, carried in a bubble of the blood of all that is, was, and will be.
And then it stops being warm, but does not become cold.
No, it becomes something new. It becomes hot.
A new after and a new now, neither of which it can feel much about or understand but which it can now realize exists. The heat rises, the thing around it writhing and shifting and remaking itself into new shapes, and all the time it burns, and it makes the thing inside hum and feel its wrongness and feel delicate and soft like it never has before, as the heat climbs higher and higher and the wrongness only grows and grows.
Until finally, in an apotheosis not its own but now mirrored by it, it makes a decision. A first, and most crucial decision, built on a wrongness it fundamentally cannot tolerate or allow.
It chooses to change.
And in a sea of Qi, wrapped in layer after layer of impossible flesh, in a moment of truth and fear and things without name and without understanding, beneath the eyes of all that is and all that was and all that will be and the things that have eaten all those things, and become ALL, a tuning fork makes a choice.
And things change.