Relative Time: [unknown] Postmortem

Location: [unknown]

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It was like the great nucleosynthesis in reverse… a great retraction of the big bang into nothingness.

Darkness. Void. An abyss of uncertainty.

It was fear. Pain. A struggling sensation… as if one were dangling from the waist down over an endless precipice of inky-black, only to be swallowed slowly until your arms gave out.

Then, there was nothing. Not at first.

I was naked. Stripped. Not just of body but of mind… of senses.

I, if I could indeed be called an “I”, was completely disconnected from my faculties. No… disconnected wasn’t the right word. It was like I had always been without them. Like they had never existed and all context or memory involved in their existence had vanished from me.

Sight, smell, Taste, touch, locomotion… All gone. Even a sense of self was stripped from the existence I’d shifted into.

How does one scream without a mouth? Vocal cords? A sense of sound? I didn’t know… The prerequisites for knowing If I wanted to scream or not were unmeetable at this point.

…Shattered sensations drifted over me like a wave would lap over your feet if you dipped them into the drink at the end of a pier. There was no consciousness here. No sentience… No thoughts. No pain or pleasure, or mundanity for that matter… just a state of absolution. Of being. The only thing that remained could only be described as ‘knowing’.

The ‘knowing’ was a language of sorts.

It was a state of being where aspects of my material reality were understood without words of any iteration. If this could be described as a language… which for lack of better terminology a part of myself decided to reference it as… it would be somatic.

It was a language that was instant. A sort of carnal magnetism and comfort which ebbed and flowed… an understanding related to body… or at least what I understood as my body now… and it was distinct from thought as I would have traditionally understood thinking to work. It was more akin to an unconscious twitch of a muscle than a movement with intention.

I was… I realized without the mechanism for realization… Without a sort of spiritual inertia.

A certain sense of bearing did manifest eventually, like a cat falling from a tree only to instinctually find the ground beneath its feet

…And a sense of humor echoed from some distant part of myself, signaling that it was like playing charades without knowing how to use your hands. The joke had a familiarity to it even with my inability to understand… so my disparate parts vibrated with recognition…

The connection itself was taps and touch… a vibrato of double entendre which allowed a fluidity of movement and understanding yet, there was no true communication through that connection.

No… there was a sort of communication, it was just alien to me.

Nothing of it relied on the now forgotten senses I had relied on before whatever I was now…

Actually, what… had I been?

I struggled to piece things together with this new language. A nonlinear, three-dimensional language mind you. A language which was virtually impossible to navigate.

There was…

No traditional sentience. Not even an animalistic pre-awareness. I just… was.

Yet there it was… an emotion? A dull, muted thing… It was there, like a bioluminescent cave mold, barely visible as your eyes start to adjust to the alien environment of a cold, lifeless cave.

Frustration. This was called… frustration…

That much I knew even without words, I hummed as a low vibration rumbled across the ‘knowing’.

… And speaking of feelings, I could feel at first, (If it could be called that) the material which comprised the currently cold form I inhabited, becoming undone. I could describe it as a husk being shed but it was more than that. My relationship with the cold form was being altered. Heat and matter was being carried away, dissipated from the mound of material that comprised me. Bit by bit I was… disappearing?

No… I was being absorbed into an estuary of something larger… a veined network of everything.

I was being spread and changed.

I understood this as the end of something, and another dull, muted emotion surfaced within my network.

A confusing jumble of chemical interactions collided all at once throughout myself. Loss, grief, anger, relief… All of these impotent emotions vibrated along the expanse of what I’d become.

Molecule by molecule my material was sherpa'd away by an ever expanding array of what can only be explained as… chemical and sometimes sentient magnetism?. Like tiny life-forms were absorbing, moving, changing, and then depositing those transformed bits of myself further away. I could feel myself being moved, changed, and rearranged… as the greater mass of myself sunk deep within the embrace of something thick and firm.

It was the pinnacle of weirdness, feeling the building blocks of oneself be in a sense, rewritten. I was undergoing an elemental change both within myself and within the skulking material carrying me off.

As this transpired, a part of the ‘knowing’... my disjointed network… attempted to focus, instinctually pondering something. I couldn’t understand the concept itself… something about distance… celestial bodies… seasons?

Brief visuals and images flashed across the ‘knowing’... These concepts were foreign to me.

There was a portion within myself, seemingly with its own force of will which was all but screaming at me. Its sheer discomfort and panic had flagged down my slowly recalibrating consciousness. It was pleading for my attention.

“Seems urgent”... I groggily vibrated, being able to utilize some of the vibratory communication that seemed to dominate this space. The excitable slice of myself seemed to be on the warpath about something. Had that piece of myself given me those visions? Had it been something else? I didn’t know but it was worth investigating.

…And not just that… this excitable portion was… cute?

There was something about its curious, nervous personality that made me want to help it. It was part of myself, but distinctly not… moreover it felt as if it was more part of the husk being shed… being changed… than it was a part of myself.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

…And anyways… Having just come into existence and not wanting to make a bad impression I decided to do my best to accommodate this portion of myself…

Anyways… the nervous energy it was emitting was beginning to emit a sort of heat, transmitting its nervousness and vigor to me.

I followed Mister Excitable's lead and felt for vibrations within the network of ‘knowing’, attempting to signal towards something I thought may be of use. Something that was acting in the manner portrayed in those visions… Something that had a defined beginning and end. A thing with whatever this “time” was between those things.

I focused away from Mister Excitable, narrowing my gaze onto a slowly dimming tangle of signatures. It was a cluster of ourself… itself? God this was confusing.

My gaze seemed to also draw the attention of the excitable portion I had decided to dub Mister Excitable..

Among the tangle of specks I found the brightest speck. It was a bright, heat-laden speck… the smallest portion of myself I could find. It danced among the cluster of other such specks, all in varying states of vibration. Its heat was, much like the tiny particles around itself, in a barely noticeable way, dimming.

I felt Mister Excitable focus, letting out a pulse as the vibration of the speck ticked darker..

With each tick signaling the darkening of the specks' shade, it was followed by Mister Excitables pulse. The Pulse itself, a soft luminous event, was then surrounded by a pronounced hum. It was by all accounts rather pretty and almost hypnotizing.

Tick, tick, tick…

As the heat dimmed and the speck grew still and dark, I felt Mister Excitable switch to another speck, and then another… repeating this ritual. The passionate portion seemed to identify a positive property of the’ knowing’… as well as the deep void the ‘knowing’ existed within by measuring the rate of decay of these specks.

Also of note, these specks weren’t gone… so to speak.

They were just something else now… they had changed, metamorphosed into a different state of being, largely the same mass as before.

I took a moment to consider how the knowledge of mass and material density was so innately understood by myself but didn’t have the vibratory vocabulary to truly plumb the depth of that mystery… so instead I just shrugged (Which was translated into a halfhearted vibration that petered out shortly).

Despite their metamorphosis, the little specks had helped Mister Excitable figure something out and I was glad that the discomfort was gone. I paused for a moment to absorb a vibration I was toiling with. How was I processing information right now?

The vertigo of ‘knowing’ was… absurd. It was to be connected to everything, while being distinctly separate. Mister Excitable’s existence was one of many byproducts of this strange connection. it was a state of having no immediate agency aside from that magnetism which allowed a slow addition and subtraction to myself over time and distance via my focus.

Wait, time?...

Mister excitable smugly beamed as I vibrated with understanding. Something had clicked. I also noticed that the excitable portion was… dimming as well?

Oh.. no… not you too…

There was no grief or regret transmitted through the layers of vibration. It felt as if whatever this portion wanted to achieve had been achieved although my ‘knowing’ did feel a sort of sadness as I watched Mister Excitable lose his luster.

As if on queue, the dimming of Mister Excitable ceased and all that was left in his place was a cold void of mass. It had happened so… fast? My entire network of ‘knowing’ slumped inward as I instinctively used every ounce of my focus to embrace that cold, dim mass. I would not be leaving the first portion of myself I had truly begun to know far from my densest self.

I folded him into myself, embracing… no, devouring him? It was a strange, sad sensation.

Gone but not forgotten buddy, I vibrated sadly

HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETE! *Grief Across Time and Space* REWARD! Perception of Time!

The sudden announcement, although silent, was in a way louder than anything I’d ever heard. Every aspect of my focus was drawn to it in an instant and it sent a shock of vibrations along my entire network.

“Holy shi…” I wrapped the now dispersing material that had once been dubbed Mister Excitable deeper into myself like a security blanket. I felt almost paternal in my guarding of the now cold matter that had ceased exercising its passionate personality.

Half in shock and before I could process the passing of the once energetic part of myself, the concept of time was translated across the ‘knowing’. It flooded into me, afflicting me with an almost taboo knowledge.

Whereas the loose concept of time had been ephemeral before… certainly fleeting… and a barely formed preamble to the possibility of thought… it was now whole and with context… and with that context, it was as if I had been frozen in place previously. Only now was I able to lurch forward. I decided almost immediately that on some level I did not like this. Not one bit.

It was as if the march of time had just gasped into being… all at once? No… it had certainly existed before I was just unaware of it. This was Mister Excitable’s gift to me and although I definitely found the experience distasteful I was going to let it envelop me.

It felt like the distance between eyelids closing… and then the lurch forward slowed its abhorrent acceleration.

It slowed like a trickle that was once a waterfall until time was at a crawl comparatively. I seemed to be experiencing the full spectrum of time now.

I had been operating at the speed of thought before. Gaging time in that manner left… Well, it left me with no concept of the time which had passed or was about to pass.

…And although time bore no meaning to the ‘knowing’, eventually, a spark of familiarity of my own self occurred.

A new ideology was born in the material I was. A philosophy of whereabouts. A religion of the space between this fractured material. The ‘knowing’ was the process by which I knew… myself? I’d been using a more proper vibration for the coordinates to indicate my center-mass previously, but now it was a more vivid idea.

More importantly I gained an inherent awareness of myself among that which was not myself.

The distance between changes was the clockwork to tell the days and seasons now. Days were a collection of dimmed portions… and seasons were more of those… This was the measurement of the rate of decay, of growth and dissolution. The miles between portions of myself was the winter, and sunlight shone when I would meet a portion of myself again.

Regaining my composure after feeling as if an entire universe of understanding had just been dumped into me, I refocused on the announcement. It felt familiar… as if I’d seen something like it before. Moreover the context for the wording seemed to be understandable to me… visible even, which was a new thing.

A hidden quest meant there were other hidden quests. It also meant that there were unhidden quests. Furthermore there seemed to be rewards for completing them.

I clutched tightly at the bundle of cold dense matter near my core as it continued to seep into the tendrils of my network. I didn’t know how I felt about being rewarded for the work Mister Excitable did. I felt even more conflicted about the fact that it was my ‘Grief across Time and Space’ which was the namesake for the quest which led to that reward…

Regardless, Mister Excitable had sacrificed their very nature to bring about this resolution. I wasn’t about to let it go to waste or stew on it for longer than necessary. I had things to figure out… and it felt as if some of that precocious, nervous energy had become part of me somehow. It was a kind of reckless abandon and curiosity incarnate.

I had learned a lot already.

I’d learned how to communicate with myself… how to perceive both time and space to some extent. I had even learned that there were quests and rewards for those quests. That meant there was a sort of progression. There was a way to become more than what I was within the ‘knowing’. Speaking of which…

The ‘knowing’ was unalloyed, sterling, entropy.

Yet somehow, the ‘knowing’ was not without a bond. This… “me” was still “me”.

It was then that a jolt of fear overtook me…

Yes that vibration was called fear, and it just hurtled through me. Now that I’d gained my bearings… how much time had passed? Was this what Mister Excitable was so anxious about? How long has it been since I came into being? Did it matter?

Something about the mound of mass that I’d sprung from… a deep primordial part of myself wanted… No… needed to know.

I would know, I decided.

I had to know.