Veil of Time: Chapter 1

How will the world be perceived by a soul freed from the flesh? What kind of signs will it have, will the soul see and hear in the usual sense? And does this soul even exist?

Such questions sometimes popped up in my head, but I never specifically looked for an answer. However, man proposes and God disposes, as they say, and so I received the answers to these questions completely unexpectedly, and, as expected by the laws of the genre, at the most inopportune moment. The moment of my career success, personal growth and well-being. It's a clever way of saying it, but it's true - when everything is going well in life, fate can very well throw a dirty trick at you, and in the worst case, you die. And I died.

Death is scary not only because of the unknown that awaits you, but also because of the process itself. A stupid coincidence, a few deep cuts, and here I am, dying absurdly, bleeding, and the sudden realization, adrenaline and increased heart rate only speed up the process. The slowly approaching darkness dissolves the resentment towards the circumstances. When even thoughts disappeared in this darkness and it seemed that there was nothing left around, as if something exploded.

It's difficult, extremely difficult to describe in words. It's as if you've always been blind, deaf, unable to smell, and even tactile sensations were unavailable. You could call it sensory shock, but at the same time you're still blind and deaf in the usual sense. It was as if there was some awareness of the space around you, but this space was strange and incomprehensible. There was no up, no down, no other directions, and the space itself was far from three-dimensional - something larger, all-encompassing.

Fear paralyzed your consciousness - in this space you lose yourself. Not that you forget yourself and become someone else, no. You feel, you feel with every grain of consciousness how these very grains split off from you and fly away, mixing with the space around you. You know that you have lost something, but you no longer know what exactly. As if you are looking at a body slowly crumbling to dust, you know that it is crumbling, you know that you have just lost something, but for a brief moment - and this deprivation seems normal to you, or rather - as if it had been like that. At the same time, you understand that this is wrong, and the remnants of logic hint that sooner or later there will be nothing left.

I don't know how long I was here, but at some imperceptible moment the fear for myself turned into certainty - something needs to change. Gathering the rest of my will into a fist, I concentrated and began trying to hold on to the pieces of myself, not letting them fly apart. It didn't work right away, and by that moment I had lost quite a lot. Probably a lot, it's hard to judge the severity of a loss whose value you no longer know.

Having once made sure that the particles were no longer flying away from me, I decided to try to get back what I had lost, although I didn't know what exactly I had lost. I simply tried to attract at least something to myself and secure this "something". However, contrary to my expectations, the attracted particles either didn't want to cling, or they did cling, but then immediately broke away again, taking with them particles of me. This situation touched some strings of the soul, and, intending to sort out this bad world, neglecting my own safety, I took up with new strength the attempts to absorb "something" from the surrounding space.

There is no pain or fatigue here. It is hard for me to judge the success of my attempts, although over time the various attracted particles stopped flying away from me and held on quite reliably. However, another question has arisen - how many of them are needed for integrity? And the integrity of whom? Seriously! Who is "I"? Were my particles attracted? Each particle carries a grain of information - an association, a tiny memory, a once-thought-out opinion or idea, a thought, and so on. They are all so different, and logic suggests that they most likely contradict each other. Some feeling of incorrectness does not allow me to correlate the associative series of consciousness of a knight in iron armor who lived in a small fortress, a genetic engineer assigned to a certain "second fleet" of the Aerospace Forces, or, for example, some mongrel dog. There were countless such fragments, and all different, incomplete scraps, but I carefully collected them.

"Who am I?" is an obvious question, but the meaning and importance of the answer were somewhere far, far away, the main thing was to collect particles so as not to dissipate, to be as complete as possible. It seemed to me that even then, having just appeared here, I was not whole.

One day, something changed. With a tiny part of my consciousness, I saw life. As if I were alive again, small, lying in a crib with a wooden fence, if only I knew what this construction was called. People were fussing around, doing something, looking at me with strange looks. I felt all this in snatches, in pieces, on the edge of my consciousness. Yes, on the edge of my consciousness, but it was life. An ordered linear chronology, and it was all happening right now - I could not look further, as with fragments. But why then is "I" still here, in this inhospitable world, which first of all tried to destroy, to dissolve me in itself? I am not collected yet. Not all the fragments. What has been collected is not ordered. Is that the reason? It needs to be collected…

***

There was a festive atmosphere in a rather affluent house in Crawley, a town south of London. The Grangers were celebrating the eleventh birthday of their second child, Hector. Their first child had been Hermione, and in July of the following year a boy, Hector, had arrived. And all would have been well, if not for his strange mental deviations.

Hector had shown an absurd minimum of any activity since birth. As a baby, he never cried. Never. Even when he had soiled his diapers or was hungry, he could remain silent and be in some kind of detached state, as if he were not there at all. It was necessary to devote a lot of time to him. Sometimes Hector seemed to return to this mortal world with one glance, showing some activity and independence. But this was rare and short-lived. It was very difficult for Emma and Robert.

Later, when Hermione was already learning to walk, babbling incoherently in her baby dialect, Hector, who should have at least learned to crawl, remained completely detached from what was happening, still occasionally "returning" and taking a slightly more active part in his development.

At three years old, the boy suddenly up and went. Without preparation, without anything. And the purpose of his trip was to change his location - from one corner of the nursery to another, where there was more sun.

It was pretty much the same with absolutely everything that children usually learn. Hector would just start doing something, keeping a completely indifferent face, staring somewhere into space with empty eyes. It scared Emma and Robert. It scared little Hermione. It scared the nanny that had to be hired, because sometimes you have to work.

Over time, Hector acquired some independence. Still detached from the world and the people around him, he was busy with his own incomprehensible affairs, contemplation, comprehension, or something else. At least, that's what everyone in the house thought when the boy stared at the wall for a couple of hours. Someone might have thought: "Didn't they go to the doctors?" They did, and very often. But no one could really say anything. However, the encephalogram, together with other diagnostic procedures, showed extremely high simultaneous activity in all parts of the brain. They made assumptions, theories, etc., but no one could draw any conclusions.

For example, Hector could, if he was in the mood and had a pencil and paper at hand, create a photographic-quality drawing in a couple of minutes. But a drawing of what? That was another question. Some kind of transcendental, inconceivable human objects and forms, in which a logic completely incomprehensible to understanding could be traced. And this was in everything. Once, Hector filled three notebooks with tiny formulas, but even Robert's friend, a professor of mathematics, broke his brain trying to comprehend what he had written and went to the hospital for a month.