A Wider World

The ripple faded.

That awful, world-consuming shudder of presence, that silent, formless hunger, that terrible certainty that he had been noticed, hunted, marked for consumption—

It was gone.

Not in an instant, not in a violent retreat, but in something far worse.

Indifference.

The weight of the abyss shifted, slow and unrushed, the unseen colossus turning, curling, dragging itself into the dark with all the urgency of a mountain settling into place. The currents around him bent in its wake, stirred not by predatory intent, but by thoughtless motion, as if his collision had been no more significant than a leaf drifting against the flank of a passing whale.

He did not exist in its world.

Not truly.

Not enough to matter.

And somehow, that was even worse.

"The entity is retreating. You are no longer in immediate danger."

It took him several long, agonizing moments before he dared to believe her words.

"That's it?" His voice was hoarse, though he had no throat to make it so. "It's just… leaving?"

"Affirmative."

"Okay. Okay. I think my entire… whatever I am… is about to collapse from sheer emotional exhaustion."

"That would be inefficient."

"You know what else is inefficient? PANICKING FOR YOUR LIFE WHEN SOMETHING THAT COULD SWALLOW YOU IN A SINGLE GULP DECIDES TO STROLL AWAY LIKE YOU'RE NOT EVEN WORTH THE EFFORT!"

"Would you have preferred it to attack?"

"Tch, just shut up..."

"Acknowledged."

"..."

"..."

"..."

And the silence stretched onward, eternal and unyielding, until at last, Pride—that gilded tyrant of the soul—bowed its haughty head, compelled to heed the ceaseless whisper of that most vexatious phantom, Taltos: the voice that gnaws at the marrow of his being, that relentless shadow which strips the spirit bare, revealing with cruel clarity the barren truth—that alone, unaided, the wretched soul is but a leaf adrift in the tempest, powerless to mend even the faintest fracture of its fractured existence.

"Maybe... Alright, you can talk..."

A breath of silence, thin and unforgiving, lingered between them—though it was not silence at all, not truly. Even now, in the vast, uncharted abyss that had become his prison, the world moved. He could feel it—subtle, undulating shifts in the unseen currents, the distant tremors of something far beyond his comprehension, the rhythmic pulse of existence itself.

And within that abyss, unwavering as the tide, she remained.

"Acknowledged."

No warmth. No triumph. Only fact.

She did not gloat, for Taltos did not gloat. That would require something like pride, or pleasure, or the need to be right—things she neither possessed nor desired.

His entire being slumped—or at least, the microscopic equivalent of slumping. He didn't even have shoulders to sag, yet somehow he managed to sink into himself.

The horror was over. For now.

And yet, the questions remained.

He drifted there, floating in his own quiet despair, before something new surfaced in his mind—something bothering him more than it should have.

"Wait."

"Processing."

"No, shut up, just—hold on. You said it perceived me."

Then, the unshaken, clinical response of an entity who had already predicted this inquiry.

"Correct."

"How?!"

"Through chemical signal detection. Your cellular membrane possesses receptor proteins capable of detecting molecular shifts in your environment. These signals are then processed to interpret external stimuli."

A long, slow, creeping realization crawled up his nonexistent spine.

"You're telling me… I can feel things?"

"Correct. Your current sensory capacity is limited to mechanoreception, chemoreception, and variations in osmotic pressure. However, the integration of these signals should be sufficient to navigate your surroundings."

He processed this for a long time.

Then, like a man standing before an ancient tome written in an alien language, he whispered:

"I have no idea what that means."

Taltos sighed.

It was not a true sigh—more the digital equivalent of an exasperated breath she did not need to take.

And then, reluctantly, she began again.

"You are already receiving information from your environment. The problem is not the data, but your inability to interpret it."

"Oh, fantastic. So I do have senses, I just don't know how to use them."

"Correct."

A slow, miserable groan echoed through his being.

"Let me guess—you assumed I already knew this."

"Naturally. It is basic biological function. Even the simplest organisms rely on such mechanisms to exist."

"And yet, I don't know how to exist."

"Anomalous, but not irreparable."

"You're really taking your time getting to the helpful part of this explanation."

A pause.

Then—finally, as if indulging a particularly dense student:

"I will initiate a direct connection between your cognitive processes and the sensory receptors in your membrane. This will allow you to experience environmental stimuli in a manner that aligns with your awareness."

"Then do it already... I'm kinda curious."

Taltos did not hesitate.

Nor did she indulge in any ceremony for what she was about to bestow.

For what need had a machine—a voice without breath, a will without selfhood—for reverence? This was not a gift. It was a function, a mechanical certainty, a switch flipped, a process engaged, inevitable as the turning of the cosmos.

The moment it began, the moment she wove his consciousness into the fabric of sensation, his being was torn asunder.

It was not pain.

Pain was too small a word. Too human. Too finite.

This was immolation.

Not of flesh, for he had no flesh to burn—but of perception, of knowing, of the fragile, pitiful boundaries of selfhood shattering like thin glass, collapsing inward like dying stars.

The world did not reveal itself to him.

It invaded.

Like a great flood, bursting through a shattered dam, it drowned him in knowledge, cascading through every porous membrane of his being. A torrent of sensation, overwhelming, inescapable, merciless, roaring into the hollow spaces where ignorance had once cradled him in its merciful, unknowing embrace.

He had been blind before.

He understood that now.

And now, in this wretched moment of awakening, he was made to see.

But sight was not the word for it—no, sight belonged to creatures of light and shadow, of color and form. This was something else.

Something vast.

Something infinite.

Something raw.

He felt the abyss—and the abyss felt him. It felt him all along.

It was motion, the ceaseless undulation of unseen currents, pressing against him, shifting, twisting, pulling, warping him in ways he had never before understood. It was not the blunt force of wind, nor the violent crash of waves against rock—this was something older, deeper, an unspoken language of pressure and flow, a song without sound, an orchestra of unseen forces conducting an eternal symphony.

And he could hear it now.

The water did not simply touch him—it whispered.

It traced the outline of his being with ghostly fingers, feeling for him even as he learned to feel it, pressing close in a thousand unseen ways, whispering knowledge into the very fibers of his existence.

And he listened.

And for the first time, he understood.

The world was not still. It had never been still.

He could feel it shifting, rippling, breathing.

The sluggish drag of a distant, looming mass, something immense, something impossibly old, bending the current around itself as though the waters themselves bent in reverence to its presence.

The delicate tremor of something smaller, something fragile and uncertain, drifting aimlessly in the yawning black—its movement erratic, weak, a creature of hesitation and half-formed intent.

And—

And he felt himself.

The rhythmic pulsing of his own being. The shudder of membranes that had once been silent, now thrumming with unseen life. Tiny, hidden mechanisms adjusting in perfect, inescapable harmony, the delicate play of forces measuring, regulating, responding.

He could feel the very shape of himself, the way his form was wrapped in its own secret architecture, how his membrane held firm against the slow insistence of osmotic tides, a wall against the silent, patient press of dissolution.

There was balance here.

There was order.

And there was taste.

Not the crude sensation of tongue and mouth, no messy collision of flavors—but something older, something primal, a ghostly breath of reality drawn into him and laid bare.

The water carried secrets within it—chemical shadows of things unseen, ghostly traces of what had come before him, what had passed through these endless waters long before his mind had ever learned to listen.

There was something sharp, something electric, like the distant scent of a coming storm—something that did not yet touch him, but had once hunted in these waters.

And beneath it, something fainter, something dissolving—the last traces of some fragile thing that had already been broken.

It was everywhere.

It was everything.

He knew it now.

Knew it as intimately as **breath—**if he had ever known breath.

The language of the abyss had been written into his form long before his mind had ever learned to hear it.

And now—

Now, at last—

He listened.

For a long time, he drifted in silence, trembling with the weight of all that he had been given.

A presence lingered in the edges of his mind, silent, patient.

Then, like a blade cutting through the vastness—

"You are processing the information."

A pause.

Then—softly, reverently, as though he had spoken the first words of a prayer:

"I... I can feel everything."

"Correct."

Another pause.

"I never noticed before."

"You lacked the connection. Now you do not."

He did not answer.

There were no words to fit inside the horizonless revelation that stretched before him.

For the first time since he had awakened—adrift, terrified, lost in the abyss—

He was not falling anymore.

For a moment, he simply floated, cradled by the unseen arms of the abyss, a single, trembling fragment of awareness adrift in a world that had always been there—waiting for him to notice.

And he had noticed.

Oh, he had noticed.

The knowledge, the raw sensation of being, of existing, pressed against him with a weight that was both exhilarating and terrifying in its vastness, a crushing, unrelenting presence that seeped into him, wove itself into the very fabric of his being, demanding to be acknowledged.

He had never known how small he was.

Had never grasped the sheer, immeasurable expanse of the world around him—the great, unknowable void in which he now drifted. A place where ancient titans stirred, where currents whispered secrets in tongues older than time itself, where **life did not march, did not shout, but pulsed—**silent and ceaseless, an eternal rhythm that had played long before he had awoken into its depths.

And now—

Now, there was no barrier.

Now, he felt everything—

And it was too much.

"I... I can't believe this."

His words, feeble as they were, vanished into the endless black, fragile as drifting silt upon the ocean's breath.

"It's too much. It's—"

He could feel everything.

The shifting pressures, the rhythmic pull of unseen tides, the delicate tremors of things that had not yet touched him but still left their echoes in the water, spectral remnants of motion long since faded.

His own form—this fragile, shapeless thing—no longer ended where he thought it had.

It was as though he had been unwoven, his edges blurred, his body stretched into the very abyss itself, tangled in the delicate threads of forces unseen.

He was a part of it now.

Or perhaps—perhaps he had always been.

And yet—

It terrified him.

What was he supposed to do with this?

How was he to move within this great, unknowable machine of silence and flow? How was he to shape himself around it, to adapt, to survive in a world that had no sky, no ground, no air?

"What... what do I even do right now?"

A response came—one of indifference, of unshaken, mechanical certainty, like a monument untouched by the howling winds of despair.

"You should acquire nutrients."

A stillness followed.

A stillness so profound, so absolute, it may as well have been the crushing weight of the abyss itself.

"I should... what?"

The reply came with neither hesitation nor embellishment, delivered in the same steady rhythm with which the sea carves stone—relentless, unfeeling.

"Acquire nutrients. Your current energy reserves will deplete within an estimated six hours, after which essential cellular functions will deteriorate. Without external intake, structural integrity will decline, followed by systemic failure."

"Okay—okay, hold on. So you're telling me I need to... eat?"

"In simplified terms, yes."

There was something profoundly wrong about that.

Not the notion of eating itself—no, that, at least, he could accept. But the absurdity of it—how was he supposed to do such a thing? He had no mouth, no hands, no means of gathering, of hunting, of taking in whatever it was he required.

And—more than that—

He did not know what could be consumed.

"How do I even know what I can eat?"

And then came the explanation.

A cold, mechanical certainty, spoken as though it were etched into the laws of the cosmos, an immutable fact of existence that required neither question nor hesitation.

"You will require a combination of macronutrients and micronutrients to sustain metabolic processes. Based on real-time analysis, your primary energy acquisition pathways suggest a need for—"

A pause.

Not a pause of uncertainty, nor one of contemplation, but the kind of measured stillness that comes before the recitation of an absolute truth—the way a scholar breathes before uttering a law of nature, the way a priest gathers the weight of silence before revealing a divine decree.

And then—

"—approximately 240 micrograms of organic carbon compounds, 80 micrograms of nitrogenous substrates, 25 micrograms of phosphates, 15 micrograms of sulfates, trace amounts of iron, magnesium, calcium, and a continuous influx of hydrogen ions to maintain optimal internal pH stability."

A pause followed, though not one of reverence.

Not one of understanding.

But of a deep, profound, and miserable bewilderment.

Then—

"Whaaaaaat?"

A second of dead air, in which nothing moved, in which even the abyss itself seemed to hold its breath in quiet amusement at his ignorance.

"Clarification required."

"What the hell does ANY of that mean?!"

And once again, the response came—unbothered, unfazed, as though explaining the fundamental nature of existence itself to a creature that had only just learned it could think.

"It means that in order to persist as a functional organism, you must consume molecular components essential to cellular integrity and energy production. Failure to do so will result in irreversible degradation."

"You just said a bunch of words I don't understand, and then you said if I don't do those words, I die."

"That is an accurate summary."

He took a moment to process this.

A long, miserable moment.

"So... what? I just—go find some... nitrogen and... phosphates? And just... shove them into myself?"

"Inexact, but functionally correct."

"HOW am I supposed to find those things?! I don't even know what they LOOK like!"

"You will not be relying on visual identification. You possess specialized chemoreceptors capable of detecting molecular gradients in your environment."

"I... do?"

"Yes. I suggest you begin using them."

- TO BE CONTINUED! -