Heat ripped through the small apartment in waves, ushered in through its sliding glass door by a soft breeze which ameliorated nothing. On the contrary, it felt like the wind and light were conspiring together to make the weather even worse than usual.
Will dabbed sweat off his forehead with a little hand towel that was already soaked with the moisture of his own body. When he pinched at it he could swear he felt salt forming on the corner tips, crystallizing from the pressure of concentration. He lay in a shitty bean bag situated directly in front of the door, those awful plastic beads already wriggling through the ragged seams and rubbing against his flesh. He kind of liked it, they distracted ever so slightly from how hot the New Mexico weather was making him.
His gaze wandered out and over the Clovis skyline with its modest tableau of one and two story residences. An unusual quiet had descended over the place, the natural putter and honks of cars going down the road outside replaced with the clattering of leaves and occasional shrieking cries of summer birds. The shimmer of sun and rising air made his eyes prickle. He blinked against the onslaught, losing more precious water.
This was not working, Will decided, and he further elected to get up from his seat to see if he had anything left to drink. A laborious process, he could feel himself overheating in real time as he did the work of propping his light frame up. That’s it: push yourself out, sort of awkwardly tumble out of the bean bag and onto the floor; prop yourself up on your elbows you bumpkin, stare into the dark kitchenette. Look at the silent refrigerator and wonder if there’s anything worthy of consumption despite checking not two hours ago. Feel the swell of blood in your head and chest and skinny legs as you push yourself up onto your feet. Watch those fleeting sparks in your vision, you know you’ve got low blood pressure. You never did take very good care of yourself.
Before subjecting himself to the misery of checking the accursed fridge, Will decided to give the sink faucet the good ol’ college try. He gripped the handle for cold water daintily, without any force to suggest that he was trying to will the refreshment to come out. It would happen or it wouldn’t; hoping as hard as he could or wishing for it would change nothing.
That conviction didn’t stop a small sigh of disappointment from escaping as he turned, and nothing dripped from the faucet for the fifteenth time. The water towers were long past giving up any more precious fluid. The paranoiacs had already filled their tubs, you snooze you lose and all that.
He plopped the moist rag into the sink, more resigned than upset. There was a dim in his eyes and brain as he walked over and opened the fridge, rooted around for a scrap of anything left. The plastic crenelations in the shelves mocked his efforts, all chilliness long gone. It would be easier if he could just see properly, but he had been saving his phone battery, just in case.
Well, why bother? If they were going to get signal back, it’d have to come with electricity. Probably. He dug around in his shorts pocket and retrieved the instrument. Precious LCD light suddenly streamed directly into his eyeballs, threw up shadows which put the softened edges and bland surfaces of the kitchen into some minor relief. On the lockscreen were the same notifications he had received five days ago, the last information he had gotten from the internet before it ceased delivering any headlines to him.
“OXFORD, STANFORD, BERKELEY, ZÜRICH, MOSCOW, BEIJING, TOKYO, MELBOURNE: THE ASHES OF ACADEMIA”
“WORLDWIDE DEATH TOLL CONTINUES TO RISE AMID MASS CONFUSION AND PANIC”
“WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE ALIEN THREAT”
“TENS OF MILLIONS PERISH IN GLOBAL NUCLEAR EXCHANGE”
“‘SEEK SHELTER NOW’: UNITED STATES MILITARY OFFICIALS RELEASE URGENT STATEMENT”
Other groupings of words like this went on for a while if Will chose to swipe up and look at them scroll across his screen.
He decided against doing this. Grimacing, and still fearing wastefulness, he redirected the beam into the fridge’s gaping maw. Emptiness stared back at him, save for one lonely plastic bottle on the bottom. As he scooped it out it crinkled loudly, protesting the disturbance.
The bottle’s cap was loose and it was only three fourths full of water. Wasn’t much, but it would do the trick. He chugged the lukewarm aqua vitae in one go, savoring the faint slosh as it hit his yearning stomach. Plopped the remains in the waste bin, no sense trashing the place even if it was the apocalypse.
Feeling vaguely refreshed, Will decided he would go for a walk. This was not terribly advisable, but he surmised that the worst of the danger had passed already. There hadn’t even been any gunshots since the second day.
Already dressed in shorts and a light shirt, he snatched up the sunglasses he had hanging by the front door and locked it behind him. Going out was quite unlike him, but he was in a good mood. Probably the best he’d felt in a long while, to be honest. It was a fine thing to live on when so many had not had such luck.
He had almost been one of the unlucky ones, actually. He didn’t believe in fate, of course: destiny is a reductive explanation for when people grew uncomfortable with how unassailably large the universe is, and of all the things in it. He didn’t think much on it (in the philosophical sense, anyway), but if he had been forced at gunpoint to think of a term for what he “believed,” he’d be a determinist. No meaning or choice to be found in your decisions, just grinding cause and effect. The world turns, and it may turn in strange or ways unpredictable to us, but it turns all the same.
You see, once upon a few years ago William Coleman had been an ardent physicist. He was on the upper end of that bell curve of “people who are hailed as prodigies while they’re growing up,” and that seemed to carry him for a while. At the tender age of sixteen he had been offered full rides through a couple Ivy leagues to the great joy of himself and his proud, loving parents.
The section of life which often follows being a child prodigy, the “burned out fucking disappointment” part, had come later for him than most. He finally spun out in the middle of his first post-doc. A Ph.D in quantum multi-vector analysis (a quantum physicist as a determinist? Perish the thought!) ultimately landed him in a cheap studio apartment back near his parents, somewhere between Santa Fe and Amarillo. He had some incredible offers on the table before he crashed and burned, too, real top notch government contracts and shit like that.
But in retrospect, taking those offers would have landed him in the grave. He’d take Clovis over that any day, as sleepy as it got around here.
All of the things on offer for him had sounded pretty esoteric even by his standards, even just from the tiny glimpses they had allowed him. Just once he encountered the phrase “spinor anomaly,” something which he had never seen before in all of his time reading paper after paper after boring paper in every journal that he had free academic access to.
A nervous breakdown had put the prospective job on ice… but then quite some time later he saw those words pop up again, in a New York Times article of all things. Information about a leaked government project of some sort.
The coincidence had seemed odd up until suddenly the word had been everywhere, when it was the only word on people’s tongues anymore. It was a cruel joke, having that tantalizing bit of information suddenly shotgunned into Will’s brain every minute he was awake, too late for him to do anything of substance with it.
There had of course been much talk of these anomalous beings—he refused to dignify the term “anomaling,” it was SO stereotypical it made his teeth itch—in the run up to nuclear Armageddon, but things had remained shockingly normal even after their existence was confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt for the general public.
For a surprising amount of time, people still did all the things people are wont to do: they went to their jobs to keep the mill of society churning; they tried to enjoy themselves with some flavor of entertainment or another. There had been a sharp uptick in alien-related stuffs, of course. Some Hollywood hack was already working on a documentary about the real aliens, no doubt to capitalize on the conflict once it was wrapped up; many still went to school with hopes for the future.
Despite everything, he had been part of that last grouping. Unable to stand the rigors of the upper echelons of hard science, he had turned inward towards humanity. His new major of choice had been history, something he had neglected quite a bit while still on the upswing in physics.
The difference in intensity was immediately apparent. In truth he could not say that the subject was less complex than physics, but it was a softer complexity. The difficulties and ambiguities of history were shrouded by the immensity of a thing called “interpretation,” a specter which only grew the further back in time you went. Will was better equipped to handle more recent events for which we have a plethora of firsthand accounts and evidence to spare… but as time went on he felt a growing fascination with the older stuff, going back to Antiquity and further. The snippets he had encountered from Chalcolithic era civilizations were alien in their own right, in part because there was so little there to understand them with.
He was no brute who thought that one’s access to technology conferred intelligence, or some other facile nonsense. He learned enough to know that even so many thousands of years ago, these were fully formed people, with the full spectrum of thoughts and feelings available to them just as he had. A strange sympathy swiftly rose in him, an urge to reach a hand out into the past and grasp the missing details their limited window failed to offer. He wished to touch it and know it intimately, meld with it in a more coherent way than through words on a page written by some scholar archaeologist from the mid-1800s.
Outside of this wistfulness, he found himself enjoying his classes just fine. The rote memorization of introductory courses had been alternately relaxing and painful, but he was again in the stage of education which comes with more discussion than lecture. With his experience offering lectures of his own and delivering presentations to countless colleagues, he spoke with more care and practice than the traditional students with whom he shared classes. They were all too happy to let him talk so they would not have to. It was with only a smidgen of shame that he reveled in his superior experience over his fellows, basking in his casual excellence which was all the greater compared to their flailing mediocrity.
This would have been true even if his newfound academic home did not leave something to be desired. Will was sure there were more precipitous falls than Ivy League to community college, but none that he had yet participated in.
Still, it had been a source of comfort to be in any kind of educational facility. He needed that stability, that structure. And if he had decided to go to Albuquerque, he would be so much radioactive dust in the wind right now.
These thoughts on his mind, it should not be a surprise to anyone that he found himself pounding pavement on a direct line to his community college, though he was surprised by that somehow. Out here the sun’s oppression was many times greater: grass lay dead and dying, the limbs of trees drooped all along the street. Non-local plant species were all screaming desperately for municipal water which no longer came. He could literally feel the heat of the sidewalk baking underfoot, the thermal radiation vibrating violently up through the soles of his trainers and into his skin. Why had he come out here again?
Even for this strange suburban oasis, it was quiet today. No cars could be found on the street, and few people. On his short path he saw only one: a frazzled looking woman who did not even seem to register his presence. He almost went to wave to her but decided against it, for reasons he did not fully understand. He had never had the best social graces, but it almost felt that she would be even less comfortable if her loneliness was disturbed.
He could understand, in a way. He had avoided strangers since the bombs first fell. The only person he had felt safe approaching was his next-door neighbor, a sullen old woman who spoke minimal English. He would visit his parents, but they had been in Dallas seeing relatives when the first wave of nukes wiped the city off the face of the Earth, alongside so many others.
Will had already wasted plenty of water thinking of that. He could feel his brain baking slowly in his skull as he continued, taking the familiar turn northward which brought him on the same street as the college, and eager to distract himself his mind turned towards academic leanings once again. Not History writ large, but his own history.
Did he still remember the precocious excitement he had all those years ago, his education spinning up in middle school? When had he or his parents realized he was “not like the other kids?” Was that phrase even still applicable, now that he had lost all of his vision and drive? The pavement turned to laid brick underfoot as he entered campus, and then concrete stairs emerged on his left. They led up to a door of steel and glass, a portal to bustling halls and rooms filled with desks and whiteboards.
The breeze picked up and for once this week it was refreshing.
The door opened to him.
Beckoning.
Will’s backpack was chafing awkwardly against his neck and armpits. Pulling at the straps helped, but he still wasn’t quite used to the weight of all those books. He had insisted on carrying all of them every day, even if the right class wasn’t scheduled. Where was Physical Science again? The nice secretary had told him it was down this hallway… ah, there’s the room number. There were colorful drawings plastered all over the door, even covering the narrow window so he couldn’t see inside. The pictures had that fledgling grace of well-intentioned middle schoolers who are starting to discover the principles of artistry, but have not mastered them. They produced strange contortions of human physiology which nonetheless carried love in their unwieldiness.
Shifting his backpack once more, he twisted the handle down and entered. A crack appeared in the doorway, which turned into a sliver, then a slice which continued to expand until his vision was filled with things he had never seen in person before. Glassware for chemistry was set out on a tabletop in the corner, so ostentatious and spotless that doubtless it saw light use, if any at all. There were a couple digital scales in the back of the classroom, and physical weights alongside them. Above them hovered a sliding scale, and there was a Bunsen burner, and an assortment of other instruments and bog-standard diagrams and colorful posters like a periodic table of elements festooning the perimeter, all of which he would one day not even think twice to look at.
But to Will, at that moment it was the whole world opening up. His hands were shaking with excitement, before he had registered conscious movement he was standing in front of a scratched-up spectrophotometer. Dents and scrapes from plentiful young hands, none too careful, had not taken away its functionality yet. He spent countless hours wondering how it worked before he got further in his education, took some more advanced classes which gifted him the principles of electromagnetism. Because that’s right, he hadn’t even learned the name of the instrument until the teacher had gotten back and saw him staring at it in awe, told him what it is and what it does while they waited for the rest of the class to filter in. Why had he been so enthralled by it?
Had been enthralled, but not since its arcane nature had become more familiar to him. He hadn’t even used a spectrophotometer after his first year in college. Why did he feel split like this? Was he going mad? He couldn’t remember if this was now or 20 years ago. The metal and plastic of the instrument in his hands suddenly wrapped around him and squeezed, offering a pressure which was both daunting and comforting. The walls of the room narrowed, the apparatus in front of him swallowed his vision.
It was in front of him, it was touching him, it was part of him. His own skin felt cold to him now, a metallic dermis covering plastic muscles and organs. Cold was seeping into his being, transforming him into something new and pristine. It was gentle, but firm, so that he felt his steel lips buckled into a smile.
His hand was on the door to the geography classroom, an elective but still rather important for historical purposes. The cold that had filled him was gone so that he wondered how he could have felt it at all. He was blazing hot now by comparison, so uncomfortably hot he could practically feel his molecules shaking inside of him, sweat positively dripping down his face. There was a matching sensation in his belly, a quivering anticipation he had rarely experienced elsewhere in his life.
So that was what Mirzakhani had been trying to describe. Those papers were too dense for him, but having some real world experience certainly aided understanding.
“Did anyone else feel that?” A small voice issued from behind the door, muffled behind the scuffed wood.
Will rapped gently to announce himself, then slowly opened the door. “Not here for trouble,” he called gently. His voice cracked from disuse, so he doubted anyone could take him for anything other than a fellow nerd.
“Come on in brother,” a veritable dude’s voice answered him. “We’re just chillin’.”
Will doubted anyone was “chilling” after that brief departure from reality, but he stepped in regardless.
There were a handful of people inside, desks scattered about to make room for an impromptu powwow in the center of the classroom. Two women, two men. One of the men was openly sleeping on his back, snoring lightly. The other man was fiddling with a flatscreen TV near the front, an open toolbag on a table next to him. The two women were sitting cross legged on the floor. Will recognized one: a classmate named Robin. She smiled upon recognizing him.
“Oh, hey there Will. I’m glad it’s you.” And she seemed to be speaking the truth, which he guessed made him a little happy.
“Good to see you, and yes, I felt that too,” he belatedly answered her. “It’ll probably happen again here in a bit. I was actually wondering if it would start soon.”
“Wait, how do you know that? What even was it?”
“It was the aliens, brother,” the apparently not-sleeping man gusted. His snoring was just his normal breathing? It seemed? “They’re finally comin’ to put us in our cages.”
“Stop it Brandon,” the other woman admonished him, though there was no passion in it. Defeat was written on her face, all doom and gloom already.
“He’s… not entirely wrong,” Will mused. Was pedagogy or reassurance more prudent here? He had trouble telling even in the best of circumstances, and his body was still a distracting hum. “I can’t pretend to know for sure, but that seemed to match descriptions from certain sources I read before… well, you know.”
“You know about this then?” Robin looked at him with a glow in her eyes that alchemized a small amount of his excitement into unease. She needlessly scooted over, which he interpreted as making space for him.
He accepted, trying not to think about her receptiveness too much. He hoped she would not touch him. “I can’t pretend to be an expert, but I can try to explain if it will help,” he said. Yes, a little goblin voice gnashed inside of him, ask away, dear friend whom I barely know. He never talked about his past research unasked, that would be gauche, but he craved those moments where people opened an opportunity to relive his glory days.
At that moment, the man behind the TV sucked in air and the flatscreen quietly flared to life. A blue field that said “HDMI1” in great white letters in the top right of the screen greeted them. The man came around to admire his success, obviously pleased. “Sorry about that,” he grinned, “I was afraid I’d shock myself if I went any faster.” He bowed as the nameless woman clapped for him. “The emergency lights don’t have much juice in ‘em, but still enough that I don’t wanna futz around too much.”
“Electrical engineering?” Will ventured. He hid his annoyance at the interruption quite well, all things considered.
“Got ‘er in one,” the man said. “I’m sure you’ve all been checking for phone signal, and I got tired of waiting. I know the school’s got antenna hook-ups, so I figured I’d try my luck. Now let’s see…” he fiddled with some unseen buttons on the side of the flatscreen as Robert heaved his ponderous frame up to watch alongside the rest of them.
The plain volume bar appeared and slid up and then all the way down to 0, options appeared for a second as he said “oop, nope,” disappeared, and then the input selection came up. He navigated to one that merely said “TV,” and Will noticed the other people in attendance holding their breath for a possibility of news from the outside, or anything really.
They were greeted with plain static, its white noise mercifully muted. The tension popped like a bubble, literally deflating his newfound compatriots. Brandon flopped back on the ground, sending a tremor through the floor tiles and into Will’s body. Was it just his imagination, or did those reverberations last just a bit longer than they should have?
After a few minutes of dejection, the engineer shrugged and came over to sit down with the rest. “Ed,” he reached out his hand for a shake, and Will indulged the ritual briefly. He was good at not being too obvious when he wiped his hand off on his shorts afterwards. “You were sayin’ you know what’s going on with all this? I’ve tried to read the papers and I can’t even get past the abstract. It’s just totally beyond me.”
That goblin inside of him sneered. Of course it is, even I struggle with it you fucking sparky. Will exerted some effort and pushed the creature down and away. Externally, he simply nodded. “Like I said, not my area of expertise. I’d say it’s in the same ballpark but it’s more like a different sport entirely. I’d try to give a full explanation, but I don’t actually know how much time we have.” He held up his hands as fear rushed onto their faces, he wanted to placate them somehow. “They’re not trying to kill us, the government wasn’t lying about that. It’s more like…” he searched for a metaphor, his body frozen in place as his eyes roved around for the answer, “… it’s more like they’re putting us under, like anesthesia or some such. Maybe not that extreme.”
“That sounds awful,” the unnamed woman piped up.
“Well, it’s not an accurate comparison. Again, wasn’t exactly my subject,” he offered apologetically, quietly seething at her interjection. “Maybe closer to a general numbing agent, like you’d get at the dentist. You’ll still be conscious, but things are going to feel off. They’re not killing us, we’re not being knocked out exactly. Robin,” he sought to involve his audience a bit, “That sensation you mentioned, the rest of you felt it as well?”
“Yep,” Brandon snorted from the floor. “Felt a bit like being reeeeaaaaally stoned, brother.” He threw up a lazy ham of a fist and shaped it into a devil’s horns. “If that’s all it is, I ain’t got nothin’ to bitch about.”
“Yes,” Robin said uneasily, “It was quick, but kinda intense. I don’t know how to describe it, like…” she shook her head.
“It was like being in a dream,” Ed finished for her. “Like things made sense in the moment, but when we came to, it was all nonsense. What are they doing to us?”
That sensation of animal excitement was bubbling up in Will’s stomach again. “It would take too long to explain the actual physics or mathematics of it to you, even if I knew the specifics. Dreamlike matches my own experience, though it was sharper than a dream. I think, to an extent, it was real.” His voice was getting faster as energy percolated through him, it was quite unlike him. “It’s all very new science, a novel approach on par with relativity and quantum mechanics—the latter I can actually comment on extensively, but it doesn’t give the whole picture.” Why was he so excited? The heat of his body was distracting, it would be uncomfortable if he wasn’t talking with anyone right now.
Searching for an example, he pointed at the television with its churning black and white pixels fluxing back and forth randomly, a nauseating image to stare at for too long. “The static you’re seeing is the result of random interactions of the antenna with background radiation from the universe. That radiation is delivering signals which are interpreted in a way that seems random because it’s happening too quickly, too spontaneously to keep track of. What the anomalous beings will do is eliminate the randomness, something about their nature gives them better control over this than us.” He was actively talking out of his element, something he did not prefer to do usually, but these people did not know any better. It was easy to defend your ideas when your audience had no idea what you were really saying.
They seemed to take this in stride, though he could tell it was all superficial understanding. That was fine, it wouldn’t matter soon enough. He could already feel the vibrations slowing down, the excitement in his limbs and core simultaneously pitching and ebbing.
Brandon was well and truly asleep now. Deep snores emanated from his yawning gullet even as his arm remained in the air, a fleshy pillar raised to the sky. Robin gently clutched at Will’s arm, which distantly disgusted him. She was nice enough that it didn’t bother him too much, though. “I’m scared Will,” she told him. He understood, though he was anything but afraid.
The nameless woman pouted, her faceless face angled just so he could tell she was sad. She sounded like she was trying to say something, but there was no hole for the words to come out. Her throat hummed the noises instead and nothing proper formed. Ed was watching the TV, and Will felt a tiny barb of annoyance that he hadn’t listened to the explanation. It was pretty rude to attend a lecture and not pay attention.
“Oh, look!” Will pointed at the flatscreen suddenly. “You can see it,” the excited words feeling a bit like a slurry as they left his mouth. “You can see it,” the excited words feeling a bit like a slurry as they left his mouth. “You can see it,” the excited words feeling a bit like a slurry as they left his mouth. The pixels on the TV were starting to lose their randomness, the black and white forming groups together. Just little bits for now, but he suspected they would start to hurry into little rows and columns, square themselves into boxes and meld together until all was oneness.
The hair on the back of his neck was standing up.
Maybe there was just a bit of fear now.
Not the kind of fear that accompanies the expectation of harm, necessarily. More like the kind when you’re doing something new and you’re not sure what result you’ll get. There’s probably a better word for that. Trepidation? Anticipation? Something along those lines, but it had been a long time since his creative writing class. He was going to encounter something totally different now, a process strange and unknown in the most visceral senses possible. Thank goodness he was still alive for that, if nothing else.
He would be more excited if he couldn’t feel his brain literally slowing down in real time, but that was okay. He wondered if he would have a chance to speak to the aliens, if that were even possible. It made him think of talking to those people from ancient history, the Elamites or the Akkadians or what have you, with cultures so profoundly different from your own that you struggle to comprehend what daily life must have been like. But then again, it couldn’t be that different because they were humans just like us. They were all apes together on a giant ball floating through space, those were the broad strokes of humanity.
Brandon’s arm was still frozen in place, more stone than flesh at this point, the rest of his corpulent mass turning into a mound of earth. The nameless faceless woman was also a heap, sadness emanating so strongly from her that Will could feel it impacting him physically, a palpable force. Robin’s eyes were shut to the world around her. “I’m scared,” she told him again and again, like her mind was caught in a loop. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
Ed continued to watch the pixels on the screen stack up and morph and coalesce into actual shapes, random static given concrete form. Their usual dance was faltering, dying sparks producing the final spasms of a macroscopically ordered universe. “You can see it,” Will realized he was saying again. “The wave function is collapsing. This happens all the time,” he said casually, “you just can’t see it ordinarily.”
“It seems hard but it’s actually quite simple,” he explained further. “Predicting an outcome becomes harder the more variables you add to the equation.”
“I don’t really understand it, hon,” his mom never humored him. She and his father both understood by now that he knew what he was talking about. Will was only in sophomore year, but he had proven himself in competitions and knowledge bowls and stuff like that a few times already. They usually didn’t get it, but they cared enough to try.
All that aside, they just knew he didn’t like being humored. It was better to give him a chance to show off a little bit instead. “Could you try explaining it with an example?”
“Easily. If you roll dice, you can’t predict the result yourself… but you could if you were able to account for every factor: the tilt of your hand as you release the die, the angular momentum as it tumbles through the air, the angle at which it strikes the table… things we can’t realistically model in real time. But maybe someday. Computers are already doing wonderful, incredible things. You should see some of the models for fluid dynamics scientists have designed, for instance.
“If you pour water randomly it’s hard to tell the exact ways it might splash and spread, but you could if you tried hard enough.” He poured water he already drank out of the plastic bottle over his hands to prove the point. His mother didn’t comment on the mess. “Every molecule of dihydrogen monoxide has a vector, a path it takes, and it encounters other molecules pseudo-randomly which alters that path. If you could see all of them and their trajectory, understood them exactly… you would be able to derive the entire universe.”
“But I thought things didn’t work like that when you get too small,” Robin was saying. “It’s like… that thing about Schrödinger’s cat. It’s impossible to know if it’s dead or alive until you actually look.”
“Yes, well, I’ve never really been a fan of Copenhagen’s work.”
“What?”
“Don’t worry about it, mom.”
“I’m scared,” Robin said as she clutched his arm. “I’m scared. I’m scared,” she said with water pooling around her buttocks and feet and dribbling down her shirt. “I’m scared.”
“I know. It’s okay.” He could feel his mind shutting down gradually, more and more, the life in the world around him leeching out as it cooled and the very synapses of his brain slowed to match. The static on TV shone ever more brightly, the black and white shapes dazzling on screen, whirling around each other non-randomly.
White seemed to be winning out over black somehow, a blooming brightness that was swallowing everything around it. The last of the black pixels were drowning, drowning in the knowledge which he drank like water, water like his life running over and through his hands. He missed his parents, didn’t like the touch of a stranger on him. “It’s okay,” he said again to no one. He was so sad, but that was okay.
A small part of him still operating realized it could count the last of the black pixels, a handful surrounded on all sides in the middle, a bacterium surrounded by phagocytes eager to rip it apart. A dozen left now. Five. The light was blinding, it filled his eyes and body, washed away the rest of the earth and the water. Three. Two. The universe collapsed into disorder around him. One.
“It’s okay…”