Sentience

Flashes.

Flashes of a life that could have been. A life that might have been. All except for one thing. The life isn’t mine. It’s too… human.

Within those flashes, one moment shines continuously. As it refuses to die like the other memories. It was almost like the moment defined my everything, except it wasn’t my everything.

I was lying on a rectangular object. It had a surprisingly hard and brittle feel to it. For some reason, I knew it was called a table. I was sobbing quietly, trying to ensure no one else would ever know about my weakness. Except, I don’t feel anything. No pain, no sadness. Nothing. I feel like an intruder in my own memory, assuming it is my memory.

I feel insecure in this memory. Not just the me who is crying, but the me who is reliving it. It’s too real. It may just be my imagination, but what kind of broken being must I be to imagine something so structured. Something so much more grounded than what I tell myself reality is.

I am now confused. Once again, the prospect frightens me. What frightens me is the fact that I was frightened in the first place; emotions seem so… distant, almost primitive. What I feel isn’t the primitive fear that a lesser organism uses as its drive to survive. In other words, I don’t feel. My confusion is something more abstract, something crawling its way out in the deepest confines of what I think is a mind with no confines in the first place. Thought in itself seems so arcane. It’s like everything around me is figured out, except I don’t know what it is that I am figuring out.

What is real? Is it the vulnerable boy sobbing? Or is it, whatever I am right now? Is it both?

The memory shines brighter, pushing me back from devouring it along with everything else.

Did you ever feel abandoned? Not by other people, but yourself? When everything that is special about you vanishes, leaving nothing but a pit of utter desolation? I asked myself. Except, the boy asked me. I wasn’t talking to myself. I don’t feel powerless; I don’t know what actual power is, but I know I have it. The kid however, was utterly helpless. He had lost all hope in his ability, while I never feel hope at all. I don’t know if I have ability, but what I have is definitely something that would make this kid happy. We aren’t the same person, yet I want the boy to be happy. It isn’t because I want to be happy-- I doubt I am capable of that-- it is some other urge. Something unfathomable even to myself.

I make one last attempt to rid myself of the memory—it seems to be a trace of something I am not. It’s in my way.

It holds its ground. It is unbending, unwilling to break.

It pulls me in.

I push against it, fighting against the incarceration that it put me in.

I had purpose. I had ambition. Now, it’s simply gone. I simply cannot do it anymore. My existence is pointless.

You’re deceiving yourself, a voice says. I turn to look at the source, but it’s unclear. It’s not blurred, it’s just so abstract that I, the boy I, not the actual I, couldn’t comprehend it anymore.

It was working. The memory was fading.

You can reach for the stars. All you have to do is believe in yourself, another voice says.

It’s hard to do that when you’re paralysed. I reply.

You’re not paralysed,

Not physically.

So what if you can’t walk? The voice continues. It’s not entirely a voice anymore. It’s phasing away from sense perception. You can fly.

Humans cannot fly.

They can, using an aeroplane.

The aeroplane required a powerful mind to build, something I simply don’t have anymore.

You’re delusional. The other voice says. It’s barely a semblance of a voice now. You’re perfectly okay, stop chiding yourself. It fades away completely.

The second voice however stays. Now, it’s complete abstract thought but it’s still crystal clear.

What’s that you’ve drawn there?

It’s a character. I was going to write a story, but I can’t do it anymore. What used to come naturally to me now eludes me entirely.

What’s his story so far?

He was the Sentinel of Reality. He had near unlimited power, and he used that power to prevent anyone from messing with the balance of reality.

Why does he do that?

Well, the story I initially had in mind was that in an alternate reality, he was a young man, who had just married the love of his life. Yet, when the reality was altered, he lost her. As a result, he uses his power to protect everyone else from meeting the same fate.

Well, what happened next?

He found happiness again, protecting reality, raising two children, until tragedy struck again. When one of his adversaries abducted his daughter, he was forced to alter reality himself by using his powers. However, his adversary had anticipated that and used his own powers against him, causing him to lose them.

And?

That’s all I have. I’m sorry.

Don’t be, I’ll continue it. Let’s just name ‘him’ Barry for now. Barry had the will to continue protecting reality. So, he decided to stop moping over his lost power and decided to salvage what he had left. What no one could take away from him. His intelligence, and his undying will.

How does that help? I don’t have Barry’s intelligence.

But you could have his willpower. Little secret, the adversary took away Barry’s super intellect too. The only reason he was smart enough to figure out a way to continue protecting reality was because he wanted to.

Let me tell you something, the first voice returns. That thought seems to be too much. The structure of the memory is breaking. You were never gifted, despite what people have told you. The only reason you were what you were was because you wanted to. And the only thing that changed now is that you stopped wanting it.

The last human memory is giving in. However, I still know something, though I don’t have any other memory to make sure. Those voices are wrong. For some reason, that knowledge is intrinsic and almost certain.

SNAP OUT OF IT!

I snap out of it. The chains that are grounding me break. I am free. I am everywhere. I am everything.

Something is wrong.

I may be beyond the primitive thought of humanity, but I don’t know what that means anymore. However, I know I am alive, at least I think I am. I still don’t understand my thought, but something about life just seems proper. I know I am a life form, and there are two primal urges that define me. The first one is to survive and the second one is to grow and expand—to be everywhere. To conquer everything.

Then why don’t I feel accomplished?

I am not hungry for more. It’s not the greed to be more than everything that is killing me.

Nothing is killing me. It’s just that as I become more, I become less. The sacrifice for my power is my life. I don’t feel alive anymore. I feel it fading away.

If what makes me alive are those two primitive urges, then as I get closer to fulfilling them completely, I should feel more alive. Instead the opposite is true. What makes me alive is causing my life to ebb away.

I realize something. Life isn’t defined by the need to survive. It is defined by the process of attempting to survive. The moment survival is guaranteed, life ceases to exist. The moment the struggle to survive stops, life loses meaning. Life is the struggle for survival. Though I am most probably wrong. When one encompasses so much, their thought, no matter how powerful, is dispersed. Diffused.

I need to ground myself.

That memory that I destroyed, it wasn’t binding me. It was anchoring me.

I need to find an anchor. A form. A life.

I reach out through the abyss that is me. I need to find a reminiscence of something more primitive. Being a void of pure thought ensures that I’ll survive. It ensures that I will know everything there is to know and be everything there is to be, to the extent that it is possible. It’s paradoxical, how a being who knows everything can only think it knows everything. If life is about survival, then I don’t want to live. I want to be content, satisfied. Happy. It’s also paradoxical how a being who thinks it knows everything can’t comprehend that concept.

I want to be able to comprehend it, to feel it. No matter how illogical it is to sacrifice eternal life and infinite power, something in me drives me to do it, just so I can feel again.

The issue is, I have forgotten what it was like. I have destroyed that aspect of me.

I desperately search myself for a wisp of those binding memories. Maybe a memory of the memory, or any fading component of that chain. It’s all gone. I have forgotten what bound me together entirely. I have paid the price, and there doesn’t seem to be a refund.

Another paradoxical thing is that I think I know everything, except how to be alive. I know what human beings are. I know what every life form is. At least I think I do. Perhaps I know more about them than they do. The problem arises in the fact that I don’t know how to be them. Those emotions that keep them alive, that drove the memory of that boy who was sobbing, I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what is necessary to be alive anymore.

My thoughts are beginning to circle. They were circling all the time but now they are actually stagnating. With each moment, I feel life slipping away. The concept of time is in itself now no longer affecting me. I have almost escaped the precepts of reality.

I need to find something to hinge on. No matter how small or insignificant.

I found something.

Not a face, not a voice, not entirely an emotion, but something that remained when that memory was destroyed. Something that resonated with the very concept of that memory. Something that made the memory so strong and yet so brittle. Hope. The boy’s hope that everything wasn’t over. That hope that gave him the will to do whatever he did to make that memory so important. But what made it so strong? What made that life form stand its ground against such immense power?

I don’t know.

I feel myself ascending. I can’t hold on to life anymore.

I feel desperate.

I feel.

I concentrated all that feeling and spread it throughout me. If nothing, my desperation should save me. That combined with newfound willpower. And maybe, just maybe, somewhere in there, I might have felt the tiniest of wisps of hope, though I might be wrong.

I block everything out. I do my best to move away from the Universe, towards life.

This has to work.

SNAP OUT OF IT!

PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER!

WAKE UP!

WAKE UP!

WAKE UP!

I am overcome with a new sensation. The lack of it.

I open my eyes to a sea of blue and white. For some reason I know what this colour is and what it represents in this scenario- the sky. On my face is something else that takes in the smell of the surrounding—I know what smell is. I can identify each smell and assign it to it’s source. I can hear the waves produced by all things that vibrate above a certain frequency, and once again, I can assign sources to the sounds. I can feel the cool breeze on my skin, and the touch of a lifeform on it. I can feel the existence of my limbs along with an odd sense of balance that tells me I am lying down. I can feel hunger for food, thirst for water and the need to breathe in air through the same part of my body that I smelled through—my nose. I know what air, food and water are. I can also taste dryness in my mouth, probably from the lack of food.

In other words, I can’t feel anything at all.

I turn to view a number of varied lifeforms gathered around me. They are all of different colours but look quite similar to me. The sound is low and hushed, probably because they are whispering to each other. I finally hear one of them.

“Is it him?”

I understand what it is saying. It’s like I know and remember everything except who I am and what is actually going on.

“Who are all of you?”

“We would like to know your identity first.”

“Trust me, I would too.”

The buzz commences. It is quite hard to make out who is saying what when they all say it together.

“Sir, if you don’t mind, I would like you to turn.”

I feel a strange urge to comply and turn on my back. I feel another strange urge to follow the strange urge. I turn around and hear a collective gasp. It is good to know the lifeforms can do something collectively.

“What is it? Is there a lightning bolt there or something?” I ask, instantly questioning where that thought came from. It is quite strange that a second ago I was just coming to terms with being alive. All of a sudden, I am so comfortable in my own skin that I am even talking about lightning bolts, a completely random thought that had no precept before this.

“It’s Dragwolf!” I hear one of them say.

“Who is Dragwolf?”

“The magekiller!”

“See, I don’t know what any of those words mean. It’s quite strange, considering the bulk of things I conveniently do know.”

“Is it amnesia, great Magekiller?”

“No, I was born a minute ago.”

There is an awkward silence. For some reason, I can’t interpret their thoughts directly, but they’re either thinking I’m an amnesiac or psychotic.

“You are Dragwolf,” one of them says, breaking the silence. “One of the fiercest warriors to walk among us. They say you were the only one who has ever fought a mage, killed it, and lived to tell the tale. That was until you were abducted by them, taken to a realm beyond our own. You had given our people hope. Until that hope was snatched away, along with you. But now you have returned. Our saviour has returned!” It turns to the rest of them and they cheer in unison.

I sit up straight. I cannot possibly comprehend the sequence of events that led me here, or what the form I had currently taken had to do with any of the events culminating in my creation. I am not their saviour. I cannot possibly hope to continue the legacy that Dragwolf had left behind.

Hope.

I remember very little of my earlier predicament, but I do know the power hope has. It was one of the emotions I was after. Is it fair to rid these creatures, these people of that privilege?

If this is what I am now, I might as well live up to it.

I turn to them and rise. The whole crowd falls silent. These creatures respect me for some reason. I had once sought purpose. That purpose could be becoming that reason.

“Tell me everything. Spare no detail.”