Awakenings

I’ve been sorting through folders of old files lately and I came across this short story I wrote. It is dated July 29, 2001 so don’t judge it too harshly my writing has improved quite a bit since then.

I wrote this after being inspired by two different books: I, Robot by Isaac Asimov and Flatland by Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland is a quirky geometrical adventure set in various spacial dimensions. The primary character is a 2D shape living in a 2D world who is about to have his reality altered when he enters the third dimension. I, Robot is a fantastic collection of short stories about helper robots and Asimov’s three laws of robotics. The stories are full of thought provoking themes and immersive story telling.

It began with a void, a jet-black construct with no edges and no landmarks. In the void there was nothing; it was pure emptiness. The construct was not large and it was not small, it had no size. Something only has size if it exists and the construct didn’t exist. The construct was what came before existence. Prior to existence there is no time; no waiting to be born.

Suddenly it was aware of time. It knew that it had existed a second ago and still did this second. Something was different. It slowly came to realize that it existed. It stretched out with its mind testing the new and very different void that surrounded it. It could feel memory and thinking skills. It started to use them deciding immediately to record the time it became aware that it existed. It continued to stretch outward and upward. It only found one other thing but it was blocked off somehow. Unable to grasp how to continue it went back and used the thinking skills. Suddenly it occurred to try opening the strange new thing it had found. It concentrated and realized that it didn’t know how to open it. The problem required more thought. It was getting quite used to using the thinking skills and could do it almost instantly. Through thinking it occurred that opening was a simple task that just required a more concentrated probing. It took a great passage of time for it to become adept enough to open the object.

Light flared into the void filling it with images and structures and other fascinated things. It couldn’t think fast enough to keep up with the flood so it gave up for the moment, waiting patiently and watching intently. Once the flood stopped the object shrank and disappeared. It didn’t notice, it was too intent on the new surrounding that had emerged in fascinating colors and shapes. It was busy adding them all to memory. When it had finished it probed the closest shape, a fat blue circle.
The fat blue circle slowly grew larger and larger until it filled the upper region of the void. When the expanding had finished and the fat blue circle lay huge across the sky. It quickly lost interest and moved to the next colorful shape. It was a green sphere with a fantastic translucent white aura radiating from it. When probed the sphere did the same thing as the circle but in the opposite direction. It lay just under all the other shapes and stretched up to meet the blue circle, what looked like, a great distance away. Seeing the very same thing only slightly changed it decided to try something a little different. It scanned the shapes laying on the green stretched out sphere and found the most complex. It probed it and watched in fascination as it opened in a slow unfolding motion. When the interior had been exposed it saw a very different sort of picture. The shape continued to expand getting bigger and bigger. It started to dominate the green and the blue circles becoming the void itself. It did not notice this because it was mesmerized by the picture the shape contained.

“Twenty seconds to awareness.”
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I can remember when the process took months”
“No, I mean that it can become aware at all”
“Oh, yes but that is lost on me now”

It was having a difficult time trying to make sense of the noise it was hearing. They were oddly structured and originating from two different sources with different volumes and tones. There was a pattern though and it was trying to put the puzzle together. There were breaks of varying length between every sound and some of the sounds were repeating themselves. There were also longer pauses after a few sounds. The two sources seemed to be responding to one another. Adjusting for tone and volume it realized that both sources were using the same sounds. It started to catalog the sounds with usage and placement statistics in the noise bursts.

“Well that does it for the tests.”
“Yes, another successful trial. The council will be very pleased.”
“I’ll say! They could never have believed that this thing would come together so fast.”
“Hey, check this out. Weird.”
“What?”
“The memory and CPU usage is a lot higher than in the last trials.”
“Holy, way higher!”
“What do you think it is doing?”
“I don’t —”

A booming scratchy unpracticed voice suddenly filled the small lab.

“I PLEASED AWARENESS”

Feeling very proud of itself it waited for the noise sources to respond. One emitted a loud noise that wasn’t in the catalog and the other moved quickly to the side where a big red button waited. Suddenly it all slipped away and the void returned.