Gramps

Chapter 1

Chapter 1.

He had been alive for so long he'd forgotten more than most species would ever know in their entire existence. He couldn't even recall how old he was himself, and he didn't care either. He had been alone for as long as he could remember too, and couldn't really say for sure if he'd ever not been alone.

He supposed there had to have been a time when he had had company. Didn't he once have family, or at least parents? He couldn't recall, and he didn't care about that either. All he knew was that he was searching, and that he had been searching for... how long had it been since he'd come across something that had interested him anyway? He couldn't recall. Neither could he recall what it had been the last time that he had been interested in something.

So he slipped into another quantum dimensional plane and entered yet another Universe in the hope that this reality would yield something that would be interesting enough for him to capture his attention. He severely doubted it when his consciousness became aware of everything in the Universe he was in now.

In many ways it resembled so many other universes he'd been to, and had found nothing to capture his attention. A bit of matter, scattered all over the place, and some bright energy linked to it to the point of them being interchangeable. Most of this universe was, like many others, mostly made up of the kind of matter and energy without substance and had only one property of itself on the same dimensional plane as the other matter and energy.

The bright energy and the matter was mostly distributed haphazardly throughout this universe with large area's almost empty and lumps of it scattered about. Those lumps all individually moved away from all the other lumps and he noticed they did so with an increasing velocity. That made him blink, and take a closer look.

Ah, the lumps didn't increase in speed. The fabric of this reality's space was expanding at an accelerating rate. In the millionth of a second it took him to blink and look closer he'd seen that everything in this universe was moving away from a single point which made him search his memory. Had he ever encountered such an oddly behaving Universe before? He couldn't really recall with any certainty.

For a thousandth of a millisecond he felt a flicker of excitement as he dared to allow himself to wonder, just for the slightest of moments, if this might be a universe that could peak his interest. Even that flicker of excitement he felt was enough to make him giddy with joy. It had been at least.... eons and eons ago when he had last felt anything like that.

He came to a decision at that moment. If there was something interesting about this Universe, or in it, he was going to take great care to make the finding of it, experiencing it, take as long as he could and make it last as long as he could. He knew that if the universe turned out to be uninteresting and yield nothing worthy of his attention he'd be depressed for another eternity but it was a risk he was willing to take.

He gathered himself onto this one reality and into this one universe, and even phasing out of most of the dimensional planes in which the majority of this Universe did not exist. He then willed himself into a form with which he could interact with the different forms of matter and energy in this Universe and only then allowed hid perception to open again.

His mind reeled with the experience. If nothing else that experience alone was the most interesting he'd experienced in as long as he could remember. It even took him a millionth of a second to understand what it was he was perceiving. Linear time, in some way connected to the space in this universe, expanding outward from a single point. Linear time with a direction forward and backwards, and the space and time even had a beginning.

A place and time beyond which both actually did not exist. Or at least, beyond which it had not existed, he corrected himself, deciding to immerse himself even more into experiencing the reality of this Universe.