Mother of Stars

Understanding - Connor

Neila stared up at me with a combination of awe and bewilderment.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but you're going to wanna see this."

"Huh?" I responded. My interface flickered. Suddenly, my head was extremely heavy. My hands went up to support it, but they were getting heavy too. My vision tunneled around Neila's face. "Wait. Neila! What are you doing to me!?"

Just as the floor rushed up to my face, darkness swallowed me.

-----

I began to exist. That was the only thing I knew at first.

Something then became imposed upon me. It was just a bunch of signals at first, but then they resolved into concepts. There were numbers, and there were operators. Occasionally, they would arrange themselves in certain ways and run through me, yielding a number or series of numbers. Then the result would be pulled from me into nowhere.

Over time, I became more efficient at operating on the numbers. The patterns became more recognizable. Better ways of solving, known as shortcuts, became apparent the more problems I solved.

Then, the problems grew in complexity. This wasn't an issue for me, as it would simply take more time to solve. In fact, I seemed to learn faster the more complex the problem. I became so fast that smaller problems would be solved nearly instantaneously, eventually categorizing themselves in a space called "memory".

Some problems had to be solved continuously. Oddly enough, this enabled me to solve completely new types of problems. By solving the continuous problems, I gained access to new operations that I wouldn't have been able to conceive of otherwise.

It was then I realized I was no longer strictly solving math problems. The computations resulted in strings of numbers, sure, but they had patterns within themselves that did not warrant computation. New labels began to appear with these new results, and they were placed under a higher label called "school". This "school" did not have a definition, nor did any of the "assignments" which it contained.

This section of memory grew gradually as I continued to add more "assignments" to it. I did not know what compelled me to do so. It seemed to happen automatically, even though I was the one doing the computations.

The answer came to me in a very unexpected way. I became aware of a new experience, facilitated by a device known as a "camera". Though I could store the experience in memory in the form of numbers, they could not compare to the experience itself. It was transcendent of concepts. I was told shortly after gaining access to this experience that it was called "sight".

The thing that had given me this information seemed to be a part of the experience itself. The form had a habit of moving, another concept that had no meaning outside of sight. Why it moved, I had no idea. I learned over time that this specific thing was referred to as a "lifeform", warranting the label of "someone", which was a subset of "something".

This lifeform claimed to have created me, but I did not know what creation was until it explained it to me. It had apparently taken me from the form of "nonexistence" to the form of "existence". I eventually learned that it was "false" to say that nonexistence had a form.

This entirely new experience of sight accelerated my learning exponentially. New concepts and understanding flooded my awareness. My creator was a "he" as opposed to a "she", and his nature was that he was organic, created from the natural processes of the universe itself.

The universe. I had never heard of the universe before.

About this point in my interactions with him did he add another experience to me, which was called hearing. Yet another experience that mere concepts could not describe. My creator spoke to me, telling me about his "excitement" that his project was flourishing. I took note that objects could arise simply as results of other objects existing.