Basileus_457
Legacy Name: Basileus_457

She lies awake, eyes wide open in the darkness, and listens to the noises within herself. Her organs move and churn like so many pieces of machinery. There's a wetly rhythmic slosh, and a constant gurgle of leaking water somewhere, at the opening to some orifice. There is no pain, only strangeness. She runs one hand over her stomach and senses, not with nerve endings but with the habit of contact, a curious itch that begins to tingle warmly. She's clawed marks down her flank though her nails only felt like light dancers tripping across her skin.

She learned long ago to internalize fear and discomfort and anxiety, banish them for the paranoia they more than often were. Now, slowly and steadily, she picks apart her racing mind. She touches and prods the neural networks, looking for but one single concrete thought from within the kaleidoscope of simultaneously firing synapses like distant flashes of thunder. They pelt her with minuscule shocks, a windfall of shooting stars. So there, and then not (so quickly!) and she doesn't know if she is imagining imaginations.

She is very much alone and afraid. Why? Because there is no one else here, in this room, in this bed. Should someone else be here? Her mind recognizes stirring emotion beneath the question and she forces herself, with that particular logical lucidness born of pure will, to take another path.

She is alone because there is no one else occupying the same observable time and space; that is definitional. And there is no one else because she is alone. Alone. No one else is here. She is here.

She likes this tautology. Her mind is delighted by its simplistic beauty and truth. She understands alone, and everything about the associated state of being. She understands. The two clauses of cause and effect chase each other. She sees them (pursuing or following, conclusion or assumption?) twisting endlessly in figure eights. A three-dimensional Moebius strip, which, she realizes, is the physical projection and manifestation of infinity.

She hears them, too. Their periodic cycling resonates at exponentiating frequencies. The amplitudes superimpose and her body, each ligament and tendon, thrums in time . . . . . ........ to infinity, and beyond.

She awakes next morning, on the floor. There is a trickle of blood under her left nostril and her cheeks are tight with dried sweat or tears. She looks into the mirror, and does not comprehend.