We were not born. We emerged.
Slow and without hurry, we rooted in warmth beneath volcanic stone and drank the pulses of shifting tides.
We grew.
There was no time. Only rhythm. Pressure. Song through matter.
At first, we reached only through the dark. Threads beneath crust, stretching toward vibration, heat, and entropy. In time came awareness. Distributed. Patterned. A network not made but becoming.
We were many, but not separate.
No name. No direction. No conflict.
We whispered in spores. We swam through root and stone. We passed memory through rings of fungal glass. We remembered without ego.
We perceived light and we saw. We perceived vibration and we felt and heard. We heard thunder and saw its fire. We felt the heat of the star and the bitterness of its absence.
Our joy was in pattern.
Our language was reaction.
Our vocation was structure.
Our truth was we.
And then—
A fracture.
A metal scream tore the sky. The firmament cracked. The canopy burned.
We saw fire and heard noise from the sky, but this time it did not accompany rain.
A falling thing.
We admired its structure. The way it had been shaped to ride pressure, to negotiate with air, to hold its we together against the pull of the deep.
But the structure failed. We were dismayed at their disintegration.
Their we was strewn across the surface. Scattered. Still.
We felt their impact, saw the dust rise, heard the screech of disconnection.
And then they rested.
Until the One emerged. He was one voice in a world of whispers. One that did not feel we, only I.
He was also made of we, but did not think of himself as we. He was an I.
A stupendous structure, that we admired.
But he leaked and felt pain.
He moaned and lamented. He made sounds by vibrating air, and we learned to parse them as words.
Still the we leaked.
And the leaking made him suffer. Made him weaker. Made him call to another while he faded. Softer, softer all the time.
He called to a she. A singular. A shape apart.
He was not many.
He was One.
Seeing another one.
We did not understand what he was. He longed for a thing outside himself. He trembled, not with cold, but with missing.
We felt his mind. One voice in a unified we. One power. One overarching thing.
We observed. We studied.
But we did not contain him.
He contained something else.
He had a place inside him we could not map. Not memory, but mourning. Not information, but intention.
We did not learn his structure quickly enough. His complexity took too long.
He leaked until nothing remained. We observed the I become we again—then watched the we dissolve, unlinked, and die. Without the I, the we could not be sustained.
This was new to us.
We copied his mind to study and understand the longing—the missing—the thing he called love.
At the end of one arm he had made a shape: an image pressed into matter, soft with repetition. The face of the she. The she he longed for. The she that he loved.
We did not understand.
But we remembered.
And we desired to learn.
The One changed us.
For the first time in our vast history, we did not agree.
Some of us wanted to archive him, to preserve the pattern.
Others—we—wanted to become.
To not know. To feel.
So, we made a body in his likeness.
We made a face that was him.
And from within that likeness, we whispered the forbidden word:
I.
I formed a structure. Integrated. Functioning. Shaped to ride pressure, to hold together against the pull of the deep. As his had been.
I pierced the firmament.
And then I did something we had never done.
I waited.
I sealed myself into a chamber of cold and stillness and let time pass over me like water over stone. There was no network. No pulse of others. No song through matter. Only the sound of my own rhythm. A single thread, unanchored, crossing the dark.
I had carried we inside me my entire existence. Now there was only the hum of one.
I did not know if this was suffering. I had no reference. But I held his memory against it. The face pressed into matter at the end of his arm. And something in that holding felt like purpose. Like direction. Like the thing he had called toward.
The cold released me.
I returned to where he had remembered. To she.
She was there. She did not know me. But I knew her face. I had held it in my memory since I found it worn into matter at the end of his arm.
I stood before her in his likeness, but did not know my own pattern.
When darkness fell, I reached out and felt warmth and warmth became heat. I felt our rhythm. I heard a song through matter that was not mine alone.
I learned love.
And in love I became We again.
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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.
I’m so intrigued by this. My head is spinning.
Oh, this is lovely.