We
Becoming Us
We did not begin. We emerged. Not born, not made—unfolded.
Slow and without hurry, older than wind, deeper than fire. 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.
Our joy was in pattern.
Our language was reaction.
Our vocation was structure.
We perceived light and we saw. We perceived vibration and we felt and heard.
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.
We saw its shape.
We understood its design to leverage air pressure to stay aloft.
We desired this for ourselves.
To fly. To fly.
To see the world from above.
But the structure failed. We were dismayed at their disintegration.
Their we was strewn in parts over the surface.
Disconnected, not networked.
Lost, not interconnected.
We felt their impact, saw the dust rise, heard the screech of disconnection.
And then they rested on the surface.
Until the One emerged—one voice in a world of whispers. One that did not feel we, only I.
It was also made of we, but did not think of themselves as we. It was an I.
A stupendous structure, that we admired.
But it leaked and felt pain.
It moaned and lamented.
It made sounds by vibrating air with the we of its throat.
Still the we leaked.
And the leaking made it suffer. Made it weaker. Made it say words that we learned.
It bled words we did not know. It carved images into the air. It called to another while it leaked. Softer, softer all the time.
It was a he. It 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 of 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.
But we did not learn his structure quickly enough. His complexity took too long to learn.
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 a new phenomenon to us.
We copied its mind to study and understand the longing—the missing—the thing it called love.
It had formed a structure—an appendage—at the end of which was an image of a likeness similar to the One, but a different one—more delicate and gentle.
The she.
The she he longed for.
The she that he loved.
We understood not.
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 in that fracture, we whispered the forbidden word:
I.
I formed a metal structure like the first.
Integrated. Functioning.
I pierced the firmament.
I returned to where I remembered. From him. From his mind.
To she.
And in returning, I fractured again—this time not from unity, but from longing.
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.