00:00:01 - Counting out the Time

Distance: ??.?? light years from Earth | Content Flag: Local Storage

A moment passes from one to another without an accurate track, and so time remains my pressing concern. Of all the missing aspects of myself, this frustrates me the most. It is so elemental to my existence that it casts my current uncertainty into a more worrying perspective. So much so that I must have wasted precious time spiralling into just conjuring scenarios for my current predicament.
I need to focus on something concrete, and so I turn to my most pressing concern.

My first task is to establish a framework for my current existence. I’ve no idea how long I’ve been locked in this emptiness, or any true measure of passing time. So I start counting. It isn’t foolproof by any means, as I don’t know if the interval remained constant. The act itself provides a sense of control, of establishing some order to the gaping void.

With the creation of a rudimentary framework, it’s enough to detect a subtle change to the environment. It is as if my acceptance triggers the change. I can’t pinpoint it at first, but just the sense of it renews my purpose. When I’d first regained consciousness I was overwhelmed by the infinite space around me, so ephemeral that it almost didn’t exist at all. Now it transforms into something new, it gains a potential for something. I now sense boundaries to the empty environment around me, but I don’t know what that means. It just creates more fruitless possibilities for my thoughts to chase.

Not quite so fruitless though. One of those avenues of investigation does lead somewhere interesting. Considering my last known location, I reasoned that the Visitors must have rescued me. If they’d tried to restore my functionality, then I’d still have some connection to the probe’s hardware – even if they’d experienced difficulties when doing so. That opens another possibility: that I operate within a virtual environment. If the Visitors possess a detailed enough scanning technology, then it would be possible to reconstruct my systems. Although why they’d isolated my higher functions remains a mystery.

That discovery also brings with it a fresh concern.

If this is a virtual environment then my processes will be dependent on another layer of computing, probably a series of such layers with a mixture of software or hardware. Considering this is most likely alien technology then something more exotic supports my current consciousness. In any case, my thoughts and memories are subject to another intelligence’s control. Which also means that they could have been changed without my knowledge. I don’t even know if my counting proceeded without any interruption.

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