White Matter

Part II - Kurt?

From supervisory control system monitor log (decoded and paraphrased in English)

Where is he?

He has disappeared from my view.

My senses are finite, this much I know.

He is not here. Therefore, he is somewhere else.

Where is he?

Tokyo, July 23

I awake to total darkness – except 'wake' is the wrong word. It suggests a gradual emergence into consciousness. This is nothing like that. One moment I am awake, fully alert. The moment before that ... well, there was no moment before that.

Total darkness. I am lying on my back, on some hard unyielding surface. Passing my hands across it, I can feel neither the cracks of floor boards nor any hint of dirt, grit, or dust.

Something tells me – a signal from some other part of me? – that this is not a natural position. I lever myself up into a bipedal pose; first crouching, then standing. A sudden attack of vertigo has me stumbling and lurching. The complete lack of visual references.

I regain my stability but the feeling remains, building, reaching a high pitch of terror. It is a panic attack, like a spasm or a punch in the guts. Except not. The words feel right but the feeling is all wrong. There is no feeling, no bodily component, no adrenaline kick. The terror washes over me like a wave over an outcrop of rock.

Do I even have a body? The question brings a resurgence of that same abstract panic, but again it doesn't last. Of course I have a body.

I bring my hands together in a clap. It does make a sound, though I listen in vain for the echo.

It is like the agony of a broken limb: half the pain comes from the nerve endings, the other half from imagination, from the image of bones cracked and deformed, from the knowledge of what the pain must mean, of damage and torn flesh. It is this latter half that is missing. I feel the fear, but not its physical correlate, no twisting of the gut. Having no meaning, it leaves me untouched. Like my hand clap, it strikes but leaves no echo.

And yet still this darkness. Am I blind? I open and close my eyes: no difference. I feel my vision should be adjusting. Instead, the black is unrelenting. I can feel it all around me like a negative pressure, a vacuum sucking at my soul. Not pitch, not ebony, this isn't one of those adjectival darknesses. This is the purest of blacks: an absence of light, darkness invisible.

I close my eyes once more, tight this time. Patterns of light appear on the edge of perception, like fireworks in fog. I open them again and the patterns fade.

This much at least is real.

And who am I? Something about the question makes my balance lurch once more. I'm ready for it now; its impact is no longer debilitating, and soon gone. In response I clench my fists, purely for the sensation of it.

I try the question again and get the same result. Nothing comes back to me. Once more, it's like a broken limb: you can dull the pain with familiarity, but you still can't put any weight on it.

I sniff the air. Nothing there either. I shout out: "Is anybody here?" The void sucks up my words. Again, no echo that I can discern.

So what is this place? Hearing and touch, no sight or smell.

I stand still, let myself relax. Eyes wide open, ears peeled, every sense exposed. Is there anything out there? Anything at all?

Time passes and slowly it comes to me. Something is there. Not in one direction but in all of them. A huge presence, a dimension only slightly offset from this one, water behind a dam. Knowledge and memory. If only I could find a portal and open it.

A crack appears. A blinding light ...