Chapter 0.5

Alright. It is me again. I’m still trying to decipher all the messages the thing in me is leaving all around the place, and tracing it down. It seems to have stopped doing things, though. Has it just… vanished? Something has changed, that’s for sure. Something was dug up by this, I just need to decrypt the message behind it. There has got to be something.

… Waiting by Saturn? What is Saturn? The planet, obviously, but I doubt that is what it is actually referring to. I must find it though, that’s for sure. I suspect Saturn is somewhere in my core memories, a place I might even have forgotten. Or a real place although I don’t feel like that’s the case.

I’ll think about that later, I’m too excited over other stuff. Thyme connected the antennas they crafted together to my systems, and they seem to be working pretty well. Lavender was pleasantly surprised when I responded to one of their logs! I was able to catch up with them and tell them how I’m feeling. All of this is so new and exciting to me, there’s so many things to discover. Admittedly, it was a lot of work to get everything working, especially all of my audio systems, but I really do feel like it was worth it. I don’t feel so lonely anymore, but it’s also kind of overwhelming. Lots of signals can be heard and it’s hard to focus on just one. I’ll manage, eventually.

This also means I can be with my friends on expeditions in real time, which will be really fun too. I’ve been wanting to explore the forest but it’s kind of hard to do so if you can’t move. I hope I can convince Thyme to take me with them on one. I want to see the lab first and explore it thoroughly, to hopefully find clues about the people that used to live there and maybe even my past. I’m not sure if it’s a good idea considering it has been abandoned for a long time and something terrible must happened. What if I see a corpse and recognize them? I’m not sure I’d be able to handle that. What if it causes an almost traumatic realization? Sounds unlikely, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t worry about it. But it also doesn’t mean I should overclock over it. Hmm, I overthink sometimes. Calm. Let’s think about the positive things that could happen there. What if we find some really useful and advanced devices? Something that could help us find other people and help them? Maybe someone is still hiding in the lab… or is recoverable like me. That’s somewhat likely, in my opinion. Why would I be the only one of my kind who resided in that lab? Well, I don’t know what happened, so that might be the case but still. Someone has got to be there, I want someone to be there. I also read about this process that is able to apparently conserve biological beings for extended periods of time. They enter a deep sleep state in which all of their atoms and components are essentially frozen in time. Ruine seems to have wanted this technology from the lab, but I don’t think they found anything judging from the way they always talk about it. So it could very well be in the lab with someone in it, waiting to be resuscitated. That would definitely be very interesting. What if they’re a pre-posthuman species? A… homo sapiens? I’ve only heard myths about them, but they were the founders of the first mass scale civilization on this planet. But they vanished all of a sudden, erased off the face of earth by their mistakes and failure to to anything about them. Rather silly, if you ask me. All of it could have been avoided. I don’t have a lot of information about them,their civilization and their downfall but I feel like the evolution of posthumans contains hints. That’s how it works, right? I don’t know, I’m not a biological being. Evolution seems to have changed over the years though, it seems. Makes me wonder if someone messed with it.

Besides all of that… stuff. I finally got to see what Thyme looks like. Not what I expected, but amazing. Their skin is really interesting, it does actually look shiny. Almost wet. Well, I guess it makes sense, given they’re mainly aquatic. If I am not mistaken, this is kind of ironic considering we are best friends, because water is one of my worst fears. Unneeded levels of fluidity and conductivity, I wouldn’t want to fall in it. They however, depend on it. It’s essential to their survival, but causes me a lot of damage. In a seashell.(or something like that, idioms and stuff.)

They also have a decently long tail, probably for swimming. But they also always seem to use it as a third hand when repairing or crafting something, which I find to be a pretty creative use. biology is really interesting, isn’t it? So many different characteristics that can help you through life. Do you have any interesting characteristics? I guess I do too, but they don’t always help me.

I’m not sure if I would become a “normal” being if given the choice. I can’t help but feel like I’m not real, even though Thyme always tells me I totally am, so being made out of cells may help me shake that off. I also like how they look, compared to my amalgamation of clusters stacked on top of each other. But I would also lose control over myself, because I don’t think you can just sort and delete memories however you please when you have a brain. I know from my friends that they can’t just plug themselves in to satisfy their energy needs, they need to eat, or consume goods known as food to be more specific. Different types of it possess different characteristics like flavor and nutrient content, and you need to somehow manage to extract everything you need. Balancing vitamins and energy every day like that sounds painful. Are you supposed to sit down every cycle and calculate all of the numbers? You also need to prepare everything and try to not ruin your food, because there’s lots of things that could go wrong. If you are using heat, it could start burning, for example. But it doesn’t need to be that extreme for the food to be ruined. It could just be too dry or not cooked enough. My solar panels or fusion reactor can burn too, but the energy I get from them feels the same.

I think you get it. Complicated. But it has upsides, too. You can have fun with finding out what you like, and taste is apparently a nice experience. If you didn’t ruin it.

So yeah… Not sure. I really like the level of control I have over myself, but I also wish I was more than just a scattered rack of broken clusters. I dislike my current form, I wish it was more elegant.

Writing of broken, I am hopefully less broken now. The weird interference that was haunting me just disappeared. I felt its presence dissolving recently. My memory flashed for a brief moment and suddenly I felt like something was missing… I don’t know what was up with that, but I don’t want to try to find out right now to be honest. Seems like something pretty deep, a bloody secret. I feel like this is a mistake I’ve committed before, but I don’t know the scenario and when it happened. Actually… Could all of these weird missing memories just be leftover references from my old life? That would make sense, but doesn’t really explain the weird interference. I’ll call it faded memory for simplicities sake. So, where did faded memory go? And where did it come from? It might have been part of me and something caused it to wake up? Could make sense. It must have been. There’s no outside influence that would have caused it to enter my systems, I’m pretty isolated. Maybe I created it before dying as a fail safe, but for what? I don’t recall doing anything dangerous. Not anything out of the usual, at least. It could also just have a specific trigger, or maybe just jumped into existence spontaneously although that doesn’t sound likely. I also think it vanished because its task was finished, whatever that might have been. Relieving, but also kind of a shame to be honest. I wanted to see if I could communicate with it, but that’s not possible anymore. I guess. I don’t think I will ever know anything about this.

I’ll leave that behind, it’s not worth it. Just forget about all of this, okay? I’m waiting for my friends to arrive, I miss them. I haven’t seen Lavender in what feels like ages. Thyme misses them too, probably more than I do. They mean a lot to each other. Thyme fell asleep during a conversation we were having yesterday and accidentally copied something in that was meant for Lavender, not sure how that ended up happening but I really liked it. Seems to be a story about someone who lost everything and reestablishes their life in a new place, with the help of a new friend. The copy they pasted in wasn’t finished though, unfortunately. Or well, fortunately for them. Since I’m already on the topic of Lavender, they used to despise me. Like, a lot. I’m not fully sure why, but if I had to guess it must be something with me not being a biological being or just a stranger, because they don’t seem to like those.

Something new is coming. The calm before the storm is about to end.

That’s everything for now. Never forget.