Darkness. Utter. Absolute. A silence so profound it wasn't merely an absence of sound, but a presence in itself – velvety, encompassing, and utterly still. The phantom sting of the bullet wound, the memory of cold rain on asphalt, the desperate face of the girl – ghost sensations that had initially clung faded, dissolving into this vast, tranquil nothingness. There was no me, not really; no body to ache, no mind to worry, just a formless awareness adrift in a sea of perfect calm. Time had ceased to exist. Had I floated here for a heartbeat or an eon? The question held no meaning in the void.
Then, a disruption. Infinitesimal at first, like a single mote of dust catching an impossible light in the infinite black. A pinprick, distant yet undeniable. It grew, not with harshness, but with a slow, steady blossoming. It wasn't merely light; it radiated a feeling, a gentle warmth that seeped into my non-corporeal essence. A soft, insistent magnetism began to emanate from it, a subtle current drawing me forward. It felt like... inevitability. Like home. The light expanded, washing over me in waves of serene, golden luminescence, promising release, a final, welcoming dissolution. This was it. The peace I hadn't known I was seeking after the abrupt violence of my end. I surrendered to the pull, drifting willingly into the heart of the burgeoning glow. Closer... closer... warm... safe...
WRONG.
The peace didn't fade; it shattered. The welcoming warmth vanished, instantly replaced by an agonizing, impossible pressure clamping down from every conceivable direction. A physical sensation without a body to feel it – crushing, squeezing, relentless. Panic, ice-cold and razor-sharp, flared through my consciousness. Trapped! Need to move! Can't move! The mental scream echoed uselessly in the internal dark. The beautiful light was gone, snuffed out, leaving only this suffocating compression and a primal, rising terror. I was being forced, ground down, squeezed through a space far too small for anything to pass.
Suddenly, release – but not relief. The pressure vanished, only to be replaced by a violent, system-wide shock. Air, impossibly cold, struck me like a physical blow, stealing warmth I hadn't realized I possessed, raising phantom goosebumps on skin I didn't know I had. Simultaneously, light exploded against my eyelids – not the gentle glow, but a searing, painful brilliance that forced them shut, tears prickling even though I hadn't willed them open.
Sounds crashed in, a cacophony assaulting my awareness – loud, booming, echoing vibrations mixed with sharper, closer noises. Nothing made sense. It was a disorienting wall of noise, scraping against my raw perception. Rough, scratchy texture scraped against skin that felt hypersensitive, alien. My first conscious breath tore through me, a burning gasp that felt like inhaling fire, raw and agonizing.
Instinct screamed to move, to fight, to understand, but my limbs were foreign objects, heavy and unresponsive as waterlogged wood. A desperate flail was the only response, disconnected and useless. A cry ripped itself from my throat – thin, reedy, utterly unfamiliar. It wasn't my voice; it was the helpless wail of something small and powerless.
Where...? The thought splintered before it could form. Pressure-Cold-LIGHT-NOISE-PAIN-BREATH-SCRAPE! My mind, capable moments ago (or was it lifetimes?) of contemplating the void, fractured into a kaleidoscope of raw sensation.
Giant shapes swam into focus, blurry and indistinct, whenever I managed to force my stinging eyelids open for a fraction of a second. Smears of color – beige, brown, a flash of white – loomed close, moving in ways I couldn't track. More loud noises reverberated around me – voices? Maybe? Too loud, too distorted, like listening to a radio submerged underwater. The booming quality suggested distance, but the sharpness felt terrifyingly near.
Something damp and slightly rough wiped across my skin, followed by the feeling of being lifted, handled by enormous, surprisingly gentle pressure points. Then, softness enveloped me, wrapping around, confining my flailing limbs. Swaddled. The intense cold lessened, replaced by a different kind of restriction, less frightening than the crushing pressure, but confining nonetheless.
My mind felt like it was trying to boot up with corrupted software. Died... bullet... rain... girl... help... light... peace... pressure... cold... pain... here? The sequence refused to connect into a coherent narrative. Each attempt at stringing thoughts together dissolved under a fresh wave of physical input – a sudden jolt, a change in pressure, the overwhelming scent of something vaguely medicinal mixed with something else... warm, organic, unfamiliar. Exhaustion, profound and bone-deep, heavier than any fatigue I'd ever known in my forty-two years, constantly threatened to pull me under.
Time lost all structure, dissolving into a confusing, cyclical pattern. Wakefulness was a jarring assault: sharp pangs of hunger twisting deep in my gut; the damp, clammy discomfort spreading across my back; the maddening helplessness of being utterly reliant on the blurry giants who materialized out of the haze. Their noises gradually took on patterns, cadences. Repetitive sounds. Language? One sound, softer than the others, often accompanied the feeling of being lifted gently, a warmer presence looming close. "Kess... Kess..." A name? Was it... mine? It landed strangely, an alien label for this confusing existence.
Sleep was a murky refuge, a different kind of fog where fleeting images sometimes flickered behind my eyelids like faulty projections. The sterile grey of the Sterling Corp Tower lobby. Rain streaking a dark windowpane. The wide, terrified eyes of the girl. The sudden, shocking CRACK of the gun. These flashes were disjointed, lacking context, quickly swallowed by the suffocating blanket of weariness or the insistent, primal demands of this new, tiny body.
My brain simply wouldn't work right. It felt... underdeveloped. Immature. Like trying to run advanced physics simulations on a child's abacus. I knew, on some fundamental level buried deep beneath the sensory overload, that something monumental and impossible had occurred. I knew I needed to understand how I went from a sidewalk in my world to this. But the mental gears wouldn't mesh. The cognitive engine refused to turn over. Thoughts requiring more than one step seemed insurmountable. The overwhelming tide of physical sensation and the crushing need for sleep always dragged me back under before any real analysis could begin.
Where was I? And perhaps more importantly, when? The language wasn't English, nor any European tongue I recognized. Yet, it sometimes sparked a flicker, a faint, deeply buried echo of familiarity, like a song half-remembered from a dream. The brief glimpses I caught of my surroundings reinforced this feeling – walls of plain, light-colored wood, the geometric lines of what looked like sliding shoji screens in the distance, the faint, clean scent of tatami perhaps? The quality of the light filtering through unseen windows seemed softer, more natural than the harsh fluorescence I distantly recalled. It felt... Japanese? Maybe? The effort to hold onto the comparison, to analyze the clues, was too much. It slipped away, lost in the fog.
All I knew for sure was the stark, unavoidable reality of this new state. The crushing helplessness. The bewildering sensory chaos. The constant, draining battle against exhaustion. And beneath it all, a terrifying suspicion began to crystallize, hardening from a vague unease into a chilling certainty: The peaceful darkness, the welcoming light... it hadn't been the end. It had been a transit point. A doorway.
And I, Anon, had somehow, impossibly, stumbled through it, not into oblivion, but into the blinding, bewildering, and utterly unwanted light of a brand new life.