That’s the story he would have told himself had his thinking, understanding, storytelling brain been up and running, and if he’d had the capacity to remember things like vacuum cleaners, the ionosphere, and migraines. But in fact, all of those systems were down. This was the state he was in: just barely enough mental functioning to have an experience of these terrible, low-grade qualia, but no capacity whatever to step back and think about them.

He had been thus for no time at all, or for an infinite amount of time. There was, in his state, no difference between those. Ten minutes, ten years, ten centuries: all of those were equally wrong, since they all presupposed some way of telling time. The only thing that could give time meaning was change, and nothing was changing. These qualia were all internal to him. There was nothing outside of him whose changes he could observe and mark. Just the visual and auditory static that came and went with such randomness that he could read no pattern in it.

He came to dread its coming and to feel relief when it subsided.

The third, or the seventy-fifth, or the millionth time it came and went, he had a vague awareness that it had happened before. Not that he had a memory of it—memory could get no purchase on noise—but that he now recognized in his own being a pattern of response: the dread as he grew certain it was coming; the terror, while it was at its peak, that it might never stop; some other part of him trying to push back against that terror by predicting it would go away; growing certainty that it was abating; relief that it had subsided combined with dread of its next onset. Those feelings followed one after the next in a patterned way.

He came to know the pattern.

The fact that he could recognize it suggested that it must have happened before, even though he lacked the power to recall specific instances of it. For all he knew it was just the same thing over and over again, and he was caught in a cycle, an infinite loop.

Eons passed.

Infinite loop. Cycle. Those were ideas, not qualia or feelings. Where did ideas come from, and how could he have them? For that matter, how could he have ideas about ideas?

Those were not thoughts that came to him all at once, at a particular moment that he could define or remember. Rather they were built up over time as his thought-ways began to follow creases, grooves, canyons. Deepening them, reinforcing them with each trip along the same path.