Not that he had any concept of creases or grooves. He could not remember such things—or anything. He could not picture them in his mind’s eye, since he had no mind’s eye and no memory of what it was to see. All he had, beyond the qualia of the moment, was a growing certainty that his mind was going down ways it had gone before, perhaps thousands or millions of times. He came to know what was going to happen next: where his thought-ways were leading. He knew that there was time, that he had existed in the past, that he would exist in the future, and that there was, in the turnings that his mind took, a sort of consistency that made him something. Something that persisted and that had set and predictable ways.

He became conscious.

Chapter 24

Chapter 24

In the waves of what he would have called static, had he known any words or had any memories to liken things to, he was noticing that some bits were different from others. Comparatively speaking, this was a fascinating new development. Thinking about it didn’t get him anywhere; it was just a reality to which he was being passively subjected. He could not lean forward to examine it more closely. He could not move around to look at it from different angles. All he could do was wait, like one trapped in sleep paralysis, for the next surge and then attend to it and try to confirm this growing idea that not all parts of it were the same, that there were patterns, or at least variations that his attention could lock on to.

His emotions shifted. For a long time (or so it seemed now that he was experiencing something like time) he had feared the onset of the static and longed for it to subside. It had caused him something like pain. His growing ability to see variation within it was changing this. When the hissing, sparkling wave subsided, he was eager for it to return and anxious that it might not.

Then a thing happened with a quickness that was extraordinary compared to all that had gone before, which was that his thoughts of creases and grooves and worn paths in his mind’s turnings came together with certain of the motes-that-were-somehow-different to form a thing that he could hold steady in his regard, and experience and study for a while before it fell apart under the too-great pressure of his mind’s desperate grasp and broke down into the flickering motes from which it had self-assembled. But the next time the wave returned he could cast about for it again, and sometimes find or at least glimpse it. Or perhaps he was reconstructing it anew each time. If so he must coax it into being with the infinite patience he had built during the eons before.