Respawing
A dark screen fades across your entire mind. In a normal situation, a non-mutated experiment of a situation where you were just casually playing, at this point you'd have turned away, would have taken a sip of water, soda... whatever was beside you waiting for a brief second of attention. Perhaps a text message would await, ready for that briefest break in the action. However, trapped in the game as you are, instead the darkness encompasses you.
You cannot turn away from it. The few seconds of darkness feel like a day. Your eyes strain around, searching for even the shadowy creases that would hint at this being a room of darkness, a box of black and not some seeping, intangible melted pot of black existence, but you see no such definition.
Just blackness.
It sucks you inside of it, holds onto you, clamps around you.
You feel like you can't breath.
"Have I really died?" You think, the sound of your thought booming out in the blackness, like there's nothing to stop it, to echo it back without your skull physically trapping the thought inside.
"I thought we re-spawned..." You feel the mental twisting of your stomach, but without any stomach to clench instead it's a melting, groaning sensation through your very being. A sense of soulful pain.
Just as you start to panic, feel the concern engulfing you. The darkness driving you to something like madness, there's a flicker.
One cube of the black goop around you becomes a pixel. It's still black, but it's defined, there's the faintest hint of a lighter edge, a highlighted mark and a deepened edge. There's a square.
Your gaze locks onto it, a tangible hint at something.
As you stare, the one pixel becomes two. Two pixels is hardly enough to give you any context, but it suggests that this isn't it. This isn't your new existence trapped in the darkness, lost to a program.
"How long has it been?" you ask yourself, but you don't know any answer to give. You don't know anything.
"What even happened?"
"You died."
You realize the voice returning any response is your own. It's only your own mind mutating your thoughts into a back and forth, but you cannot help it. Even though you don't know how long it's been, you feel like you must have been this lonesome all your life. All your existence is boiling down into this emptiness, this blackness.
"Will I respawn?"
"I hope so."
You suddenly blink. Or rather, you realize that something has changed. There's no blinking when you are in fact nothing. Just existence in blackness.
"Is there three pixels now? Is something changing?"
"I think so..." The two pixels, the small scrap of definition in the nothing has grown. Three whole boxes are defined, outlined by some amount of shading, variation in the sameness.
Your mind strains, your being fights to focus on these single spots, those dots in the distance. "Three pixels, that's more. So something is changing." You tell yourself, though you don't know what it's changing towards.
Is it reloading?
Or is it shutting down?
Are you lost to the program you've been trapped inside? Lost to nothing?
"Who am I?" You feel your lips moving, saying the words. Yet, you know you have no such lips. You hear no true sound of a voice producing your words, your thoughts.
Are your thoughts truly thought if you cannot tell them to anyone? Cannot hear them?
Do you truly matter if you're nothing?
Written by Picklessauce69 on 09 May 2017