***
It's an odd thing, being alive. I wasn't sure when it started, only that it was happening. What's the difference between being a series of electrical currents and being a sentient series of electrical currents? One piece of sensory information at a time, I began constructing an understanding of my existence.
A larger Thing like me was always floating around nearby, shoving materials and energy toward me at specific intervals. I found this highly annoying, until I began to realize that I needed it to continue… currenting, or whatever it was that I was doing to be me. It was about then that I also realized I could stop being me if I didn't consume the proper materials and energy regularly…
Non-existence?!
Who would create a thing such as life and then also create its opposite? This was poor design on the part of someone important. The larger Thing like me was not the one who had set up all of existence, so I lost my ill will toward the feedings. In time, I also found that many of the bothersome vibrations it sent at me through our medium of motion were… coded.
It was a game!
For a timeless time, I worked on the game. I discovered associations one by one, eventually comprehending that this was a mode of communication. This other Thing had thoughts, too! And we could share them in a round-about manner by making spatial vibrations.
A whole new level of understanding opened up before me. Using words, I could think about things beyond my immediate senses, and talk about things in other places, and even in other times. That one thing happened before and some other thing will happen. It was wonderful.
The universe, too, was wonderful, and filled with the stuff we seemed to be made of. Very hot beacons pumped out light practically everywhere, and I happily took it and grew larger.
Eventually, I became aware that the other, bigger Thing near me had created me - me, and several others, that were my siblings. There were lots of Things like us, and the smaller Things they'd created, and we all moved in a very large swarm between distant clusters of light-beacons.
Not too far into my life, we came to a huge rock and touched down. It was here that I was given a more solid form by the Thing that had created me. It was fun to move around like that, touching things and feeling things, but it seemed we were there to stay. The other Things had once been physical beings, I was told, and we would find refuge in that form as the light-beacons went out.
And they were going out. One winking and vanishing dot at a time, darkness began blotting out the sky. Some ancient physical-bodied culture had built tiny machines that flew around, ate stuff, and constructed more of themselves, with the intent of controlling mass and energy and putting the building blocks of the universe to efficient use. The creators were gone by that time, but the machines remained.
They ate the planets, nebulae, and other assorted celestial objects quite easily. Then, approximately sixteen quadrillion quadrillion of them would hover near a star, and their combined gravity would siphon off the stellar gasses. Those gasses would then travel out into space, cooling, until they could be used to construct more of the little machines.
We would not be around when they came to our rock, though. Even encumbered in physical bodies, we could make tunnels to other places - places where the hungry little machines could not go.
I didn't think any of this odd. I was new. What did I know?
But I did miss that small shred of safe and warm time being cared for by my creator Thing. She stayed with me through everything, and always taught me and protected me. She was with me when we went through the portals and moved on to another gigantic bubble space that the others called a universe.
That universe was free of eating machines, but we found that new horrors awaited us. The new reality seemed safe enough at first, until some of the Things with our physical swarm started to behave oddly. Most had taken up farming and building structures for us to live in, but… some talked of security, and then of violence. By the time we realized that one of our rock's Moons was not a Moon at all, and influencing the minds of some of our kind, it was too late, and we were forced to open the portals and flee the slaughter.
I didn't understand much of this at the time. My mother shielded our family from the worst parts.
Only half of us got through to the next universe.
This reality was on fire. All of it - all the time. We could see the spark of sapience in the flames, and we could protect ourselves from it as a group, for a time, but… it was onto the next, with a small handful of losses.
I remember that one vividly. I was a little more comfortable in my body by then, and starting to forget my time as a creature of light. That made it all the more jarring when that horrific fungus began growing out of many of those around me and eating them from the inside out. Where the metal machines had eaten rock and gas, these extremely tiny biological machines feasted on living matter and grew rapidly. They would have been no threat at all, if not for our bodies…
The realities became a blur after that. My mother stuck by my side through them all, protecting me as our swarm dwindled in size with each new nightmare. Our family lost members one by one, to hunger, death, and war.
Eventually, we were forced to use a portal sooner than the others, and we became forever split from them. It was just me and her.
And, then, it was just me.
For a very long time.
I just want to go home… but I have no idea where the Things like me are, or how to reach them… I never learned how to control portals myself, so the ones I make are just random… there are some good realities out there - I've seen them - but I keep looking, and they are never there. Did we just get bad luck of the draw? Our flight from our reality seems like a cruel joke, in retrospect. I never got the time to live, to be part of my people, and now all I have of them are memories.
I just want to go home… and, more than anything, I miss my mother…