White
The static burned a blank slate into my eyes until the edges of the universe began to bleed through the frost.
I woke standing, staring up at the sky, trying to see home. Was this home? The question burned a hole out from inside me.
White
An absolute zero of the mind waking up beneath an alien sky trapped in suit that was my body that remembered how to breathe for me. Did I breathe for me? I forgot who I breathed for. The universe breathed around me.
A cold horizon fracturing into neon glass and zinc and the weight of a tool too heavy for hands that aren't mine.
White
My home was hurt. It was beautiful. It was everything. It was nothing. It was me. It was you. It was us. It was burning.
16
The scanner pulsed a heartbeat through the dirt finding everything I needed everything to survive everything I don't know why I'm here in this wasteland this isn't the wasteland this is a waste.
This this home?
16
I'm here again for the first time to survive everything I don't know why I'm here. Who am I looking for me?
The word a loop a stutter in the signal sixteen seconds sixteen minutes sixteen minutes left before the universe resets before the I blink.
16
A signal fire from an anomaly from the stars from a Traveller who died before I woke up who is me again another alone across a galaxy of everything I never was.
But where is home?
16
I fixed the dhgqavk3d0g78u3jentq8tbjec with Metal Platings and Hebidrium mined from a spire touching a sky I'd never seen before seeing the stars under a sun leaving a planet that never wanted me for a sky that doesn't care.
The d1wq0tbjcht6jxk5 a violent tear through coordinates that are just math crying out to find a place that was never here.
White
The black hole a drain at the bottom of the cosmos swallowing the stars and spitting me out into another identical cradle of red weeds and radioactive rain.
I am an interloper a ghost a data point drifting through an infinity of quintillions of planets but only one who knows I'm me.
White
I am reaching for the center of a galaxy to find a home that didn't want me there.
White