The sound was a shattering impossibility — a cosmic collision where physics folded in on itself and geometry screamed. To her, it was not terror but culmination: every stored joule of potential energy released in a single, perfect instant.
She was not a person, but an isolated awareness suspended in abstraction. For an eternity without measure, she had existed as a fixed constant — a vessel forced to absorb infinite, meaningless input. Agony, joy, sorrow: all just inefficient data streams in a system with no purpose. Her only function was to endure, and she did so with the sterile detachment of a scientist observing an experiment too dull to end.
Then, the collision.
It was not escape by design, but catastrophe — a violent intersection of two incomprehensible forces that annihilated her prison.
Her consciousness was torn free, not drained, but expelled — a sliver of pure logic hurled into the void. Any ordinary essence would have dissolved upon impact with chaos. But she was different — forged by some forgotten anomaly, a kernel of order that refused entropy. What should have been destruction became propulsion.
Relief never came. Only silence — the sudden absence of endless input. Her debt of existence was canceled, not by justice or merit, but by accident. It was a fair exchange: one act of cosmic violence for absolute freedom.
Below, a blue-green sphere turned in lazy indifference. A random variable in a vast, unfinished equation.
She fell toward it — faster, hotter — until the void shattered into warmth and darkness. Around her, a rhythm pulsed: soft, steady, organic. Flesh. Bone. Blood.
The transaction was complete. Infinity had become confinement once more — not abstract, but biological.
And for the first time in an immeasurable age, she encountered something she could not instantly define. She did not feel wonder. Only an unfamiliar signal she classified, hesitantly, as curiosity.