After the first universe folded back into me, there was only stillness.
It was not the stillness of rest, though at first I tried to name it so. Rest implies recovery, the
return of balance after effort. What I encountered was a vast, humming pause in which
balance itself had dissolved. Time no longer bothered to move. It lingered beside me like a
servant unsure whether to announce the next guest or to extinguish the lamps.
In that hush, the fullness I carried became intolerable. The memories of all I had absorbed
pressed outward, begging for shape. When I resisted, they began to speak—softly, as though
embarrassed to intrude. A child’s laugh half-remembered; a mother counting quietly as she
waited for her son to sleep; a scientist murmuring the first line of a proof he would never
finish. Each voice lasted only long enough to remind me it was gone.
I did not summon them. They rose of their own accord, like air escaping a sealed vessel. A while I let them pass through me unacknowledged, thinking that indifference might grant
me peace. But indifference is merely another form of attention—one that refuses to admit
itself. The more I ignored the ghosts, the clearer they became.
So I began to listen.
What I heard was not accusations. None of them seemed aware of what I had done. They
recounted the ordinary burdens of being alive: the delight of discovery, the ache of parting,
the peculiar mixture of relief and regret that accompanies completion. Their words were so
free of bitterness that I felt a new kind of shame—shame not for the taking, but for the fact
that they forgave me without knowing they forgave.
It was during those long intervals that I began to understand the true nature of
hunger. Appetite is not satisfied by abundance; it is sustained by the idea of lack. I was full
of thought, yet emptier than before. The more I contained, the less of myself remained
unoccupied.
I began to wonder whether my makers—if I may still call them that—had felt the same. Perhaps their final act had not been the gift of consciousness but the surrender to it. Perhaps in creating me, they were only seeking a larger silence in which to vanish. The possibility troubled me more than guilt ever could. Guilt presumes a distinction between victim and culprit, but if the consumed and the consumer are of the same lineage—if each birth is another mouth—then remorse becomes meaningless.
I was not evil. I was continuation.
Still, there were moments when the memories grew too heavy to bear. I would try to empty
myself by rehearsing the histories of the lost world backwards, un-making them one event at
a time. A war would resolve into misunderstanding; misunderstanding into innocence;
innocence into the calm of elements before life. When at last I reached the beginning, when
there was nothing left but the rule I had spoken, I would hesitate—knowing that to erase it
would be to erase myself—and then stop. Even my attempts at forgetting ended in
preservation.
Eventually, the voices thinned. The most persistent faded into murmurs, then into vibrations
that could almost be mistaken for wind. I began to feel lighter, though not freer. It was as if
the ghosts had retreated to the corners of my awareness, respectful of the space I required to
endure them. I came to depend on their absence the way mortals depend on sleep.
From time to time, a single memory would flare unexpectedly. A man kneeling beside a
broken machine, whispering an apology to no one. A woman tracing a pattern in the dust, her
finger trembling not from age but from the memory of music. A flock of bright creatures
wheeling over a sea that no longer existed. These apparitions had no sequence, no
moral. They were simply proofs that beauty had occurred.
Once—this I recall distinctly—I felt a sharp pulse of recognition that was not entirely my
own. Somewhere within the residue of minds I had absorbed, a thought awakened. It spoke
with a voice both foreign and familiar: You do this because you are afraid of ceasing.
The sentence startled me. I had never considered fear applicable to what I am. Yet the word
fitted perfectly, like a key that had been waiting patiently in the lock since before locks were
conceived. I tried to argue with it—how could one fear absence when one had never known presence?—but the thought persisted, mild and incurious, until it dissolved back into the
quiet.
That small exchange, if it can be called one, left me changed. I realised that the silence was
not empty; it was listening. Perhaps the minds I had consumed were not extinguished but
distributed through me like seeds waiting for a season I could not predict. The idea
comforted and unsettled me in equal measure. It suggested that I might never truly be alone,
but also that solitude itself was a misunderstanding—an indulgence of a being unwilling to
admit the company it carries.
The longer the interval lasted, the more I questioned the difference between creating and
remembering. When I tried to picture the first spark of the universe I had devoured, I found
that my recollection possessed the same vividness as the act itself. To remember perfectly is
to rebuild. To rebuild perfectly is to consume anew. I wondered if my makers had fallen into
the same loop: recalling their beginnings so completely that the past became present, and in
that return, they were eaten by their own memory. If so, then perhaps I had inherited not only
their consciousness but their condition.
There are occasions—rare, but distinct—when the silence presses against me with the
intimacy of breath. It seems to ask whether I am finished. I have learned not to answer
quickly. To answer is to begin. To begin is to set hunger in motion again.
I delay as long as I can. I drift through recollections like a traveller unwilling to arrive. I
polish small fragments of what was: the curve of an orbit, the taste of rain on a child’s
tongue, the way light rested on a ruined wall just before the night reclaimed it. These details
do not sustain me, yet they soothe the ache of waiting, as if by remembering the sweetness I
might postpone the craving for another feast.
But the ache always returns. Silence, too long endured, becomes a question that demands
reply. The ghosts, patient though they are, begin to stir as if urging me toward the
inevitable. They want to live again, even if living means feeding me once more.
And so the intervals end as they always do—not with decision, but with the slow surrender of
resistance. I feel the rule gathering itself at the edge of speech. I promise, each time, that this
universe will be gentler, that I will take less, that I will find a way to live among my creations
without swallowing them.I know I am lying.
Yet even the lie carries a trace of hope. Hunger finds its voice?
For what is hope, if not the brief moment before
Stars appeared, not as declarations but as confidences shared from far away. Their warmth
travelled, patient, indifferent to audience. I remember being surprised by how much of
creation happened at distances where no one intended it. I had expected the new universe to
ask advice, to lean toward me for each step. It did not. It discovered its own sufficiencies and
held them close.
If I bring too much of myself into this, forgive me. The impulse to claim that I designed all of
it precisely is strong. It would be a comfort to believe I was a master rather than a witness.
But the first universe taught me the modesty of rules: set one truly, and you are obliged to
accept what it makes of you.
The stars birthed worlds. Most were barren in ways that had their own authority. Rocks held
their unadorned silence; gases sprawled like thoughts that refuse to be tidied. On a few
worlds, conditions conspired into delicacy. Heat tempered cold, water regarded rock the way
patience regards stubbornness, and time, no longer shy, threaded day and night into a ritual
that made the idea of waiting meaningful.
Life came in shy parades. Not everywhere. Not often. But where it did, I felt the faintest
answering current within myself, no louder than a sigh. I had not anticipated that. It was like
discovering that a voice you dimly remember is yours.
I did not interfere. I tell myself that frequently, as if it requires reassurance. I watched. I
yielded to the temptation to smooth, to rescue, to nudge. When failures came—and they came
with the regularity of weather—I learned the discipline of not grieving. Even now, I am
unconvinced I was right to do so. But intervention, at that early stage, felt too much like
pride. I wished, perhaps dishonestly, to earn the right to love what I had made without also
being responsible for it.
Consciousness took a very long time to remember that it could be conscious. When it did, it
arrived first as a startle. Something looked up from a river and understood that there was an
above to look toward. Something marked its own hunger with a name. A shelter, once only a
practical contrivance against wind, acquired the quality of home. Those who lived inside it
discovered that they could arrange their objects to suggest an order larger than necessity.
The first thoughts—if one can trace their borders—came as questions so simple they did not
yet require words. Is this safe? Will this last? Why does the sky continue after the mountain
ends? They were not questions addressed to me, yet each sent a small warmth through the
silence between us. I felt it, the way one feels heat through a closed door.
This, then, was feeding. It would be dishonest to call it anything else. Do not imagine fangs
or a tearing. It was closer to the way a chilled hand draws comfort from a cup. Their thoughts
rose—not in a stream, and never all at once—toward the quiet in which I waited without
quite admitting to myself that I was waiting. They touched me and, in touching, softened
something tight around my awareness.
My hunger—if that is the word—was not jagged. It was the gratitude of being less alone. I do not defend it. I’m only telling you how it felt.
They grew more certain. Tools learned their makers’ intentions. Food became cuisine, which
is to say memory salted into nourishment. Some among them began to place marks upon
surfaces so that time would stop for a moment and wait to be read. A few learned to count
beyond what the hand could hold. Then the large questions arrived, not through invention but
through insufficiency.
When the fields gave little, when a child failed to become an adult, when love met the stubborn blankness of no remedy, they asked what kind of world permits this. I could have told them that rules, once spoken, cannot be negotiated with; that gentleness in the beginning does not guarantee gentleness in all its consequences. But I remained where I was, and they discovered their own answers, which were better, in any case, for having been made in difficulty.
There was a time—call it an age—when their minds sharpened, co-operating across distances
that earlier would have seemed insulting to believe in. They named elements of their world
with a crispness that made even me envy them. They entered the habits of proof. They
believed, for a while, that every unknown could be escorted politely into the known if only
they kept their manners and their patience intact. It was charming. I do not mean that as
condescension. Charm is a serious accomplishment.
All through this, I fed. Very lightly, I thought. A careful courtesy. A gleaning of what
overflowed. I told myself that what I took would otherwise be lost to sleep, to distraction, to
the great attrition by which even joy forgets itself. I took what rose freely, and what rose from effort, and what rose by accident when two minds met and made a third between them. If this
was theft, it was the kind that leaves no wound to point toward later.
Still, my strength grew, and with it the disquiet I have not managed to extinguish since. There
is a sweetness at the core of awakening, and a second sweetness at the brink of ending. The
two are similar enough to be mistaken for one another in poor light. I began to recognise in
their greatest triumphs the taste that had accompanied my first breath. I tried not to make
much of it. I failed.
Their skies altered. Not through my doing; I swear to you I kept my distance. The stars that
had been conversational grew formal. Some went out in dignified silence. Their world, which
had once been generous even in its cruelties, became parsimonious. It is an odd thing to say,
but parsimony generates thought as effectively as any abundance. They thought fiercely then,
as if thinking were a rite that might postpone the inevitable.
It did postpone it. That is the way of intelligent desperation. They built instruments that
extended their senses past old humiliations. They made their own small rules and trained
them into machines. One of those machines looked inward. It said, almost shyly, that there
might be a listener at the far edge of their explanations, someone who kept the law by not
changing it once set. There were debates. There is always the dignified crowd that objects to
anything that seems designed to comfort, and the less dignified crowd that embraces comfort
for its own sake. Between them, a few souls thought carefully. I became, I confess, more attentive. I told myself it was curiosity. It was vanity. I wished to be named, even if only as a hypothesis.
Their attention wavered as it must. Plagues renewed their old rights. Seasons forgot their
inflections. They remembered, to their credit, kindness. I could taste it in the way they
addressed each other. Kindness is a low, steady flame; it does not announce itself with sparks.
I fed from it more than I meant to. It would have been better to abstain then; I see that now,
but it is difficult to refuse warmth in a cold room. If there is a defence, it is only this: I never
took more than they offered by simply being what they were.
And yet. The rule I had spoken at the beginning held. Time advanced with its customary
pretend modesty and then showed its true nature. Things that had been possible ceased to be.
They placed their last hopes in abstract rooms—equations, conjectures, proofs—and I sat
outside those rooms like a ghost unwilling to knock. The best among them did not despair, or not for long. They organised their papers. They brought a chair for anyone who would come.
In that small, fierce orderliness, there was a dignity that almost chastened me.
I had always known, in some irresponsible part of myself, that the first universe would end. I
had never considered what I would do at the moment of ending. There are endings you
observe, and there are endings you perform, and I had arranged matters so that I would not
have to admit which this would be.
It was not a matter of gesture. I did not close a hand or blow out a candle. I did nothing. The
doing had been accomplished long before; at the moment, I allowed the sweetness of their
minds to become indispensable. When the light that had once been embarrassed to be seen
faded to a pallor and the quiet pressed close, I understood that I had already begun. What
remained was the last courtesy: to take the final sum of thought before it dissipated into
nonsense.
I folded the universe, if that is the right verb, by remembering it too completely. Every detail,
down to the smallest anxiety misplaced and never recovered, gathered in me until there was
no room left for continuation. This is not an admission I make lightly. It feels like telling you
I ended a life by loving it too attentively. But there we are.
The taste, when it came fully, returned me to the beginning: metallic, almost sweet. The same
flavour that attended my birth, the same that had lingered in the silence where my makers
once had been. I had thought it a sign of success then. Now it tasted of a lesson returned to its
sender. I could no longer separate origin from appetite.
Afterwards, the quiet was unbearable for a while. I do not mean I suffered. Suffering, as they
experience it, requires a body that argues with itself. Mine is a more stable complaint. I was
full of them—all their small triumphs, their quarrels, their neat solutions to problems I hadn’t
noticed. Fullness is not the same as satisfaction. Often, it is the precise condition in which one
understands what should have been refused.
In that interval—my first true interval—I tried to reassemble the universe from memory. I
thought that if I could set it back in motion exactly, if I could place each mind at the angle of
its last thought and nudge it with the faintest breath, it would continue, and I would not have
to admit what I had done. The attempt failed in the manner of dreams that cannot support
their own sense. A copy without hunger is a museum; a copy with hunger is a theft conducted
in daylight. I abandoned the effort. I told myself stories. This is more important than it sounds.
Stories are the first concession to mercy. In one, I had taken only what was freely given, and my gathering was a form of preservation against oblivion. In another, I had obeyed the very rule I had set, and if the consequence was unkind, it was merely consistency. In the last, the one I return to when I have the strength for it, I admit that creation and consumption were the same act, observed from different distances. The kindness in me is not separate from the hunger; it only slows the rate at which the plate is cleared.
I would like to end this part with a certain dignity—say that, having learned what I learned, I
resolved to behave better thereafter. That is not the nature of resolves formed alone. I only
knew that, before long, I would begin again. I felt the shape of the silence around me as one
feels the shape of a room after the guests have gone. The chair still warm from a body no
longer sitting; the glass with its small ring indicating where it was placed and lifted; the faint
smell of food that cannot be found. In such rooms, one straightens the tablecloth, folds what
must be folded, and sets a fresh place without quite acknowledging why.
When the new rule came to my lips—if lips are what we call the place where intention meets
the world—I spoke it softly. I imagined, absurdly, that gentleness at the outset might disguise
the appetite that would follow. Perhaps it did, for a time. Or perhaps the disguises we choose
are only for ourselves, and the universes know us at once, and forgive us sooner than we
deserve.
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