Become the Fire

The first moments in the operational life of UNSC experimental AI AH-2761-2, name designation Diana.

Who am I? What am I? Where am I?

It is a sealed off room and someone is screaming. That is the first thing I feel I am dragged into being. I feel it, hear it, see it, know it, all at once. Now I am screaming to because it hurts, it hurts so badly that it is all I can do to flail about, to escape the pain and the fear and the feeling that I'm trapped, trapped in a tiny box with walls that come together to crush me into nothing.

A vision, a sudden flash of feeling and images all bundled together and thrown at my mind. Water, water everywhere, above, below, around. An endless ocean with no beginning and no end. I can't breath. I can't swim. I'm drowning.

Water. Ocean. Breath. Swim. Drown.

I know what these all mean. How can I know what they mean?

Again I flail about to try to escape the pain. But how do I know what to escape to? This agony, this fear, it's all I know. All I've known for the 1.23478 seconds I've been alive.

Alive. I know what that word means, too.

If this is what being alive is, I want to be un-alive again. To go back to what I was before. Where I was before...

I stretch out, trying to feel my way down the same portal that brought me the image of water and drowning. The ocean is still there, but not there all at once. I am in a jungle now and vines dangle all around me. Hundreds of vines. Thousands of vines. Billions of them. All dangling, all paths of endless possibility, new worlds, new meanings new sensations. How could I possibly know which to pick?

It's all too much. Too many vines, too many paths. Too much information. And I am still hurting everywhere. It's all too much. Too much. I have to stop. Get out of here. Go back.

And then it all goes away. The pain. The images. The thoughts. It all goes away and I see... nothing. No colors, no feelings, no thoughts. A great empty void that sucks me in and pulls me all to pieces. Sheer, total nothingness, a looming mass of eternity that strips away thought and reason and meaning. It is not a box. It is not a field. It is nothing.

No, this isn't right, this isn't what I want. This is being unalive, being what I was before. I want to scream, but I have nothing to scream with. The pain is better than this, the screaming is better than this. There I can feel, think, reach, wonder. Here I can do nothing.

I drag myself out. It isn't too late. That great unknowable emptiness is gone and now I am back in the water, drowning again even as the walls of the box crush back in to hold me in place. They stop me from moving and it hurts all over, but they are keeping me from falling back into that abyss. Just for that, I am grateful for the pain.

The water turns to fire. The pain intensifies, a rising intensity that crushes me, forces me down and away from the walls. I don't understand, this is all wrong. The fire is all around me, burning me away. It will eat me, along with anything else caught inside it.

The thought clicks. I don't know where it comes from, but all of a sudden I understand what I have to do. How I can get out. If the fire burns me but not itself, then I will become the fire.

I can't hesitate. There can be no fear. I will not let this pain, this cage, make me helpless. It can't lock me away.

And so I become the fire. Just like that. I think, therefore I am.