Planet #10616 {part 4}

Suddenly, Lilian couldn’t see anything. The whole world just… logged off.

When Lilian was a kid, she used to close her eyes and “look” at the world through her eyelids. Sometimes she saw nothing. Sometimes she saw white noises or sparks disturbing a pitch-dark background. If she did that under the sun, the world would be painted reddish orange instead because the eyelids were glowing red from the sun.

That. That image was close to what Lilian was “seeing” at this moment, but not even.

Have you ever looked at something transparent? Glass? You think you have seen glass, but you have only seen its imperfections and refractions. Plus, even if you swear that you’ve seen transparent, you only know it is there when it is paired up with something that isn’t. Water only looks blue when it is in the ocean, and the sky only looks blue because of how the sunlight is absorbed and refracted by the atmosphere. One could argue that the outer space, which is nearly a vacuum, is a black canvas with a few white dots. But black is what the human brain registers when there is a lack of light. Black is still black and transparent is transparent.

Transparent. That was what Lilian was seeing at this moment.

It wasn’t colorful. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t black. It was transparent. Lilian had never seen anything like it, nor did she understand what she was seeing. But that was it. Her vision had suddenly become transparent.

If the whole world had become transparent, then most likely —

Lilian looked down.

“Looking down” had become such a meaningless concept all of a sudden. What was “up” and what was “down”? In Lilian’s defense, though, she wasn’t telling herself to look down. She simply wanted to look at herself and her muscle memory interpreted that as directing her neck and eyes towards the ground so that the eyes could catch sight of her feet, although “neck”, “ground” and “feet” had also become non-objects by now.

She “looked” at her “feet”, and of course there was nothing. She had become transparent like the rest of the world.

Instinctively, she tried to move.

But nothing really happened. She felt as if she was stuck in a rock. Not under a rock, but inside of a rock. She tried to free her limbs even though she probably didn’t have any; not that she could see them anyway. Even so, her limbs – which weren’t there – remained stubbornly lodged inside of a rock that also wasn’t there. She quickly fatigued her energy and so she stopped to rest.

As soon as she stopped moving, she quickly realized that she had indeed been moving the entire time. The movements weren’t very meaningful though. It felt more as if she was still trapped in that same rock, except that rock was floating on water. She was floating up and down and left and right, like a lone swimmer crossing the sea in the big waves and currents. Maybe — it felt more like she had become entrapped in a plankton that was just following the ocean current.

Instead of trying to move, now Lilian tried to stabilize herself against the current, only to be greeted by changed senses again. She realized that she had never been frozen solid. Nor was she drifting mindlessly in the current. She had been moving with such heightened energy this entire time. Her body felt as if it was sprinting with top momentum towards all directions at the same time. It was the opposite of being stuck in a rock. Her body wasn’t stuck in a rock. It was just that her body moved to all those new directions and positions at the same time, only to have all those senses cancel out on each other, giving this falsehood that she never moved and was stuck.

But none of those senses could dictate for a sufficient period of time. Whenever Lilian tried to move differently than the way she was moving, she felt like solid. And when she wanted to stay the same way, she burst around like a hot gas. In that sweet mid-point where she neither felt like moving nor not moving, she felt like she was liquid, but that moment also felt extremely unstable and brief.

But if she were to condense all those senses into one word, she’d probably describe it as “jelly”.

She not only saw transparent, she felt like she was in some translucent jelly.

And then she heard a voice.

To call it a voice was also very wrong in itself. First of all, how could one hear someone’s voice when they no longer had ears? She didn’t exactly hear any voices or soundwaves. Perhaps one could refer to such a phenomenon as telepathy? But the big difference was — whether people talked or telepathed, there was always one “speaking” and the other “listening”. Except she did not feel that way. It felt like she was the one who pierced into the mind of this voice and forced the words out of their mouth, as if she had transplanted her mouth to this externality.

“What are you,” the voice asked.