The New Bugs

This is the first chapter in a work. I’m not sure if it will be a novel or a novella in the end. I have a few chapters written. I plan to edit them to the best of my ability and post them once a week or so. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy this story and decide to check back in as it progresses. Let me know what you think.

CHAPTER ONE

Birds in the Sky

He laid on his back in a crease on the field’s face. If one were to have stood at the edge of the field, one would not have seen him down there, just low enough to hide from their eyes.

The crease, or divot, was barren toward the bottom of it. Yet, along the lip, the grass stood a hand’s height — that kind of grass, thick and matted, almost a carpet.

And he lay on his back at the bottom of it.

His eyes opened to the world around him, and his mind blankly processed. Slowly, like through syrup, he divined the incoming photons and converted them to the electrical signals that went to the back of his head for processing. Of course, he had no idea he was doing any of this, much less what was, in fact, processed there near the back of his skull.

Nonetheless, his eyes were razors, and they sliced the world into billions of parts, reassembled them, and interpreted them, and he had no idea about any of it. The problem lay in the understanding — for there wasn’t much of that. He had a vague sense of himself as a being of some sort, a near-hairless biped, it seemed. Or maybe he sensed himself in a state of being. He wasn’t exactly sure what the difference was either.

He tried to remember his name and then stopped to wonder about the word “name” and the voiceless motivation within that caused him to seek it.

He didn’t move. It didn’t seem like an appropriate time for that.

Every thought seemed shapeless. The words were clear in his mind, like old code. However, he experienced these strange loops: First, an observation led to a word. Then, he remembered the word on some level. Then, he called into question the whole idea, followed by musings on the origins of such things as words. Observation. Understanding. Scrutiny.

He plucked them from an immeasurable place, searching with an intensity that caused him to lose focus on the world around him. So, he released the inward glare, and it slid away from his vision, revealing the ice-blue sky.

“Ice.” He thought the word inside his skull.

He believed the descriptor accurate even though he had no recollection of “ice” or its particular appearance. Yet again, he saw the word, clear and crisp inside the bottomless void. It floated. Just behind it, its meaning wriggled in darkness like a bag filled with a million bugs.

“Ice.” He said it, and the sound was dull and flat, much less impactful than he’d expected. He’d conjured the muscular and pneumatic operations required to get the word into the air. The experience left him feeling miniscule in the scheme of things. However, it was only his first word, and he experienced an indistinct notion that he would get better at it.

Blackbirds meandered in the long distance from his eyes. White and steel-colored tufts of vapor moved along above them, much more distant. Those things were clouds. (He again plucked the word from the void.) They moved at a clip, indicating some determination, shifting in shape as they slid behind the birds on top of the ice-blue glass.

He ruminated on the nature of their propulsion. Just then, the grass at the divot’s lip rustled, and the wind poured into the space with him. It surrounded him, causing his skin to dimple with its cold, running hand. So, now he knew cold, and it was not altogether unpleasant. He began to understand “Ice” and how it was made.

And it was all like a memory that hadn’t happened.

The birds circled oblong and looping, each with its purpose. They were connected but distinct, just as the clouds above them. No algorithm could have predetermined their locations or predicted their direction. More importantly, there was no need to do so.

These birds are like me, he thought. They have nothing except what is in front of them. They will go where they will. Every force, every thought, and every motivation, directed by an unseen hand, as nameless as their arc is unpredictable. What is created appears random yet specific — designed, as it were.

The birds swam in the ice-blue sky, and the clouds peeled past, forming and reforming as they saw fit. The wind moved the grass, and he felt the dirt beneath him. He felt it, grainy and cold, pressing against what he’d come to accept as his skin.

And it was then he investigated himself and found himself to be naked in the cold dirt. His witless and pale coating was mottled and smudged with Earth.

He lifted his head, just as he said aloud, “He lifted his head.”

He investigated his body, lanky with long, cordlike muscles. A thick patch of dark brown hair hedged up around his penis, a penis that didn’t much care for the cold. The sight of it made him laugh. And the sound of his laughter was more authoritative than his words before had been. It was filled with air and voice. The cords in his throat hummed with it. He felt good about it.

And then he felt cold again.

“The birds are just like me,” he said to the wind.

They’d no place to go. Although he couldn’t see what they above could. Their actions would remain mysterious as long as his view consisted only of the sky and the dirt and the grass and the shriveled penis.

So, he sat up.

The field spread out, rolling away from him in all directions. His divot was shallow, and now his shoulders and head projected from it, and he could see a ways off. He saw the trees along its edges. He saw their brown and grey stalks, which he knew to be broad and solid. He saw the plumes of green, yellow, and red flowering out and above them and, at once, knew the cold was intrinsic to the colors — some grand clock was at play, some coordinated action in the works. He understood everything around him was not everything there was.

His head up now, the wind played a rougher game. Down across his brow, jet-black tassels whipped into his eyes, stinging his cheeks as the bastard wind drove at him from behind. This was his hair, flung in all directions, commiserating with the swaying and bending of the grass, involuntary on the flat open plain in the hands of the stinging gust.

He scooped it back away from his eyes and held it. Then he thought, “I can move now.”

With the other of his hands, for he possessed two of the things, he reached into the thickness of the grass and pulled himself up onto his knees. The carpet provided good purchase, and the next thing he knew, he was standing in the slicing wind.

He took a moment to commune with the birds again, a fleeting fellowship. The thoughts of oneness were less meaningful in the full force of the gale, which seemed bitterly present and ever approaching.

His legs moved. The balance centers within his ears worked perfectly, and he decided to enjoy motion — the weight of his body and the grass underfoot. All the mechanisms attached to him, the hinges and pulleys, as of yet indeterminate, functioned as if oiled and new.

His toes grabbed the surface and propelled him forward, away from the wind’s attention and the naked field.

He made his way quickly and, by the time he reached the trees, no longer cared about the birds —

— or the sky, or the origin of words.