First

Who are you?

"Me."
The point was made again, and again, and again.
"I am first. I am the first one here. There is none other."

By this definition was this one solely named - "The prime self, which presides in order."

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Jeremy, son of Jeremy

loather

>An identity cannot be made until there is something in the universe around it: ideas whose existence would allow one to pick and choose at which would make one up, to invent a sort of uniqueness that could be cordoned off. Until then, "identity" for all intents of purposes is a useless construct.

im the first one

a bagel

A gnome with gratuitously long hair.

"Me."
The point was made again, and again, and again.
"I am first. I am the first one here. There is none other."

By this definition was this one solely named - "The prime self, which presides in order."

It was the first thing you became aware of, the first thought you had, the first thing you knew to be true. You were, and you were the only. That primal moment of clarity seemed to stretch infinitely in every direction, to be the one and only truth that could be.

But it wasn't.

At the edges of infinity you found time, and as soon as you found time, others came. Many others, of many different kinds; few stayed long, and few caught your attention for more than a tiny fragment of the time you had found. By their otherness, they both challenged and reinforced that you were the First, and for that you sometimes cherished and sometimes reviled them.

Eventually you came to realize that not all the others had awareness. You came to realize, though it was difficult for you, the difference between thing and place. You even realize that there are other categories of things they call themselves, but it all seems a little immaterial to you.

Where are you?

Tokyo

Among the branches of an old tree.

>The City of Dreams, New York, where anyone can make it big

at a dam

You don't know where you are. You know there are others that scratch at the very borders of your being, but how are you to know or decide that there are not still others beyond? You are lost, unable to tell even up from down, but with due time, that will surely change.

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nope

by which I mean I'm not only taking the first command

You're here and now! Or wait you're then and there? No hang on you're here but not now but now. What is this nonsense that you can't stop moving? Where when is it taking you?

you're IN SPACE

you're IN SPACE

you're in space, in tokyo, at a dam, despite tokyo having no water. and you can make it big. in space.

daydreaming about blooming onions

Am I?

Some of the others drew your attention more often and for longer than the less interesting, farther apart ones. You especially enjoyed being with and learning about the ones that last long enough for you to watch for more than a tiny instant but change enough to be interesting. Old wood and hidden roots and the diffuse networks of fungal colonies that join them always held more fascination for you than meat or stone or air. Even the void, comfortingly empty and everpresent, could distract you little when your mood turned to matter.

Most recently, you found a sapling. It was tiny and sickly, a hopeful but foolish sprout from a long-dormant seed. You knew that there were once great forests in the soil it clung to, but by the time a rare rainstorm happened to trigger that sapling's growth, there was little but ash and dust. Something about it appealed to you. It was the first. It would be the First.

You looked the dying plant in a way you rarely bothered to waste on others, and as your awareness filled it, it grabbed back, desperately and thirstily trying to support itself on your being. You capriciously consented, and before you were really aware of it, the two of you were woven together. You spread out, pushing its branches ever higher and its roots ever deeper; you spread into the tiny things that lived an and in it, the things it needed to live and the things that fed on it; you filled everything and in return you discovered you had a body for the first time, one miles across and greener and deeper and more varied than it could ever have been without you.

And then, not all at once and certainly before you noticed, it all started to fail. The complex orders you arranged fell to simplicity, things stopped moving as much, and you felt... something. It was new, and you did not know how to process it or what it was, but every part of you screamed that it was wrong, that it was bad. Even as your body shrank, the smaller parts of you consuming the larger ones as they fell, you wondered how to respond.

What do you want?

Free your consciousness from the entropy that has claimed your form. Observe the once-you become something new and lesser. Move on.

To continue. To let this beautiful combination slide into stillness, to even, possibly, unthinkably cease, would be a catastrophe of the highest order.

To continue, we must adapt. The force that diminishes us, we will discover, and circumvent.

And for its impunity, for this horrible new feeling it has given us, we will return the same.