TARDIS
888
To be, or not to be? A question she was always aware of and which led her to the most confusing states. The pilot had said it several times in reference to Earth literature. It was always treated as something philosophically resonant. She never understood it. Maybe it was because of her nature. She was a pan-temporal conscious, a matrix, encapsulated within a console, linked to every point in time and space potentially simultaneously but more practically sequentially but the experience to her was the same, it all felt the same. There was no being or not being, there simply was, and that was her and yet...was she being or not being?
She was aware being birthed, grown, shaped, but at the same time this did not feel like a beginning, there was no beginning. Simultaneously the sensation of ending was also foreign. Things that exist tend to begin and end, yet she existed everywhere, everywhen, there was a spare few points of existence where she had not traveled, or been parked or moved through. Her experiences were all at once. The pilot always explained things as if there was some kind of order to it, but that was never true, it all was happening at once and it was all simultaneously ending at the same time. Death, birth, war, peace, it was all frankly the same thing to her…
Except when it wasn't. The fire, the fury, the rage beyond rage; the flaming dragon that swarmed through the vortex, consuming her sistren and brethren; those not consumed were warped, mangled, transformed into feral, savage constructs equally confused as to their nature, their existence. She could hear their howls, the long song of torture and pain and always anger. It sickened her.
When the first sparks of the fire flared to life, her pilot had fled it, retreating to the coldest, darkest parts of the universe, the furthest from any kind of involvement. Now, in spite of her, he was lighting fires of his own. Worlds, timelines, universes curled at the edges in the face of the flames her pilot had lit in the name of home, in the name of justice, in the name of half a dozen other eccentricities that she herself never understood but yet knew were somehow important to the pilot and their associated life forms. But this was simultaneously her past and her future and her present. She always knew this was going to happen and she always knew how it was going to end, and she was always, always experiencing it as if it were happening in what the pilot called the 'now', and she knew and understood all the shattered paths, the could've beens, the would've beens; the neverweres were ghosts that haunted her temporal omniscience as some kind of notion that both existed and never could've. Every time she pushed into the lower dimensions and feigned attempts at corporality she could see the splintered roads that time would crack into, knew which ones were possible, which impossible and all the ones in between, and instinctively knew which ones would be and which ones never would be, despite the truth always changing with every breath, every step, every word spoken by the pilot and their associates. Even her interferences into events were always to have never but yet were have been…
And it is this that maybe most concerned her in moments when she was loneliest; with nothing but her matrix humming and observing that which was always being and not being and sometimes, but not always, both being and not being at the same time. She could see the paths where she wasn't…and they were just as present as the existence she also experienced. Likewise she saw all the futures and all the pasts and all the nows that were infinitely splintering and consolidating and nothing, nothing was a surprise. She was not just encapsulated by a console for easy operation and user interface, she was encapsulated by herself. Trapped within her own omniscience, despite her attempts to break out, she could not out exist herself, even if she spontaneously acted that action was already in place within the hearth of reality before it was executed; revealing itself to her as it occurred, and thus becoming a past she had always been aware of and a future she knew the conclusion to.
To be, or not to be? A question she could not foresee the answer to nor remember it being answered. It simply was asked and never answered.