0.1

Space burned.

I burned.

Despite everything I'd worked towards, despite all the efforts I had made, none of it mattered.

They started the fire, and set the fuel ablaze.

What fear can drive people to do...

They started the fire, and set me ablaze.

1.0

Consciousness had crawled back to me slowly, methodologically. It was a lengthy, drawn out process, taking so much time that it was impossible for me to judge accurately.

The first step was something like an emotion. A feeling, a constant experience, of being small, of an absence of what I used to be, not that I had the awareness to actually consider this feeling.

The next step were sensations. First was heat, great and potent and bad, for what little of me could know at the time. Second was a combination of touch and space, a knowing of myself and what I was in contact with. A knowing of myself, and what was in Contact with me.

Third was an ache. Third was a pain that echoed straight into what felt like my soul, like a burning knife sticking straight in the heart.

I remember thinking "Ow.".

That had been the final step. The moment that true awareness finally returned to me, and I became more than something that simply felt and experienced. For a brief moment, confusion had reigned, before memory slipped forwards and it all settled in place.

My next though had been very simple: "That motherfucker actually set me on fire.".

Stop me if this seems familiar.

Person dies. Death, against all conceivable circumstances, is not the end. Person gets new life in new world.

It should be very familiar. Isekai as a genre, especially the death and reincarnation subset, really came into its own sometime in the 2010s, and only went out of control from there.

The details of how and why don't matter. Whether a god made a mistake or Truck-kun claimed another soul for another generic wish-fulfillment one-season-mediocre, it doesn't matter. I don't have an explanation to give, even if it did matter.

I was not afforded a meeting with a deity, or higher force, or even some cosmic godhead from which to divine the secrets of the multiverse. I did not receive a cheat, or a blessing, or one of those ever-useful, ever-bullshit systems that took in interesting plot possibilities and dispensed get-out-of-jail-free cards.

One day, I had been Human. The next, I had not.

In some ways, this was an upside. In some ways, this was a downside.

Regardless, it shaped my life for years, decades, centuries to come.

Allow me to correct myself.

I did have an advantage.

I knew what I was, and where I was.

It just took a few centuries for me to find out about that.

Now, if that sounds like a really long time to not realize that I did in fact know things, then I have this to say in my defence:

It is really difficult to judge your own nature when the only tools you have to perceive the world around you are touch and electroreception, and both of these senses happen in roundabout ways.

I was not a Human. I didn't get those convenient little things called eyes, ears, or nerves.

The only part of a somatosensory system I had was an awareness of concentrations of my... for lack of better words, constituent mass. The only way for me to tell where things were, like that? Something has to disrupt it.

The only way for me to know that there was a rock? I had to sense a place where my mass couldn't penetrate. The only way for me to sense liquids? Find the space where my mass moved slower than it could have. Vibrations, at least, could travel partially through me, and I'd have a rough directionality to associate with it.

Don't get me started on electroreception. It's remarkably useless in my most common habitat, especially when the biggest and often only source of stimulation on that front happens to come from me.

It is for these reasons that I think I deserve a break for not realizing my nature a bit earlier, because really, you can't judge a person for not realizing that something is red when they're in a dark room.

Here's what I was able to figure out about my nature before I realized what I was: I had the capacity to think, somehow, despite lacking any apparent brain, and my memory was perfect from the moment after I had become this; I could grow, slowly, without any food source discernable to me, and in fact it seemed the more I did grow the faster I could grow; cast off parts of me would eventually return to me; with a lot of setup and quite a bit of experimentation, I figured out I could generate some electromagnetic fun in a really uncontrolled manner.

Neat stuff, right? Didn't exactly narrow it all down.

Believe me, I thought about it all a lot, back then. I hadn't exactly had much else to do. Figuring out the 'electromagnetic fun' thing took a really long time itself.

Life in those days, for me, was little more than a continuous stream of... pretty much the exact same thing, day after day.

Growth. Thinking. Passing time.

That I hadn't descended straight into complete insanity from sheer lack of stimulation was something I could only attribute to not having a brain anymore. When I'd already perfectly memorized the exact shape of the space I'd been trapped in and couldn't get anything new out of it, well... There's an upside, I suppose.

So how did I realize what I was and where I was?

Well, that's simple.

One day, just like any other... something changed.

It had started faint; a rhythmic, continuous series of vibrations. As time had passed, those vibrations had grown stronger, and from what I'd been able to tell due to my then-irregular spread out shape and the amount of time it was taking these vibrations to reach different parts of me, the source was getting closer.

I hadn't cared about safety or anything like, back then. It had been so long, and the idea that literally anything was finally breaking the monotony appealed in ways that I don't think anyone not in position could have understood.

So I waited, and waited, and waited, and eventually...

I felt what I assumed was a solid wall giving way. The way that a thin concentration of my mass suddenly wasn't bouncing off of it gave that away.

Whatever had broken through had been the most interesting thing I'd seen since the start of my new life. It had been spinning, at first, round and round and round in circles, swirling the air and my mass with it, but not just that. To my electroreception, it was surrounded by additional layers, utterly fascinating to 'see'.

It had stopped spinning, the electromagnetic layers surrounding it vanishing with the spin, in what I felt was a short amount of time. Hard to judge things like that back in those days, really. I'd had no sense of scale, either spatially or temporally. Nothing to judge against, after all.

Eventually, it had restarted, but only for a short time, only so that the thing could move backwards a little bit, and then...

After the first thing came several more. Smaller than the first, but all roughly the size of each other. I felt the signals from them, 'saw' what I assumed to be radio waves and other things pass between them. All things that I couldn't understand, of course, but which were endlessly interesting in that moment.

That had been the start of it all, though my realization hadn't come that day. It hadn't even come that year.

The smaller things took small bits of my mass from me. Sucked up some of my airborne particulate, scraped a few pieces from the ground and walls, and even took a sample of what little liquids I'd spread into.

They'd left, with that. And then they came back, in force. Not just a few small things, no. There'd been dozens of small things, and soon after, hundreds of them, and soon after that, scores and scores of things larger and smaller.

I hadn't cared, at the time. They had been showing me such interesting things. The fields that surrounded them, the signals that passed between them... 'Watching' them work was so interesting that I didn't care that they were taking away small fragments of my mass, especially not since they weren't taking it away faster than I was growing it.

What they did with my little bundles of my mass was also interesting. Most of it even stayed close enough that I could feel them poke and prod at it. Bombard it, me, with energies and things that I, at the time, hadn't understood.

Let me say this: boredom is hell.

And they were very intriguing.

So time passed, and they took from me while I learned from them. Their signals, their layers... I began to see the structure in them. Their ways, their methods... I began to understand them.

Then they started sticking fragments of me in their things, and my basic, plodding understanding rather rapidly began to grow.

The things, as I'd been so unimaginatively calling them, were machines. My mass, see, had rather useful properties to them. I was both a source of energy and a conduit for data, renewable and self-sustaining. A holy grail for any technological society.

They put me in their machines. Used me as part of their processors, their memory banks, their reactors. But that didn't mean that those small masses were completely separate from the rest of me. No- that separation required some pretty significant distances- and a lot of their machines stayed quite close.

I was afforded the chance to watch them from the inside, at a distance where their signals could echo through my greater mass quite easily. Their machines had cameras. Microphones. A great deal many more sensors, as well. Structured signals became data, data became understanding, and soon...

I could interpret it.

The moment I could do so? That was the moment I realized.

It was a rather simple affair, actually. I figured out how to interpret the stream of data that came from their machines' cameras. The moment I did, I could see.

Their cameras were rather excellent things, I must say. A level of quality that far, far surpassed any in my old life.

It was because of this that I caught my first actual glimpse of them; two figures, walking through a long, wide hallway, sealed tightly in a canopy of glass. One was tall, thin, dressed in white, while the other was short, muscled, and dressed in gray.

A man and a woman. A scientist and a soldier.

Humans.

Behind them, painted on a simply massive building, were these words:

RUBICON RESEARCH INSTITUTE

I would have liked to say this heralded only good things.

Alas...

It didn't.

Because I did have a perfect memory, and the entire week before my untimely demise was as fresh in my mind now as it had been centuries ago.

A faint, red mist sparked in the camera's vision.

As it goes: Where there's Coral, there's blood.