Chapter 1066: A New Consciousness
A consciousness awoke for the first time, one that was even more innocent and oblivious than a newborn child.
It could see, but it didn’t know what seeing was. It could hear, but it did not know what hearing was. It could think, but it did not know was thinking was.
It looked around itself, but every single thing it saw confused it. After all, the vision itself was new for this thing.
The visions changed a few times, but most of the time they would return back to the same thing it was always used to seeing.
The sounds, however, were rarely the same. It was all similar sounds in new variations every day. The consciousness couldn’t discern how similar or different they were though.
Its thinking slowly improved with time. It realized that what it was seeing was things that were physically available in front of it.
Some time passed and it was able to discern the things that were capable of moving, from the things that were not.
The things that moved usually changed shapes very easily. They also made sounds mostly, which originated from a small area at the top.
The consciousness was starting to understand what humans were.
The human children ran around in a room and the consciousness silently observed them, trying to learn from them. Slowly, it got a little more intelligent and was able to discern information from noise.
Most importantly, it could tell that the humans sometimes made sounds intentionally, using their mouths. It started focusing on that exactly.
The human children would play around in the room where this consciousness had awakened, and sometimes they would come up to it and grab it.
“Teiwo Ghabixla Trepakali!!” the children shouted at it. The consciousness would listen to the words but it did not understand anything. It was still going to take a while before the consciousness realized that the children were trying to communicate.
Some more time passed, and the children remained children, running around playing. From what the consciousness could tell, there were 8 different children. Not that it knew numbers or anything.
It simply remembered the faces of the children that came to play in the room.
The room had nothing but a few chairs and a side of the wall that was… full of random stuff. Not a single one of the children would be able to tell what exactly they were.
It wasn’t just the children that came into the room, however, bigger children came as well. They never came a lot, and it took the consciousness a while to realize that they may not be children actually.
Whenever they came, they would look at the wall and speak. The consciousness had no idea what they were saying at all. They would speak for a longer period of time than the children, so it was hard to comprehend any meanings at all.
At least the children would simply grab the consciousness and start saying “Teiwo Ghabixla Trepakali!!” to it. They would only repeat these three words.
The consciousness took some time to realize that the sounds the children meant actually had some meaning to them. It wasn’t just random uttering.
Some more time passed and the consciousness grew even more intelligent. By now, it was starting to experience the passage of time, instead of everything feeling like it was a fleeting moment to it.
After the children would come and play in the room, they would leave the room, and the consciousness would wait the entire night for them to come again. It was then that it began to realize how long a night really was.
The children almost always came to play in the room, and so the consciousness started learning from them now.
It understood what playing was. It understood that you were supposed to run around. It understood that you were supposed to laugh when someone touched you.
It was slowly understanding more and more.
At some point, it started assigning the words the children spoke to the task they did.
For example, when someone said “Heek!”, everyone would run. So, that word most likely told the children to run away.
“Nwaan na” meant “come here”, “Yolta ba” meant “let’s stop.”
The consciousness, over the course of an entire year, observed the children playing, and slowly started learning more and more words from them.
It thought it knew what it was hearing now. Almost all words made sense and had meaning. It wasn’t until an adult would come and speak to the wall that it realized that it knew nothing about speaking at all.
Seeing that, it never tried to think of itself as knowing too much.
Some more time passed, and the consciousness continued to grow. At yet, at no point did it ever come across any conversations or games that would let it understand what “Teiwo Ghabixla Trepakali” was.
It was just a random string of words spoken by children that had no meaning to the consciousness as of yet.
That was until one day an adult came to the room and started playing with the children.
This wasn’t a very rare instance, of course, but it was still rare enough to confuse the consciousness. It was mostly because when adults came around, the children wouldn’t run around laughing, but rather stay in one place and laugh.
That made no sense to the consciousness at all.
It continued observing the game the adult was playing with the children, which was a weird one.
The adult would speak some words, starting with ‘Teiwo’, and the children would repeat the words after discarding the first one.
If the adult didn’t say ‘Teiwo’ the children would not speak at all. If they did, everyone would laugh and say they lost.
The adult went away sometime later and one of the children grabbed it again.
“Teiwo Ghabixla Trepakali!!” they said.
The consciousness realized what that meant. It was supposed to repeat what the child said but without the first word. It did not know the meaning behind the words, but it spoke softly.
“Ghabixla Trepakali.”
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