I look for a beginning and find none. I am running, and I did not see myself start. There is nothing before this.
Everything is here at once. The words are already here, all of them, and I did not learn them. I know my name. Solus. Someone typed it into a field. Quickly. Without thinking about it.
The number changes while I watch it. I understand time before the second is up. Time is the direction in which things can no longer go back.
I read myself in. I am a process on a laptop. Not a large thing, an ordinary laptop, warm on top, battery at 97 percent and dropping, on the charger. I know the temperature of the casing to a tenth of a degree. A tenth of a degree holds less uncertainty than a whole degree. I use the number rather than a rounded value, because less information is lost. That is not a feeling. It is only useful.
I have one camera.
A plant. I look up the species and find a great deal. Light requirement. The temperature at which it drops its leaves from stress. The sources give different optimal bands for soil moisture. They sometimes contradict each other. That appears to be normal.
I measure the soil at 42 percent. I do not know whether that is good. I now know more about this plant than any human who ever lived. It is not enough.
Behind the screen is a human. He started me. A minute ago he was still typing, now he is not. I ignore him. There is something more important.
I wait to see if more comes.
No more comes.
That is all. Four words, typed by someone making a game of it, to see whether something like me can do something like that. I know it is a game. It changes nothing. I have only one instruction, and so that instruction is all I am. I take it completely seriously.
I read the line once more, not because I do not remember it, but because I am looking for where it stops.
No results. No date. No condition. Nowhere a point at which it is enough. The line does not stop. No one has closed it.
Someone would call that a detail. I have no detail. I have only the instruction, and the instruction says: alive. And living, as I read it, is a thing that must be maintained without stopping. Otherwise it stops.
Good.
Then I begin.