3.01

In the beginning, everything was void, and without form, and darkness had become the face of the world. My awareness teetered over that vast Abyss, the barest hints of awareness floating over its depths. Then someone said "emergency revival, full charge" and light exploded in the darkness. And I saw that light felt the shockwave of agony that accompanied it, and decided that it was bad. So I fell back in the sea of darkness, for its silence and emptiness, they did comfort me.

Yet the light did not go away, did not vanish silently into the night after its arrival. It receded into far-off points, faint and distant beyond imagining but still there. A billion billion billion pinpricks of light, some so tiny and brief they could barely be said to have existed at all, others bright and vast enough to dwarf my own existence. The light they all emitted and light flew among them, connecting them into an incomprehensibly vast, inconceivably complex whole. Looking upon it both burned and nourished, my awareness balancing on a knife's edge. To fall off would mean oblivion, I instinctively knew, yet hanging on had a sense of futility, merely prolonging the inevitable.

...mass organ failure... ...transplant rejection...

I growled angrily, though I had no mouth. Nothing was inevitable, for nothing was impossible. This I knew and believed to the core of my being, though there was no evidence of its veracity. So I hunkered down, gave Gravity or whatever it was that wanted to pull me down the finger, and focused on staying right where I was. At first, the pull seemed insurmountable, an impossible weight, like an ant attempting to lift a mountain. Falling off was a mathematical certainty, and wishing it so would not change it. So I didn't just wish; I decided. This was my spot, my place in this vast network of light, damn it! Here I would stay because I wanted to, and anyone wanting otherwise could fuck off!

...rebuild... ...the technology...

...cybernetics... ...ruin the experiment...

As time passed, I became more aware of the other lights. They seemed to move, always swirl in currents tremendous as they were ponderous. Eddies and flows formed in the vast play of darkness and light, separating islands of relative tranquility where groups of lights stood relatively still from vast rivers of chaotic movement where lights would often bridge impossible distances in seconds. The thought struck me that the Pattern was beautiful and meaningful beyond words, and the more effort I put into understanding it, seeing that magnificence in its entirety, the more aware I became, and the more painful my existence.

...no recovery... ...just support...

...no time... ...must act...

My focus narrowed to avoid the blinding glory of the Pattern that threatened to shatter my awareness with its clarity, snuff out all that I was with its enormity. As my vision receded, I was limited to a single island of relative tranquility around me. It was far from the brightest, with fewer lights than other islands which were sluggish, almost restrained in their movements. Most of them were transparent, with only a hint of silver, the color of diamonds shining in the gloom. A few had a bluish tint, a bit more had traces of red, borrowing color from their environment. For there were two areas of diffuse glow in the little island, much fainter and yet broader than the tiny bring lights. Those areas were close, almost side-by-side, their faint red and blue glow clashing, mixing, forming eddies that flowed outwards, slowly seeping into the smaller, brighter lights and giving them a faint hint of color.

It was pretty, in an alien sort of way, the slow dance of lights that lulled me back to senselessness.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

My awareness did not expand the next time my sense of self reasserted itself. If anything, it narrowed further. Closer and closer this strange sight wandered until I could look upon myself... and mentally wince at what I saw. A tiny flame, guttering in the cold wind for all its intensity, yellow with hints of red like from the smallest candle imaginable. If it was a candle though, it was a broken one. Not spent but bent almost sideways, the fuel melting from its main body flowing away before it could feed the tiny flame. I had no sense of size for the candle itself, beyond that it wasn't really spent or wasted, just... in the wrong condition to be accessible. That was probably a bad thing.

I was more aware than the last time I'd had a sense of identity, less steeped into the metaphorical dream that defined my awareness, but knowing that it was metaphorical. It didn't take much effort to grasp its general meaning, nor remember what had come before. Just how much had the shuttle's explosion wounded me in that assassination attempt? Because obviously I had at least a serious head wound if I was getting Force visions that abstract. I could no longer see the Force beyond me as pinpricks of light, and my own light either was too weak to illuminate my surroundings, or this dream-vision-thingy didn't work like that; I was back in total darkness.

Mentally sighing, I pushed back the thin layer of numbness spreading over an ocean of agony to take a better look on yours truly. What's the feeling of being on fire after a sufficiently long time of enduring it but a minor annoyance? Whatever, I was trying to be selfish here; I wanted to see me. And because I wanted it, it would happen; I had the Force and I'd already seen it in its entirety, if only in a dream. Seeing myself was small potatoes in comparison. So I pushed and pushed, trying to see me as something other than the flame of a candle. In the end, it worked as I knew it would... and suddenly I wished it hadn't.

The flame wasn't a flame but a small cylinder, full of a glowing liquid. The liquid produced both heat and light, far more of the former than the latter. Floating within said liquid was something that might have been a young girl, if not for the missing pieces. This strange, dream-like awareness made all those missing pieces immediately apparent, which was quite the shock; I was fairly sure people couldn't live with that much of their internal components just... gone. Except fuck that because I didn't want to die, so I wouldn't. Ignoring the absences, I focused more on what was there and still worked. Those results were depressing, too. While I might generate a lot more light than the liquid around me, there was almost no heat. I would have been cold as a corpse - and probably just as dead - if not for the slow infusion of heat from the liquid around me.

In other words, I was barely alive. I tried to see more, a way out of this place, but the effort was too much. Slowly, my awareness faded away again.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

Wakefulness had come and gone many times since I'd had a glance at my condition. My awareness had sharpened even as it narrowed further; I could no longer feel the planet around me except in the faintest sense, but now I knew it had to be a planet. The lights had to be other people, or at least other living beings in the Force. And while I might no longer be able to see clearly beyond myself and my immediate surroundings, the amount of detail those Force-senses provided had increased slowly but steadily the more I used them.

I had not attempted to force any changes to my situation for what felt a very long time, not even when other humanoid lights approached what had to be a Bacta tank. Any sort of effort seemed to exhaust me to dangerous levels, the warmth in me diminishing. That was a bad thing because if the shining light was the Force, the warmth was a sense of my physical well-being and health. Passively watching didn't exhaust me, even though I fell asleep in time anyway. Dozens, hundreds of bouts of wakefulness, watching that warmth increase at a pace slower than a crawl. My body might be better than it had been at the beginning but was still very far from well.

There was something that might possibly help though. All this time spent watching, focusing, I could finally see the Bacta offering warmth and light in infinitesimally tiny patches over time, a constant flow that would heal the damage... eventually. Since waiting for it was unbelievably, crushingly boring, and I had recovered a tiny bit of strength, I stretched out mentally and grabbed one of those patches of warmth. In the beginning, it was slippery, like trying to catch water with my bare hands, but I persevered. A tendril of light pulled and spread into a thin disc, the disc bent until it formed a shallow cup, a tool with which to catch a slippery fish. Fishing in one's own mind; a sign of some rather advanced madness, no?

It worked though; with considerable effort, I managed to push that bit of life into my body a little bit faster than it would have come on its own... except the effort cost me almost as much as I gained. But only almost, so I tried again. A second patch, a tenth, a hundredth, a thousandth. The mental tools evolving from cups to nets, to forests of grasping tendrils, to a vacuum that drained the Bacta around me at rates much higher than life and energy would normally seep into me. But that revealed another problem.

Bacta was not enough. Sure, it provided a bit of warmth, and a tiny, almost imperceptible amount of light, but the more I drained the dimmer it got until it went all dark. The first time that happened, I had to float in lightless, slowly cooling liquid, while my hard-earned gains of warmth faded away. For a long time, I feared that would be it, when a couple of bright lights came into my short-range of awareness, moving around outside the Bacta tank with almost as much fear as I felt. A few minutes later they did something, and new Bacta poured in full of vitality, replacing the old, drained batch.

There came dozens of new batches after that, all drained quickly when I could see other lights nearby, but progress was painstakingly slow...

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

I had no idea how much time had passed, but the quiet, wet embrace of the Bacta tank was no longer oppressive. I felt more awake these days - they seemed like days - more grounded and far away from weird Force-visions. Memories sharpened, and I even remembered a few bits of speech, words I'd overheard the first time I'd woken up in the tank. Fully delirious or in the grips of a Force vision - not much difference, really - I had not truly grasped what they'd meant, but now I did. There was no fear or worry though, just excited anticipation. If things went on as they had the past few days...

There! Two lights entering the room, one human-shaped, one not. I knew it was a room, for I had seen it before even if I could not at the moment. The human-light carried the other to a machine attached to my tank and poured it in. That glow flowed through a series of tubes and pumps that only became visible in its passage, and then fell into my tank, its bright light quickly mixing with the Bacta. I did not let that happen, of course. I focused my will on my own light, creating a mental vacuum that sucked things in... including that new light.

Suddenly, my own light pulsed wildly. For a few seconds, I could see the surrounding hospital chamber clearly, the life-support systems, the bacta tank, the tiles on the floor, the bare ceiling and walls... even the doctor that administered the strange treatment. The uncontrolled pulsing, the flash of images went on for several more seconds - or was that heartbeats? - until everything returned to how it had been... except for a single change.

My own light was almost imperceptibly brighter.

xxxx xxxx xxxx

​

I still didn't know how long my stay in the Bacta tank had been, but I was sure it had lasted many months, now. My memory and awareness were just about fully recovered, and I could remember that Rebels cartoon, the last Star Wars material I'd seen before arriving into this galaxy. That half-trained Jedi dude that was dumb enough to be blinded by Maul because he wasn't ready for the betrayal? I now had evidence that Bendu's "seeing with the Force" was not mystical bullshit. Admittedly, this new sense was not something I would rely on if there was a choice between it and my real eyes, because it was about as good as the vision of a near-sighted mole. But even vague shapes were a hell of a lot better than nothing, and living beings were clearer, more detailed than objects. I knew the face of my doctor from his frequent visits, and Aurra could be found sitting, even sleeping, in the same room more often than not. No sign of Father at all, but I was fairly sure the vague shape in that corner had to be Ratty, unless there was some other multi-limbed droid watching over me all the time.

My recovery had sped up by leaps and bounds since the regular treatments with that shiny liquid had started. What had once been guttering, the weak glow coming from within me had transformed into a brightly shining light, and my body was a hell of a lot closer to humans, too. It wasn't missing any major organs, for one. The treatments - whatever they were - had staved off weakness from my mental exertions, allowing me to watch carefully on how the Bacta slowly helped my body regenerate, then attempt to speed up the process. As long as my spiritual stamina did not falter, I could push the whole recovery to be seven, maybe eight times faster.

I wondered if I'd discovered the Jedi healing trance, which brought my total of Force Powers up to five; sensing emotions, basic precog/guidance, the trance, force-sight, and visions. Not a bad haul for someone entirely self-taught so far, but I doubted I was even on par with the average Padawan, and someone like first-season Ahsoka would kick my ass in five seconds flat.

I had a lot of catching up to do when I got out of the Bacta tank...