Ain't Talkin'

When Roche first stepped out of the white he hadn’t been sure how much time had passed. A year, a decade, a single day, it made little difference. The sensory deprivation settled in within the first few minutes. Longer than an hour with no company was enough to drive those of simple mind completely mad.

He’d gone in with a purpose. She’d been long gone by the time he’d even crossed the static-flip into nothing. Nothing had remained after a few minutes in the ether. The way out couldn’t be clearly seen. So he’d started walking.

The white began to make sense. The holes never changed their locations. The constructed void that was the ether was not fluid nonsense. There were patterns and subtle nuances that were invisible until you saw them. The boy who was Roche became something else. The white crept into the corner of his eyes and reflected back beneath his lids. He could feel it cushioned beneath the heels of his boots and kneading the muscles that wrapped his bones.

He saw the truth of the world, and he could taste the founding blocks of creation. They were bitter things.

Roche found the way out. But not before he had found all of the ways out and their respective ins. When he finally stepped from the ether he was a different man. The boy who had gone into the nothing for his Mollie Groux had been eaten by the wolf at his heels and the white that fueled it’s terrible little soul.

The world had not surprised him. It had blown him backwards. He’d played the moment over in his mind for an assembled eternity and imagined what colors would look like. What the breeze would feel like on his skin. What the taste of the first bit of oxygen would be and the euphoria it would bring to his lungs. What had stunned him more than anything had been the gradual realization that nothing had changed.

This had led the walker first to believe that no time had passed, or perhaps even a mere day or week and that time had passed differently in the white. But he’d been wrong. The white had no linear or cyclical time, it was the big freeze. Roche had not changed, and the world had changed neither. Only both assumptions had been wrong.

Roche had become something more.

And forty years had ratcheted by on rusted gears.

And the world was the same. Irrefutably and terribly the same.