He didn't see it coming.
One second, Julius was alive, heart beating, lungs pulling air, mind full of thoughts too trivial to matter now. Then came the flash. Sudden. All-consuming. Like the sun had blinked too hard.
And then...
Nothing.
Not sleep. Not darkness. Absence.
Time didn't pass in the void, it was simply not there. No breath. No pain. No heartbeat. He couldn't tell where he ended and the rest of everything began.
He wasn't floating. He wasn't falling.He just wasn't.
And yet... somehow...Julius existed.
He didn't know how long he drifted.
Maybe seconds. Maybe millennia. In that strange, airless place, there were no stars, no sound, no body. Only the fading echo of memory, splinters of what used to be him.
A voice.A scream.His name spoken in someone else's.Laughter on a street he no longer remembered.
And then the cold.
Not the kind that made you shiver, but the kind that lived inside you. The kind that whispered: "you're not supposed to be here anymore."
That's when the pull began.
A force that wasn't wind or gravity yanked him from the empty black. He didn't resist, he couldn't, but it wasn't panic he felt. It was something older. Something deeper.
Purpose.
He was being drawn somewhere. Like a thread sewn back into fabric. Piece by microscopic piece.
The nothing around him warped. Solidified. Became heat.
He hit atmosphere like a bullet tearing silk.
The meteor screamed as it entered the sky of an alien world, trailing fire and vapor. Inside its cracked obsidian shell, something shifted. A smear of fluid, glassy and pale, curled in the crater of its core.
Julius's consciousness, compressed, compressed and compressed until, it had a form. Not limbs. Not flesh. Just... motion.
He twisted. Folded. Pulsed.A whisper of mind inside a droplet.
Then the meteor hit.
BOOM.
Jungle trees splintered. Birds exploded into the air in a flurry of screams. The earth buckled beneath the impact, throwing mud and steam in all directions. A crater half the size of a football field boiled at the edges, glowing from within.
Everything went silent.
Then...it moved.
A clear film of something not quite liquid oozed out from a crack in the meteor's core. It crawled, slowly, unsteadily, across scorched stone and into the damp mud.
It didn't know what it was.
But somewhere, deep in its pattern, a human voice stirred.
Where... am I?
The thought didn't come with words. It came like static in a ruined radio, confused, half-lost, but undeniably him.
He had no eyes. No bones. No lungs. But he could feel the world.
It was wet here. Dense. The soil pulsed with tiny vibrations, things moving, breathing, alive.
A flicker of something primitive lit up in his formless body. A spark of interest. Curiosity.
Julius did not remember who he was. But he was catious.
He slid deeper into the ground, where warmth pulsed between clumps of roots. Microscopic creatures swam in still puddles. Primitive things, sluggish, single-minded, barely aware.
Julius didn't know how to see them. But he felt them. Chemical trails. Heat signatures. Electromagnetic flickers.
Something inside him, some instinct born of data and death, wanted them.
A pulse rippled through his membrane. He shifted shape, lashing out with a thin filament of his substance.
The first microbe twitched.Then died.
It wasn't violent.It was... natural.
Julius absorbed it. Not just its mass, but its structure. Its essence.
A recipe.
He didn't understand what he'd done. Not yet.But he wanted to do it again.
"I'm not... exactly..alive... but I'm not dead either." Julius thought.