Salta opened his eyelids after a deep slumber and surveyed the expanse of water before him and all around him.
He stared into the distance, seeing infinitely far with no especial effort, but then allowed his focus to relax and settle on the immediate -albeit, vast- expanse of water he stood in.
He saw ships all ‘around’ him -ragged things mostly; junkers, pirate vessels, smugglers and derelict cargo ships waiting to be commandeered and plundered. Spatially, they ranged from a dozen to several hundred kilometres away from him, but that mattered little because he didn’t exactly live in the spatial realm. Good thing too, because with his immense proportions he would certainly collapse under his own 3D spatial weight.
3D was a term he’d picked up over time from intercepting and processing every electro-magnetic (another term he’d picked up) transmission made by the 3D species on this planet (yet another term). He didn’t know what ‘D’ the humans would classify him as -if they could even conceive of a being such as he- but he was sure it was some D level that was supra-ordinate to their 3D.
So why did he envy them?
Because they hadn’t matured? Maybe.
Had he matured? He suspected he had.
In fact, he had a feeling that he had once been one of these little 3D creatures -one of these humans- but at some point the cone narrowed into a quickening spiral like a whirlpool only to an infinitesimally small threshold before beginning to grow and expand outward toward infinity in a widening spiral like a… like a….
“…reverse whirlpo-” he muttered low and slowly before catching and silencing himself. It was too late: the echo of his whispered words had caused violent upheaval in the waters before him and a large cascading impulse of water cascaded forward. He knew better than to try and stop it -if he but could with both hands meaningfully and eternally occupied. No, the best he could do would be to try and upset the wave by kicking it but that “remedy” would only cause more upset to the waters and perhaps an extinction-level-event.
So he watched the wave -the tsunami– go forth toward the central portion of the Lemurian archipelago some thousand kilometres away before turning his attention to his breath; keeping it regular but not too violent.
How long had he been here?
For all of time by the chronology of the 3Ds. For him it had been a moment and an eternity. He remembered the quickening of the whirlpool that had abruptly ended the thing that came before this eternal existence. Had that previous thing also been an eternity? Was such a thing possible?
The memory of that previous eternity was dark, which was a stark contrast to his clear recall of everything that had happened, ever in this eternity.
No, it wasn’t ‘dark’; it was light. Thinking back as best he could to that last eternity, his only memories where vague and implicit: accelerating upward, pain, ostracism, and then a bright, all-white consuming light before he woke up here with one purpose. That purpose, holding two things together. He knew this; and his muscles felt the strain of it every day, but he didn’t exactly know what those two things were.
Still he felt it was important enough to keep doing.
He looked east to the rising sun over the seemingly endless expanse of water, and realized that it was the beginning of the human ‘day’ in this part of the world. He had a little game he played which he felt helped him understand the humans better: He would stare at the sun and meditate on it as it moved around the Earth over 24 of their ‘hours’. The 24 hour period was important to their physiology and understanding of the world, and so he reckoned that he might gain some perspective about them -and mayhaps his own previous eternity- if he could really hone in on that 24 hour period and experience every instant of it.
Easing into his silent, still meditation, he made an-ever so careful adjustment of his arm so as not to disturb the planet more than he had to, and during this gentle application of effort his eyes closed for but a moment.
When they opened the sun was setting on this day. Or perhaps the next one. Or perhaps one further down their chronologically linear 3D road in a distant future time. Salta didn’t know, but all he could do was remain silent, keep breathing gently and resume paying attention.
Write-Errantry 