Sped Up Along the Cusp of Speciation

 Posting some of my old writing. This is a story from 2015 that I never completed. Might not finish it because where it was going was kind of reddit, but maybe I'll try.

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At just the moment her body was finally torn, a soft hand pulled her out of the frame. She was flying backwards near lightspeed, but the sensation registered like a warm, gentle breeze on her skin.

Tension had long been pulling her opposite ways. Too long. Unbearable tension caused by the various possible futures swimming alternatingly into her view: each one blooming, unfolding, dancing, and then collapsing back into flat dimensionality to allow the other's next round to begin anew.

Her own fate played out in each one, sped up before her observer's eyes... or she herself had slowed drastically down.

All stopped. She stopped flying.

The parental hand exuding the long-sought force of comfort that had brought relief and guided her belonged to a body. Her old brain wanted to call it “guide”, but it was not quite guide. It was not even singular being. Nor was it clearly multiple being. Her mind found itself wrestling with the concept of “being”, and of a sudden felt overwhelmingly primitive and sluggish in a struggle through waters toward the worn word, a lighthouse in fogging waters, fading in and out of familiarity.

Together she and whatever it was stood on the side of a hill surrounded by space; dully she sensed interminable space behind them, through the other's form as if it was there to shield her from the shattering blow of empty endlessness. She had a muffled taste of it, as if through a mouthful of painkillers. From that alone she felt - in body, in feeling, in thought - less encumbered than she could ever recall feeling. To express it as lifted weights was laughable. The lexicon pared down to few, and expressed volumes more.

Shrouded in a thin atmosphere that cast a glow in the dark bed was the world, moving and swirling ceaselessly in place. Simultaneously she overviewed it and stood on scale with each inch. There was every action, an unknowingly syndicated drama, playing out before her hands, face, and stomach mute and still behind a wind wall.

Time was speeding along on Earth far below. The motion of lives rippled beyond the uncrossable waterlike barrier rippling with undulations of time.

She walked the heart/left path. But she walked on air. The hand was holding her off the ground while her eyes hurt, funneling months to her brain at the compression rate of seconds.

She watched her species' development unfold until she was satisfied, with all the power and none of the worry of a contented viewer relaxing on her couch; at will she rewound it, peered closely into eras, confirmed what she saw in one story with so many analogous ones with comically echoing conversations. No written show a group produced in her lifetime had matched the ultimate show. The best only strained to pay homage to it.

She sighed, momentarily freed from her own personal strain.

She was still inside the world, still standing in the moment that tethered her to circumstance.

“You've been debating a long time.” It was something between a question and statement, carrying both concern and mild amusement.

It was a very earthly problem, almost a silly problem, a universal crisis facing everyone her age.