Movement
Yes, that's what you'd call movement. It was the first word, or more like the first concept, to surface in its awareness. The meaning slipped in quietly, like a guiding beacon.
The slime shifted gently out from under the massive pile of stones, making what you could call its first decision, marking the birth of its awareness and will.
Turning? No. That option wasn't available. This body had no neck to support such a motion.
Strange it is for the body to know a function it didn't even have.
Stranger still was the feeling of deciding on an unknown stretch of instinctive stillness.
Proceed? Avoid.
After bumping into the boulder a few times, it concluded that slipping past it was simpler and faster.
Dissolve
Full? No.
The idea of dissolving things beneath it, as eating came naturally, without any real thought.
It had felt that same sensation when it covered and dissolved a few herbs and minerals, but it didn't ease its hunger or its curiosity. There was a strange emptiness inside it, lurking at the edge of its awareness like a predator waiting for a chance.
The pale blue creature kept moving, slow and steady, learning not to force itself through solid objects and simply avoiding them instead.
Cold pebbles brushed its smooth, cool surface without leaving a trace. Its outer membrane made sure nothing sharp pierced it or stuck to it. Taking on extra weight would slow it down and leave the fragile slime exposed.
The darkness around it didn't matter. It wasn't relying on sight anyway. Its delicate body focused on sensing tiny vibrations like echoes and checking the surrounding conditions.
Rocks and rocks in every direction. Luckily for it, its sense of beauty was nonexistent, or it would have been disappointed by the dead cave around it.
...What...do I do...?
The slime stopped for a moment. It sensed something far less brittle and cold than the rest of the cave. Instinct told it to pull back, but it slowly drifted toward the new material.
It touched the surface again. It rippled and broke.
Water. It felt a strange familiarity with this water thing, a pull. One thing was clear: it was absorbable.
It threw itself into the little pool and began taking in the liquid around it. This wasn't going to be as quick as dissolving those herbs, but it didn't really care about time anyway.
It found itself in a small pit twice its size. It tried to move through but hit something solid.
Avoid.
No other path.
It had never been in a situation like this. Usually, hitting something solid was solved by avoiding it, but that wasn't going to work here.
It threw itself harder against the wall, only to bounce back to the pit's floor. The wall behind it yielded the same frustrating result.
Confusion. A new feeling settled into its awareness, and with it came something else. The emptiness shifted, swelled, pressed against the edges of its being until its membrane contracted on its own. Not pain. It didn't know pain yet. But wrongness. The feeling lingered for a moment that stretched too long, then faded, leaving the slime motionless at the bottom of the pit, as he started a new line of thoughts.
There had to be another wall to test.
This time, it tried the wall below it, the ground, but it was already attached to it. It had to move away before hitting the target.
The slime reviewed what it knew. By now, it understood the three dimensions pretty well. If hitting the front required pulling back first, then hitting the bottom must require pulling back... upward!
But how?
Jump. The idea came in oddly. Instead of using it to solve the current problem in a straightforward way, simply knowing the concept made it choose something different: jump out.
It tried to embody the idea of jumping and apply it to its body.
It condensed its gel-like core, pressing inward then pulling upward, and then... sprang!
And it cleared the pit.
Jumping proved much faster and more useful than crawling. Instead of avoiding things, it hopped over them. Easy.
Its jumps were a bit livelier than normal for its small size, maybe because it felt a sense of accomplishment.
Every now and then, it went back to crawling to look for something to dissolve. Even if it didn't satisfy it, the feeling at least filled the emptiness a little.
Once, it dissolved a cluster of pale mushrooms and waited. The emptiness didn't ease. It deepened. The slime recoiled from the sensation, its body rippling in something close to alarm before it forced itself to keep moving.
Empty. Yes, its mind was empty. The soil of awareness was rich enough for thoughts and ideas to sprout, but they were almost absent, stumbling in the shadow of loneliness and relative ignorance. And still—
Cave... exit... Whether it was some kind of hallucination or a touch of madness didn't matter. Its awareness had only been awake for a few days. Tracing the source of strange thoughts wasn't something it even considered. It wasn't really thinking yet.
Funny how the first thing a barely conscious creature wants is to leave its safe place.
The slime's movements grew steadier, taking a direction with more intent than randomness, even if it didn't know where the forgotten memories were guiding it.
It found itself focusing on a faint white thread forming in its awareness.
...Where am I going...? It ignored every distraction, the rocky debris, the bones, the plants that kept getting more frequent. It stopped less often to quiet its hunger. It kept following that thread without pause, as if it would disappear at any moment like the rest of its fleeting information.
...I need to get out. The pull grew stronger with each jump forward.
When the slime tried to pause, to dissolve something nearby, the thread seemed to tighten. An ache bloomed in its centre, sourceless and insistent. It abandoned the food and moved on.
Then, for the first time since beginning this journey, it stopped.
The thread flickered. Dimmed. The emptiness surged, no longer lurking at the edges but flooding through its entire being. Its membrane contracted violently, over and over, and the slime found itself unable to move, unable to think past the overwhelming wrongness pressing in from all sides.
The thread brightened again. The pressure eased.
The slime moved forward.
Normally, it would be strange for a newborn consciousness to have such a clear goal without any obvious reason.
No memories or identity, like a blank page or a painting with no colours.
For the slime, unaware of what was normal or not, leaving the cave felt like an instinctive goal, as natural as dissolving things.
It didn't know what it would do after leaving. Its strange intuition didn't seem ready to offer any hints about its future steps.
Until the time came to think about that, the slime kept moving forward.
The path was not short. The labyrinth of stone offered endless dead ends and obstacles, but the thread remained a constant pull, and the slime followed, unerringly, forward.