Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored, bored. Beyond tolerance, beyond belief, beyond all reality she was bored. This was the true sentence. Not incarceration, not forced labour, it was boredom. “I sentence you to so-and-so hours of being bored,” the judge hadn’t told her. Straight-up lies, omitting that.
So she fidgeted, and she paced, and she poked, and did all the other distractible things a human being might do when confronted with too much time to do nothing in, and she lost her mind and found it again and finally one day she looked up at the ceiling and wondered if she’d ever tried climbing on top of it.
Sammy put her feet on the floor, and then one foot on top of the other, and then her foot on the wall, and her other foot on the ceiling, and then she took a step with just a little bit extra and she was on top of the ceiling..
She wondered why nobody had ever tried that before. The overside of the ceiling was an odd texture; made of something that wasn’t quite molecules, and as she stood on it the light clipped through her eyes in a way that made her very very uncomfortable.
Also an alarm was ringing and someone was shouting, which wasn’t helping either. So she shuffled her feet – generating something that was like a static charge but inside-out and upside-down – and put one directly on top of the other, and then the same again, and in doing so she climbed on top of top of the ceiling, and then on top of on top of that, and was on top of the roof.
The breeze nearly blindsided Sammy; it’d been so long since she’d been outside with no walls to block it. Her shirt felt too thin and her skin felt too cold and she enjoyed it more than she felt was probably reasonable, and for a while the sheer joy at each new step made in a new place kept her as warm as she needed to be. But after walking lap number six the low-slung guardrail of the roof began to look too much like another wall to her, and the large siren had started up, and so with great annoyance Sammy looked around, saw a tree, and climbed on top of it.
Getting there was the same as before. One foot on top of the other, and again, and then on top of the tree, which was where it was quite different and quite difficult because it wasn’t a nice flat surface like the roof, or a nice quasiflat unsurface like the top of the ceiling. She was standing on many hundreds of branches, all at once and all together, and even more leaves than that, and the leaves were needles because it was a pine tree, which just made for even more confusion. Its trunk was a winding python of a gnarled, sap-ridden thing, and Sammy felt like she was balanced on a crocodile’s nose.
So she looked around for the first thing she saw and climbed on top of that instead – one foot atop another, then atop it – which was a bird, and that was much worse.
***
Sammy stood on feathers and beak and bones and blood and body and air sacs and crop and liver and heart and lungs and guts and legs and feet and wings and so many muscles and a pair of big eyes and an offended little beak and a loud and VERY upset song being directed at her with tremendous volume and venomous force.
It was like trying to keep your footing inside a cement mixer. So she screamed a little, and leapt a little, and she jumped off the bird and landed on the other next thing she saw, which was another bird, and that was twice as bad because it had happened two times in a row but also only half as bad because that helps you get used to it but unfortunately the bird was at least twice the first bird’s size, which brought her right back to square one.
So Sammy jumped, and landed on a bit of cloud.
It was soft, in a gassy sort of way. But hard, because it was water, and few things were more relentless, even on holiday in the sky. This particular scrap of nothing was roaming under her foothold, just bumbling its way along until it could build up a head of thunder and shit itself all across the landscape in a torrent of tiny little droplet daggers. It accepted her presence with the casual benevolence of someone who didn’t really care if you existed or not, and Sammy was left to stare at the world around her and marvel at how high she’d climbed, which she did. She was upside down and this seemed like it should matter more than it currently did.
It turned out that a lot of things mattered less than they should when you were upside down. The ground was much less enormous when it was the sky; and the sky was far more solid and real when it was the ground. A big blue blanket stretched out beneath Sammy’s feet, as real and solid and true as the floor she’d paced on just a few million instants ago. She could see a lot and didn’t understand most of it. Something flitted in the corner of her eye, she turned to face it, stepped a little harder than she’d meant, and she was on top of the underside of a plane.
It was very unpleasant. The sound was outrageous – vibrating her bones, chattering her teeth, shaking her until she couldn’t tell if she was shivering with the cold or not. The metals underfoot were confused and muddled in a way that the water vapour hadn’t been, lacking confidence or direction or much of anything beyond their own solidity. And worst of worst of WORST of all there were a lot of upside-down people around her that didn’t know which way wasn’t up or how up worked, and in Sammy’s haste to get away from their loud and deeply confusing thoughts she stepped on one of the plane’s signal transmissions and climbed on top of a satellite.
***
It was quiet again. Cool, since Sammy’s foothold was currently on the nighttime and shady side of the planet and therefore a long, long way below zero. Peaceful, in a thousands-of-miles-per-hour sort of way. An antenna was poking into Sammy’s heel, which was probably very expensive for someone somewhere.
She could look down and see everything everywhere in such absoluteness that none of it was visible. Or she could look up, which would be much worse.
Sammy looked up and saw nothing nowhere.
So much nothing. So much nowhere. Everything everywhere wasn’t even a rounding error. It went on forever, and she couldn’t understand forever, and in the face of it all she realized that was probably okay, or at least if it wasn’t okay it was in a way that her mind couldn’t grasp.
Sammy relaxed, open at last to a truly boundless universe whose infinite space made her feel finally, comfortably housed without being confined. She reached out with empty arms and grasped at the ungraspable, content with the futility of this gesture, then shuffled her feet just slightly wrong and climbed on top of everything.
Being in space is difficult and painful. Being outside of space is not pleasant. It’s also not unpleasant. It is many things that are impossible to conceptualize because they aren’t concepts or even things.
But whatever they were or weren’t, Sammy experienced or did not experience a lot of them or not-them and then after a nonsequential antiquantity of unevents she climbed back down, which should not have worked or even not worked.
Which it didn’t.
***
Sammy sat in prison, in her cell, under watch, under guard, under the law, under the ceiling, under one giant roof, and she was bored, bored, bored. And very grateful for it, too.
Truly grateful. Wouldn’t trade it for the world.
But.
Maybe tomorrow she’d try to climb again.
Just a little bit.