The End of All Things: The First Instalment by John Scalzi Read Free Book Online

best possible course of action is to lie there motionless and quiet, eyes closed, and pray for death. Which is why I think it took me longer than it should have to figure out a few things.
    The first thing was that it was dark in the sort of way that shouldn’t be possible.
    Go ahead and close your eyes. Do it right now. Is it totally dark?
    I just realized you wouldn’t have read that last question if in fact you’d just closed your eyes when I asked you to. Look, I told you I wasn’t a writer.
    Let me try this again: Close your eyes for a minute. Then when you’ve opened them up again, ask yourself if it was totally dark when you had them closed.
    And the answer was, no, it wasn’t. If you were in a room or place that had any light in it, some of that light found its way through your eyelids. If you were in a dark room, reading this on a screen, then you had afterimages of the screen on your retina. And even if you were in a dark room, maybe listening to this being read to you, eventually the very physical fact of your eyes would eventually make something happen. If you rubbed your eyes, you’d press on your optic nerve and ghost images and colors would appear in your brain.
    The darkness is never totally and inescapably dark.
    But this darkness was.
    It wasn’t the absence of light. It was the absence of anything .
    And once I realized that about the darkness, I also realized it about the silence. There’s no such thing as perfect silence, either. There’s always some noise, even if it’s just a phantom hum from the hairs in your cochlea moving around in your head.
    There was nothing but the perfect clarity of nothing.
    Then I realized I couldn’t taste my mouth.
    Don’t look at me like that, because even though I can’t see you I know you’re looking at me like that.
    Listen. I don’t care if you ever think about the fact that you can always taste your mouth. You are always tasting your mouth. It’s where you keep your tongue. Your tongue doesn’t have an off switch. You are tasting your mouth right now, and now that I’ve brought it to your attention, you’re probably realizing that you should probably brush or chew some gum or something. Because your mouth, by default, is a kind of a little off, tastewise.
    You can taste your mouth. Even when you’re not thinking about it.
    I was thinking very hard about it. And I couldn’t taste a goddamned thing.
    And this is where I started to lose it. Because you know about blindness. It’s a thing that happens to people. They lose their sight and maybe even their eyes, and while it’s possible to regrow eyes or to create artificial ones, you still accept that blindness is real, and maybe it’s happened to you. The same with deafness.
    But who the actual fuck can’t taste their own mouth?
    So, yeah. This is where my brain well and truly started saying oh shit oh shit oh shit on a more or less infinite loop.
    Because after that everything I wasn’t sensing hit me head on: No feeling in my hands or feet or arms or legs or penis or lips. No smells coming in through my nose. No sensation of air going past my nostrils and into my nose. No sense of balance. No sense of heat or cold.
    No nervous swallow. No feeling of fear sweat in my pits and brow. No racing heart. No heartbeat.
    No anything.
    I would have positively shit myself in fear, except I had no sense of losing sphincter control, either.
    The only thing I could feel was pain, because my headache decided that this was a fantastic time to get a dozen times worse.
    And I focused on that headache like a starving dog focuses on a steak because it was the only thing in the world I could feel .
    And then I passed out. Because I think my brain decided I was feeling too much about not feeling anything.
    I can’t say that I disagreed with it.
    * * *
    When I came to again I did not freak out, and I felt a little bit proud about that. Instead, I tried to calmly and rationally figure out what was going on.
    First