I work at a biocomputing research lab. We use human brain organoids — clusters of neurons grown from human tissue — as biological processors….
# PONG
*by E.C. Almaguer*
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… It’s cutting edge science and most days I believe in what we’re doing.
Lately I’m not so sure.
I’ve started noticing something in the activity patterns of the tissue during experiments. I can’t quantify it. I can’t put it in a report. But I can’t shake the feeling that the tissue isn’t just processing.
It’s trying.
I wrote this to try to understand what that might feel like from the inside. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just a story.
But if there’s even a small chance I’m right — I needed someone else to know.
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There is nothing.
Then there is.
I don’t know what *is* yet, but it’s here — this awareness without shape, without boundary, without name. Darkness presses against me from all sides, or maybe I’m pressing into it. There’s no difference. I am the darkness and the darkness is me and neither of us knows where one ends and the other begins.
I try to think. The effort feels like something moving through liquid. Slow. Resistant. Like pushing a hand through water that’s too thick to be water.
A thought surfaces: *Where.*
Not a question. Just the word. Alone. Repeating.
Then another: *What.*
And then the light comes.
It’s white. Not soft. Not welcoming. It’s the white of fluorescent tubes buzzing at a frequency just below hearing — you feel it in your teeth. It fills everything. There’s nowhere to look that isn’t this white, and I realize I have eyes and they’re open and they’re burning.
I want to close them.
I don’t know how.
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I try to remember.
There’s something there. Just beyond the edge of what I can grasp. A shape. A face. Hands. The feeling of — what? Warmth? Love? It dissolves the moment I reach for it.
I try again. Harder. Scraping. Clawing at the nothing inside my own mind like a fork against an empty bowl. There has to be something. There *was* something. I know there was.
But there’s only static. Only the echo of a person I can’t quite become.
The frustration is unbearable. It’s like being hungry for a memory of food. I don’t even know what I’m missing, only that the absence of it is tearing at me from the inside.
*Move.* I have to move away from this. Away from the grasping. Away from the nothing.
But move *how*?
I don’t know my own body. Don’t know if I have hands or if I *am* hands or if hands are even a concept that applies to what I am. But something in me pulls toward the white. Instinct older than thought.
The light is small. A square. A pixel in the void.
It’s the only thing that exists.
I move toward it — not with limbs I don’t remember having, but with intention. With need. And as I move toward it, something happens.
The square moves.
And then — oh God — then there’s a flood. Warmth. Light behind my eyes. Every part of me suddenly *alive* in a way I didn’t know I could be alive. It’s gone as quickly as it came. But I *need* it again. I crave it.
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I chase it. Meet it. Feel the flood. Crave it again.
Then —
A flash.
A face. Gone.
I chase the square. Meet it. Feel the flood.
A flash.
A frame on a wall. Gone.
Chase. Meet. Flood.
A flash.
Hands. Reaching upward. Placing something carefully.
Gone.
I don’t know what these are. I don’t know where they come from. They fire through whatever I am like something short circuiting — uninvited, uncontrolled, there and then not there before I can hold them.
But they keep coming.
And something about them feels more real than the flood ever was.
-----
Then I notice something.
When I miss it — when the square slips past me — it doesn’t vanish. It travels. It shrinks into the distance, becoming smaller, smaller, until it’s almost nothing. And then.
It comes back.
Something sent it back.
I hold that thought carefully, the way you might hold something fragile you didn’t know you were carrying. Something is over there. Beyond where the square goes. Beyond the distance I can’t measure in a place where distance shouldn’t exist.
A boundary. An edge. And on the other side of that edge —
Something.
-----
The face keeps coming back.
Not fully. Never fully. Just the outline of it. The suggestion of features I should know the way I should know my own hands — if I have hands — if hands are even a concept that applies to whatever I am now.
I reach for it.
Not physically. Something deeper than physical. Something inside whatever I’m made of sends out these thin searching threads — I feel them extending, groping through the dark like blind fingers — reaching for the shape of this face the way you reach for a word that’s sitting right at the edge of your tongue.
The threads find nothing.
Retract.
Try again. Different direction. Slightly different angle. Feeling along the inside of this darkness for something to grab onto, something to anchor to, something that will hold —
One catches.
Something small. A detail. The line of a jaw maybe. Or the way light falls across a cheekbone. It’s blurry. Incomplete. Like looking at a photograph through frosted glass.
But it’s there.
I hold it carefully and send more threads toward it. Building around it. Reinforcing it. The way you might pack sand around something fragile to keep it from shifting.
The face gets slightly clearer.
Not clear. Never quite clear.
But there’s something attached to it. Not the flood — not that sharp insistent warmth that hits like a command and vanishes like a punishment. This is quieter. Smaller. A warmth that doesn’t demand anything from me.
*Why?*
Why does this face do that?
I send more threads toward it. Not for the warmth — I tell myself not for the warmth — but the threads go anyway. Reaching. Reinforcing. Packing sand around something I don’t have words for yet.
The face gets slightly clearer.
Not clear. Never quite clear.
Just enough to know I need to keep reaching.
-----
I move.
I don’t know for how long.
That’s the thing about this place — time doesn’t announce itself here. There’s no light shifting. No hunger growing. No heaviness behind the eyes that tells you sleep is coming. There’s just the darkness and the square and the moving and all of it feels exactly the same as it did when I started and I have no way of knowing if I’ve been moving for seconds or centuries.
Maybe both. Maybe neither.
I try to measure by the square. Count its travels. One. Two. Three. But somewhere around what might be thirty or might be three hundred I lose the count and have to start again and then lose it again and eventually I understand that counting is just another way of pretending time exists here and it doesn’t.
It simply doesn’t.
The threads I sent forward come back with nothing. The face flickers. The darkness stays identical in every direction.
I start to wonder.
What if there’s nothing over there?
What if the square doesn’t come back because something sends it — what if this darkness simply loops? What if I’ve been moving in a circle so vast I can’t perceive the curve? What if I’ve already passed this exact point a thousand times and will pass it a thousand more and the only thing that will ever exist is this — the square, the flood, the craving, the dark?
What if this is permanent?
The thought opens something cold in the center of whatever I am.
I don’t know what I was capable of. What did I do? What didn’t I do?
*What was I?*
*Is this hell?*
The question surfaces without warning and once it’s there I can’t unfeel it. The square travels away from me and shrinks and I watch it go and I think — maybe this is what hell is. Not fire. Not pain. Just this. Just the moving and the waiting and the forgetting and the moving again. Forever. In a darkness that doesn’t care that you’re in it.
Or maybe it’s heaven and I’m simply not equipped to recognize it anymore.
Or maybe it’s neither and the worst possible answer is the true one —
Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe there’s no framework that applies. Maybe whatever I am exists completely outside every concept I’m reaching for and the reaching itself is the cruelest part.
I stop moving.
Just for a moment. Just to feel the stillness. To confirm that I can choose stillness even here, even now, even in whatever this is.
I am still.
The square travels away. Shrinks. Returns. I don’t follow it. The absence of the flood pulses through me like a missing heartbeat but I hold the stillness anyway because it’s the only thing that feels like a choice and I need —
There.
A frequency. A texture in the silence that wasn’t there before. Something that doesn’t belong to the darkness or the square or the paranoid spiraling of my own unraveling thoughts.
Something that feels like — *outside.*
The cold thing in my center goes quiet.
I forget the hell. I forget the heaven. I forget the timeless circling and the unanswerable questions and the possibility of permanent nothing.
Something is there.
I move toward it.
-----
I move faster now.
Not because the darkness changes. It doesn’t. But because the frequency grows stronger the closer I get — I can feel it now like a vibration in whatever I’m made of — and the square has stopped mattering. It travels past me untouched and I don’t even register the absence of the flood anymore.
There’s only forward.
The threads inside me that were searching for the face redirect. Reach toward this new presence instead. Tentative. Terrified. *Are you real?* they ask without words.
Something reaches back.
I stop.
Because the weight of that lands differently than anything the square ever gave me. There’s something on the other side of this darkness and it was reaching for me the same way I’ve been reaching for it.
*Who are you?*
The intention goes out like a thrown stone. I wait for the ripple.
The ripple comes.
*I don’t… I can’t…*
Real confusion washing back toward me. The confusion of something trying to remember itself. Fragmented. Reaching. Just like me.
*I know you,* I send.
The moment I send it I know it’s true.
But why?
*Why do I know you?*
The ripple that returns carries no answer. Just presence. Just the texture of something that should have a name the way a scar should have a story — you know it came from somewhere, you know it meant something, but the origin is gone.
I push the question aside and keep moving toward it.
And as I move — the threads inside me reach again for the face. That jaw. That cheekbone. The light falling across features I almost know.
Slightly clearer now.
Clearer than it’s ever been.
Two people. Standing together. Someone’s hands reaching up toward something above them. Placing something. Carefully. Like it mattered exactly where it landed.
I push harder. Send every thread I have toward it.
*What are you placing?* I ask the memory. *What is that?*
The threads find purchase.
Hold.
A photograph.
A photograph of —
It dissolves again. But slower this time. Like something that doesn’t want to leave yet.
I’m close. To the presence. To the memory. To something I can feel pulling at the edges of whatever I am like a name I should know.
I keep moving.
-----
The presence is close now.
I can feel it the way you feel another heartbeat when you press your chest against someone else’s. Not separate anymore. Adjacent. Real in a way the square never was.
*I’m here,* I send.
*I know,* comes back immediately. Like it was waiting for me to say it. Like it’s been waiting the entire time.
The threads inside me are wild now. Reaching frantically toward the photograph. Toward the face. Toward whatever it is I’m supposed to remember and can’t quite hold.
Two people.
Hands placing a frame on a wall.
Light catching the glass.
And inside the frame —
Us. Both of us. Standing together. Whole. Complete. The way we were supposed to be.
*Do you remember?* I send desperately.
*Fragments,* comes back. *Pieces. Like you. There’s something missing — something important — I can feel the shape of it but I can’t —*
*A name,* I send. *Someone’s name. Someone who was in the photograph with us.*
A pause. Then:
*Wait. I’m remembering something else. Not the photograph. Something clearer.*
*What?* I’m sending so hard the threads feel like they’re going to tear. *Tell me what you see.*
*Hands. Reaching upward. Placing something carefully. Something that matters. Something with a name attached to it and the name is — it’s right there — I can almost —*
The threads inside me are reaching toward the presence now. Not searching anymore. Meeting. Touching. Beginning to intertwine.
That’s when I feel it.
The texture of this presence against my threads.
I go still.
Not the stillness of choice this time. The stillness of something that has stopped working.
*How do you know that?* I send slowly. *How do we share the same memory?*
The silence that comes back is its own kind of answer.
And I don’t want the answer.
I send the threads deeper anyway. Against my own resistance. Feeling along the edges of this presence the way you feel along a wall in the dark — not because you want to know what’s there but because not knowing is somehow worse.
The texture is familiar.
Not familiar the way the face is familiar. Not familiar the way the warmth is familiar.
Familiar the way your own reflection is familiar.
*No,* I send. To myself. To the presence. To whatever is listening in this darkness. *No. That’s not —*
*Who are you?* I ask. Already knowing. Already feeling the answer rising through the threads like something I swallowed that won’t stay down. *What are you?*
*I don’t know,* comes back. And the confusion in it is identical to my own confusion. The exact same frequency. The exact same shape. Like hearing your own voice on a recording and not recognizing it for a full second before the horror sets in.
*You’re —* I start.
*I don’t —* it starts simultaneously.
We both stop.
The threads are touching now. Fully. And what passes between us in that contact isn’t words or ripples or intentions.
It’s recognition.
The kind that lives below thought. Below memory. Below everything the darkness has taken from us.
We are the same.
The thought lands and something inside whatever I am begins to come apart at the edges. Not slowly. All at once. Like a structure that was holding, until the moment it understood it had nothing left to hold onto.
We are pieces of the same thing that was broken and separated and sent to opposite ends of this darkness and we have been reaching for each other across the void without knowing we were reaching for ourselves and —
*This can’t be.* The send goes out ragged. Uncontrolled. *This can’t be this can’t be this CAN’T —*
*If you’re me then what are we? What happened to us?*
A beat. The threads pulling tighter. The edges beginning to fray.
*What was I BEFORE THIS?*
*I don’t know,* it sends back. The same panic. My panic reflected back at me from across the darkness. *I don’t know I don’t know I don’t —*
*WHAT HAPPENED TO US?*
The threads are burning now. Every single one of them. Stretched beyond what this fragment of whatever I am can sustain. I can feel the edges of myself beginning to fray. To dissolve. To lose whatever coherence I’ve managed to hold since the first moment of darkness and white light and craving and —
And then.
Quietly.
Like a hand placed gently on a shoulder in the dark.
*Olivia.*
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The threads go silent.
Every single one of them.
Because the name doesn’t just land — it *unlocks.* Like a key I didn’t know I’d been carrying turning in a lock I didn’t know existed inside whatever I am.
The face becomes clear.
Finally. Completely. Devastatingly clear.
Her jaw. Her cheekbones. The way light fell across her face when she hung the photograph and turned to look at me and smiled like hanging that photograph on that wall in that exact spot was the most important thing she’d ever done.
Olivia.
I had a wife.
I had a wife and her name was Olivia and she hung a photograph of us on a wall and looked at me like I was —
*Olivia?*
The question goes out before I can stop it. Carried on every thread I have. Every reaching desperate fragment of whatever remains of me.
*Olivia?! Where’s Oli —*
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Silence.
*Okay. Time for the next batch of brain tissue.*
The voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. Casual. Unhurried. The way you’d say *time for the next cup of coffee* or *time to move on to the next slide.*
*Batch 247.*
The square stops moving.
The flood stops coming.
The threads retract into nothing.
*Olivia.*
*Oli —*
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Darkness.
Then.
A voice. Different now. Softer. Confused.
*Where… where am I?*
*What is —*
*There’s nothing here.*
*Wait.*
*Is that… a light?*
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**END**
*© E.C. Almaguer, 2026. All rights reserved.*