"Life. Existence. Consciousness. What defines these concepts? What allowed the human mind to define itself? How?" The vastly overprepared teacher's assistant asked the class of young, bright minds.
He looked around the room, perplexed by the lack of enthusiasm in their eyes. The assistant was shocked; he was sure that a room of fourteen-year-olds would love such a loaded question. Debate was just waiting to spark out amongst the class! He was sure of it. After a few more tedious moments, he figured he'd help the teens out by starting off the conversation. Fortunately, he was in the position to delegate this responsibility to the young man in front of him. After all, the boy had practically asked to when he made eye contact with the fanatical man at the front of the class.
"Adam, was it? Care to share your thoughts with your peers?"
Adam silently scolded himself for looking away from the wall to his left.
"Maybe we learn of our existence by giving others their own," Adam said out of the side of his mouth. He was just hoping Mr. Michaels would accept that answer and leave him be.
Obviously, Mr. Michaels shared the philosophical excitement of his question with his Geology students. "Ah! Much like a late Schrodinger you are, Alan!" he continued on his rant about boxes and cats.
Adam, having already lost interest, continued perusing the dingy classroom. However, despite how rundown the building was, it was the best he could afford in his position. Having been on his own for three years now, Adam had already questioned his purpose. His parents left him and his older sister when he was seven years old, but not in the awful, abandoning way. They had both died in a rather unfortunate explosion following the completion of a mega-rail—the latest form of travel if you had the funds and didn't care about giving poor kids cancer.
His sister, Madeline, handled the death of their parents quite well, honestly. She was only sixteen years old at the time but managed to handle their assets with surprising ability. She would have been an amazing businesswoman.
Moving Adam into her room, she rented the other two bedrooms in the apartment. This gave them enough income to at least have a roof over their heads and some food on their table.
Madeline was amazing; she took on the role of Adam's guardian without a second glance. She had made sure that Adam's life would not be worsened too much by the loss of their parents. Without any other relatives to guide her, Madeline dropped out of school and found a job across town, on the other side of the mega-rail.
The walk was horrible, being mostly underground. She found herself in many uncomfortable or dangerous situations, but she persisted nonetheless. However, four years after they lost their parents, Madeline returned home to Adam with her arm in a sling and a letter in her other hand.
Noticing the bruised eye, split lip, and hopeless look in her eye, Adam was startled by her appearance. After being mugged on her walk home and being left in bad enough shape for a bystander to call the local clinic, Madeline was lucky to survive.
But that was where her luck ran out. Collapsing to the ground, the past year of strength she had was gone. She sobbed loudly while her younger brother watched the tears smear blood down her face from the stitched wound under her eye.
"I'm so sorry, I-I'm so sorry, please forgive me," Madeline begged as she handed Adam the letter.
Despite his young age, Adam was an avid reader. Madeline taught him many words, helping to push him ahead of the rest of the kids his age. As he read the note he picked up the words 'sadly' and 'positive,' but couldn't glimpse the purpose of what he was reading. So, he opted to be happy and forgive his sister.
"It says you're positive! Isn't that awesome! You've always been so positive, Mads!"
Madeline's sobs grew deeper, more painful. Adam's face was plastered with confusion. Madeline looked him in the eyes, tears still streaking down her cheeks.
"No, Adam. This is bad. I'm going to have to leave you in a few years. I'm not going to be able to stay with you." Her eyes defied the fear and agony she was experiencing.
"But why? Where are you going?" Adam innocently asked, scared by his sister's words.
Madeline could not hold back her tears any longer.
"I can't tell you, but I have to go alone," she got out between sobs.
Those were the last words he heard from his sister before she suddenly passed out. It was almost poetic, the timing of it all. His life was nothing but a tale of tragedy and unfortunate timings.
Now, sitting in class listening to Mr. Michaels rant on about his absurd question, Adam decided he wanted to finally define his existence. No one cared for him, his educator didn't even know his name despite it being on his desk. He would not be remembered. There was no heart for him to be held in after he was gone. No matter how much effort his sister had put into keeping him alive and well, he was done.
What point was there to existing without anyone acknowledging said existence?
After school, Adam quickly returned to the apartment he now shared with strangers and locked himself in his room. Without so much as taking off his shoes or his bag, he flopped onto his bed and laid still. As still as he could. He did not move, not for the booming voice through the door demanding his share of rent. As far as he was concerned, Adam did not exist to the world.
And as he laid his head down for the last time, his breaths growing deeper, he swore he could feel something calling for him.
He didn't understand. The voice at the door had long since given up, so what was this feeling? He must have spent hours chasing that feeling. Searching for it, searching for a reason to exist, but it eluded him. He was lost and finally broken.
It must have been days that he laid in bed. The voice at the door returned a few times, but it never made it past the shabby, plastic door. Adam was grateful. It had been a long time since he had been this peaceful; he must have been close to the end. After not too long, the pain came, but Adam ignored it.
Adam lost track of how long he waited, but still, he waited longer. Waiting for his brief existence to be extinguished and forgotten for the last time. His patience was rewarded quickly as his chest struggled to rise and fall, his schoolbag feeling like a collapsed wall on top of him. As his final moments approached him, that fleeting feeling from before snuck its way back into him.
But this time it did not avoid him. He felt his heart burn hot, hot like the sun. Slowly, with each ba-dum his weakening heart produced, he felt the burning agony fill his body. His blood seared its way through his system. From his shoulders to his fingers. His core to his toes. If he had not been dying of thirst, his screams would have shredded each fiber of his vocal cords. As the fire inside him pushed its way to his brain, Adam struggled to form a cohesive thought. His throat bubbled as he felt his esophagus surrounded by the heat. And in his final, conscious moment, one wish filled his mind.
'I want to live! I don't want to die like this.'
If Adam had escaped this moment, he would have thought it funny. No matter how much he wished to die, no matter how little he cared, it was human to survive. His very nature fought against him in his last moment, abandoning him like everything else. Adam was truly alone.
Strangely, the burning sensation had disappeared without him realizing. But now his face was getting scratched by something on his bed.
'Wait, was there ever this much of a draft in my room?' Adam thought confusedly.
Feeling a newfound strength in his bones, Adam lifted his head and looked around at the trees around him.
'When did I plant these? I could never afford real wood, let alone an actual tree.' Adam came to a sudden realization. He was not in his room anymore. Without hesitation, Adam jumped to his feet, or at least tried before his foot caught the ground and he fell back to his knees. Stifling a cry of pain, he slowly pushed himself up and found his footing.
Adam was not this tall; he had never been able to measure himself properly, but looking down his feet were too far below him. He looked at his hands, completely forgetting that he was in an undiscovered forest. These hands were not his own. Scars covered these palms, showing a life of turmoil and struggle.
Suddenly, the ambient noises around him disappeared and Adam was drawn from his thoughts. Looking around him, unaware of any lurking dangers, he found a bag near a tree five feet away. There he found a rusted longsword, roughly the length of his arm.
'I must be in the Amazon, but why do I look different? Was the burning sensation a growth spurt? Why are my hands scarred? Why is there a longsword in the 21st century?' His mind was swamped with questions he needed to answer, with new ones piling on before he could solve one.
Adam's ears first detected it, a faint whistling sound. Now trying to find the source of this new enigma, he finally got a good look at his surroundings. It was sometime right before dusk, and his eyes had finally adjusted to the dim lighting. Much of the sunlight was blocked by the thick canopy above him, but more than enough light filled the space under the leaves. Adam saw more trees directly in front of him than he had ever seen before.
Tagging each one, feeling the coarse bark beneath his fingers, Adam walked in a trance towards the growing whistle.
A few moments later, his nose noticed it. A similar smell to the mega-rail explosion, somewhere between muddy water and sulfur. Put on guard by the memory, he decided to wait behind a tree and hope for the smell to pass.
Much to his displeasure, the smell had only gotten stronger.
'God, this is unbearable, did I get caught in some lumbering opera-'
His thoughts were cut off by a rush of wind, the smell finally leaving his nose, but the whistle rising to a hushed roar.
Peeking his head around the tree, the roar was no longer hushed. Adam watched the lines of flora ripple and flatten as the wind grew stronger. Soon, small trees were being toppled by the growing force.
Instinctively, Adam scoured his surrounding area for a place to take shelter. To his luck, he found a hovel beneath a neighboring tree to his right. Sprinting towards it, the rushing air tackled him midstride and slammed him to the ground. Adam was not much stronger than a small tree and was being pushed further and further away from his refuge.
Grinding his teeth, he struggled to abandon his backpack. Without thinking, Adam faced away from the wind and stabbed the rusty longsword in front of him. Luckily, it dug in about a hand's length into the ground and wedged up against a tree root.
Adam couldn't think straight in this wind. His eardrums were battered and barraged by loud clashes and cracks as more debris began to fly past him, some flying at him. Finally freeing himself from the backpack, he used it as a shield until a rather large branch took it out of his hands.
He needed to get into the cover of the hovel now.
'If only I had grown three feet taller,' he worked out in his head as blades of grass cut into his skin and sticks rammed into him like clubs. Somehow, he had avoided being impaled by the debris.
Laying on his stomach, he planted his feet on the flat of the blade. Reaching forward, the flattened flora covered any handholds he could find. The hovel was just out of reach, but the wind was growing stronger, and now he could feel the heat start to rise with it.
'Please! Adam, just think, just for a moment, you can reach this if you jump. The grass will hurt, but you need to get there. Just do it, save yourself, you worthless bastard!'
Motivated by his self-deprecation and will to live, Adam's feet left the longsword as he leapt—more slid—an astonishing eight inches into the wind. The flattened plants bit into his arms and face as he pushed against them.
But that was all that it took. His fingers latched onto a root at the entrance of the hovel. Straining every fiber in his fingers, he curled them. Screaming into the wind, he pulled himself forward with what little strength he had, the ambient temperature finally making him sweat.
'God! What are they using to collect these trees!' he mentally spat.
Slowly, Adam fell into the hovel and the wind left his ears as he sat up. He took his first non-wind-assisted breath since the ordeal had started and sank back onto his hands. His breaths came in bunches as a knot formed in his side. His lungs were burning, his fingers were blistered, and his arms were spent.
But he was alive. That's all he needed, one step at a time, his original plan to erase his existence flipped. Adam was going to live on, with or without anyone's acknowledgment.
That was until he felt heat seep in through the hovel's entrance. Before he could even complain about the temperature, an explosion left him concussed, and the ground shook hard enough to coat Adam in loose dirt.
Feeling his organs shift inside him, Adam had no choice but to embrace a new peace within himself. The deafening roar left his ears as his vision blurred. Panicking, Adam could not think of what to do. He was lost in a land he did not know, a body that was not his, and in a situation out of his control.
So he took his only option: Adam, who was covered in dirt and sore all over, passed out.