The Weight of Being Noticed

The alien felt a new thing.

It had felt surprise, once. A singular, sharp, crystalline feeling, a perfect sphere of unexpectedness. It had been… interesting. A novel sensation in an eon of silent, patient observation.

Now, it felt a new thing. A messy thing. A chaotic, discordant, and utterly baffling thing. It was not a single, pure note, like the surprise had been. It was a chord, a jumble of competing frequencies, a transmission of pure, unadulterated noise.

From the entity that had touched its mind, it now felt three distinct and contradictory emissions. One was a wave of pure, self-negating silence, a desperate attempt to become nothing. Another was a focused, analytical beam of intense, almost painful, curiosity, a relentless prodding and poking at the edges of its consciousness. And the third was a raw, open, and bleeding stream of… everything. A torrent of memories, of fears, of hopes, of art, of rage, of love, of despair.

It was, to the alien’s ancient and ordered mind, the psychic equivalent of a scream. A multi-tonal, self-contradictory, and deeply confusing scream.

For the first time in a very, very long time, the alien was forced to do something it had not done in ages. It was forced to think. It had observed the universe for eons, a passive, silent witness to the birth and death of stars, to the slow, grinding dance of galaxies. But this… this was new. This was a consciousness that was not only aware, but was aware of being aware, and was now tearing itself apart in the face of that awareness.

The alien, for the second time in its long existence, felt an emotion. It was not the clean, sharp shock of surprise. It was a slower, more complex, and far more… unsettling feeling.

It was the feeling of being noticed. And the feeling that it was now, somehow, responsible for the screaming, beautiful, terrifying thing that had noticed it.

The silence on the other side of the void was no longer impassive. It was now a silence of profound, and deeply troubled, concentration.