Chapter eight: Jane falls into the first memory of an Australopithecus

Before counting the last dot, she notes that the breeze has stopped
"Ups", she thinks
She touches the last eye and draws the last mark on her notebook's second page
The moment she closes the book, the eye blinks but doesn't disappear
It grows instead, very fast, reaching enormous proportions in a fraction of a second
It wraps her with a silently deafening scream and becomes so big that she falls inside its pupil
Attracted by the gravitational pull of the gigantic object
So heavy
Crushing upon its own nuclear solitude without any trace of air
Keeping it in relative balance with the others
There are no others anymore
Each dot, each memory, counted on the presence of its neighbor
To sustain its perfectly circular motion
A chain of reminiscences now completely disrupted by her straightforward
And categorical analysis
She holds fast on her precious notes while free falling
Inside the pitch black core of the very first explicit thought
"Whomever this first memory belongs to, it must have had
Macroscopic implications on what came after", she thinks
"It's too big, it's too intense", she manages to write in freefall while losing pages
It's a silent fall. No air is there to transmit sound
She starts to feel crushed by the gravitational intensity of the object
It doesn't feel unpleasant though: more like emotional intensity
"Emotional gravity", she labels it
And the moment she begins to think that this state could go on forever
Something very small and grey appears in the distance
And approaches her at a considerable speed
She blinks repeatedly to focus on it
The grey thing looks like a circle, no it's a sphere
No it's an irregular sphere and it's not completely grey either
It casts shadows on its surface
It has a surface
It has lines, scratches, bulks, it's getting bigger
It's a stone
It's a big stone
It's a massive stone
Oh, it's a planet!
It's a planet
It has an atmosphere and she's falling through its clouds
She sees better now: continents, mountain ranges, pole caps, oceans
She falls
She falls
She begins to hear herself screaming as the air fills the vacuum
She is about to be a few kilometers away from the ground now
Turning her head backwards she notices that the eye she fell into, closed itself behind her
What was black nothingness of unknown
And nearly unbearable emotional intensity
Slowly begins to look like a rocky landscape under a blue sky
Her fall slows down and she knew that somehow it wouldn't harm her
With exquisite scientific delicacy she calculates where she's going to land
And sketches it in her notebook at the bottom of the first page
She then touches the ground where she thought she would

Herons fly backwards above her head
Rocks of all dimensions and shapes lay everywhere else
Nothing else moves

And then on her left, fast, agile, zigzagging, two figures
One clearly chasing the other
She blinks, there's no time to lose
She runs after them