I always loved walking around at night, the cool air on your skin, It's the perfect time to think. A few streets over from my house stood a big square park. I had been repeatedly tracing the outside edge. Slabs of concrete with dusky street lamps in an endless loop. monotonous, but calm and almost meditative.

This walking path had gotten me over many difficult times, I was hoping it would do so again. High School had just finished a few weeks ago. Over the years I had been constantly hopping between social groups. Being friendly with most, but never quite fitting in. Now with everyone moving on, It was suddenly lonely. Isolation after years of rigid social structure.

I wasn't terribly fond of the idea of college. Not that I hated to learn, I had spent too many late nights browsing Wikipedia for that to be true, but school was... slow. I'm unsure if I wanted to do even more years of jumping through countless hoops, just for a paper to say what, I know how to program? do math? English right-ly? Well, maybe I could improve a bit more on the English front, it never was my best subject. S.T.E.M. was more my style, systems of rules, building answers.

I paused in my walk ... there was something wrong. I walked a few more paces and stopped, looking down. The sidewalk looked wrong. Well no 'looked' wasn't quite right. It looked like a slab of concrete. it more 'felt' wrong. There was an unnerving feeling about this tile, as if it was... empty.

Maybe I had finally lost it, gone full cuckoo for coco-puffs... Nah, it was probably just paranoia. Who knows? You can easily pick out faces in a dark room, but when you flick on the light it's just a coat on the corner of a chair or something. The human brain is no infallible thing, maybe something accidently tripped some obscure warning burned into my brain from evolution. The important thing is to not give into irrationality, to keep your mind clear, and collected.

So I stepped forward, and as if the concrete was a lie, my legs passed through as I entered free fall. "shit" was my last word as my head slid under.

I was not dead as far as I could tell. But all of my senses were gone. No sight, sound nor smell. In their place sat a new comprehension of reality. An understanding of the fundamental structure behind it all. Myself, the world, everything, it was all built of networks. Just bunches of colored points floating in space, connected like components on a circuit board. Their interactions creating the mechanics of the universe.

It was odd, seeing the entirety of my own structure. Well, 'seeing' is not really the right word, as I couldn't really see anymore. More just inherently understanding the structure of myself. The network composing my physical body was amazingly complex. Even more so was the network that built up my consciousness. like a field of stars it twinkled, different nodes changing states and interacting, as my consciousness examined the mechanisms of itself.

When I focused I could even examine the structure of what was around me. I could see where I had slipped out from, a small hole in an impossibly large network stretching from horizon to horizon. That must be my own world.

My musing was interrupted by a terrifying force piercing through me. The impact rocketed me away and cleaved off a huge portion of myself. There was strangely no pain as I stuck onto an unknown structure behind me. We were moving fast though, and within mere moments I could no longer see the wall of my home. It vanished behind a fading horizon of darkness.

A huge chunk was now missing from my physical body, with it disconnected I could no longer understand its structure, all that was left was a memory of its general shape. Luckily, It had missed my consciousness. I'm not sure what would happen if that was torn apart, best i could hope for would be brain damage.

Sorry mom, I don't think I'll be making it home for dinner, but in trade I guess I've discovered some secrets of the universe... all it cost was an arm and a leg... approximately.