Chapter 1: An Awakening.
She woke up feeling dizzy and confused. It wasn’t time, yet she had a foreboding feeling she had never felt before. Despite existing for a trillion years, she feared that her death was drawing closer. Close was a relative term, which could mean countless millennia, yet it would only be a blip on her timeline. She thought of going back to sleep, but she couldn’t. The True Maker had awoken, and her curiosity was too much for her to ignore.
True Maker made up her mind. She needed to investigate what was going on in the Milky Way Galaxy, and to do that, she needed a form. In her natural ethereal form, she suffered from sensory overload. Thus, the only way to experience the world was to take a mortal form.
An image of a tall, slender blonde woman filled her mind. Why did she see this human? “Sabina…” echoed as a faint whisper in her mind. The woman’s name was Sabina, and she existed in two separate timelines. She was the one who stood to save True Maker and the Milky Way from certain doom.
‘Why am I depending on a human?’ True Maker thought and took Sabina’s form to feel what she was feeling. She felt nothing. The empty shell she wore had no soul attached to it, which meant one thing. Sabina hadn’t existed yet.
Seeing that her future saviour would not exist for 70,000 years, True Maker thought of a more suitable name for the clone of her coming redeemer. True Maker closed her eyes and tried to attune to the humans on earth. Humanity was praying to the deity Gaia, who was the personification of the planet itself. ‘Gaia…’ True Maker mumbled the name a few times, and her human body agreed with her. ‘Gaia it is.’ True Maker decided.
Inhabiting a human body, True Maker felt emotions that she never felt otherwise. She felt hunger and thirst. She understood how living species filled these needs, but she didn’t know what humans used to quench their thirst. She would have to find out.
True Maker imagined a virtual computer screen, and she looked at the chemical makeup of a human. The four primary elements by weight in a human body were Oxygen, Carbon, Hydrogen, and Nitrogen. Thus, she deduced that her body needed these elements in the largest quantities to quench her thirst. At the moment, she lacked oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon.
‘Hmm. I should eat solid-state methane, while liquid oxygen would be my best guess for a drink.’ True Maker speculated. She conjured a container filled with liquid oxygen. At -183 degrees, this would be a cool, refreshing drink, perfect for quenching one’s thirst.
True Maker lifted the container and poured the content into her mouth. She felt immense pain as the freezing liquid caused frostbites to the body’s digestive system and went into shock.
True Maker looked at the lifeless body of the blonde woman. So little did she know about the lives of living beings that her attempt at quenching the body’s thirst had ended up killing it. While this was tragic, it also served as a reminder. It was better to combine observations with logic rather than blind faith in reason.
True Maker decided to revive the body. She liked the beautiful human form, and it would be interesting to learn about humans by living a short lifetime. How long was a human life anyway? A few millennia? That was nothing, and it would be over as soon as it started.
When True Maker had manifested in Gaia’s body, she felt hungry and thirsty. She needed to find a better way to sustain her body than trial and error.
True Maker focused her attention on Earth, and she found a similar yet dissimilar species. Those creatures were Gaia’s forebears, yet they were too different for their genome to be related. She needed to investigate why this was the case, but first, she needed to find out how to quench her thirst and still her hunger.
True Maker watched the humans for a while, and she learnt that they used liquid water to quench their thirst while eating berries and nuts to still their hunger. As she conjured the water, the berries, and the nuts, she felt a lot better as she fulfilled her needs. To be a satisfied human was a nice feeling, and she would spend the coming years experiencing the perfect human life. Learning about the human body was her new project, and she forgot about the foreboding feeling that had awoken her from her sleep.