Gnomon

In a universe without light, she will never know what she looks like, and if she is the only thing in it, how could she ever determine where were her borders, the outer limits of her skin?

Cold like a new colour, stark and blinding.

There are no grown-ups behind the secret door. There’s just this lot.

Why should we have to wait twenty years for that, simply because we are attached to an already-illusory notion of bodily sovereignty?

Sometimes, as I sit very still, information reaches me from the future before I uncover it in the present. I am literally getting ahead of myself.
What do I know? I know that human beings and fundamental particles share one absolute commonality: they exist in their interactions

That makes her lips twitch, because she’s actually salivating, she can feel wolf’s teeth growing in her mouth.

It’s true that we might possess no will of our own, just be acting out determined or random steps and dreaming of choice-making; that we could be brains in jars, or surgical patients on operating tables or old women dying alone in nursing homes fantasising about other lives, or alien players of immersive games trapped in the system, or even just simulations of simulations in some enormous engine analysing a stock market in a universe far above our own; or that we might be physically real, but exist in fact as a sequence of selves, each alive only for an instant in the uptick of an electrical pulse, gone again the next, each fraudulently recollecting in his own short span the chemically stored memories of a billion others back down the line to the womb and declaring them his own.

Who she is in this moment is contingent upon events which have not yet taken place. Thus, a most painful conflict of ontology.

It had not occurred to me that her absence would be more appalling than her presence, but a shark you cannot see but know is there is a thousand times worse than one you can observe.

The process of transition would be memetic rather than corporeal, but I have already acknowledged that the woman is not the cells.